Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one's concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that they are typically based on introspection and introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspective phenomena, which we call (...) class='Hi'>fact-introspection and thing -introspection; arguments for the unreliability of introspection typically target only the former, leaving the reliability of the latter untouched. In addition, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding thing -introspection that may have a surprising consequence: thing -introspection is not only reliable, but outright infallible. This points at a potential line of defense of phenomenal-belief justification, which here we only sketch very roughly. (shrink)

We can be aware of particulars, properties, events, propositions, facts, skills, and qualia. We can also have knowledge of and be conscious of a similar range of objects. We can, furthermore, be ignorant of such objects. Awareness is quite clearly related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. But how? This entry explores some of the ways that awareness is (not) related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. It also explores some of the ways that awareness might be required by, (...) and thus fundamental to, these other relations. The emerging insight is that additional clarity on the nature of awareness stands poised to add clarity to a wide range of philosophical issues in both epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to (...) focus on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)

Expressions of the form 'S is aware of the fact that p' are commonplace. This book provides a systematic exploration of the relation between knowledge and factual awareness, arguing that knowledge is but one species of factual awareness and that we can understand the possession of objective reasons, the normativity of knowledge, and the nature of knowledge in terms of factual awareness. In this way, the state of factual awareness is, structurally and substantively, a more (...) basic type of state than knowledge. If correct, this undermines a number of ways in which knowledge has been regarded as ‘first’ in recent epistemology. (shrink)

Although conditional stimulus (CS)/unconditional stimulus (US) contingency awareness appears to be necessary for human Pavlovian autonomie conditioning, only a selective review of the literature and the forgetting of certain basic, brute facts can allow the cognitive conclusion that awareness causes, or even is important for, conditioning. That conclusion is theoretically barren for explaining the phenomenon and is also of little potential practical use.

This is a brief exploration of the notion of an objective fact. The form of objectivity at issue is distinct from epistemic objectivity or objectivity about truth. It is an ontological form of objectivity. Objective facts may obtain whether or not we know, believe or are aware of them. They depend upon objects, for example, on the properties that objects have or the relationships into which objects enter. Setting scepticism to one side, there is a perfectly mundane sense in (...) which we may come to have knowledge or fail to have knowledge of such facts. We must perceive objective facts from a perspective, but this does not enter into the facts. Nor does the fact that we must describe facts using language mean that facts are language-dependent. (shrink)

In this study, falsification-aware semantics and sequent calculi for first-order classical logic are introduced and investigated. These semantics and sequent calculi are constructed based on a falsification-aware setting for first-order Nelson constructive three-valued logic. In fact, these semantics and sequent calculi are regarded as those for a classical variant of N3. The completeness and cut-elimination theorems for the proposed semantics and sequent calculi are proved using Schütte’s method. Similar results for the propositional case are also obtained.

This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees (...) of the personality construct known as alexithymia, I will argue, do, in fact, display impairments in emotional self-awareness, and, so, may provide some insight into the relationship between this awareness and the capacity for responsible agency. More specifically, individuals with ASD may provide us with evidence that robust emotional self-awareness is not a necessary condition for responsible agency or that lacking such a capacity could undermine some otherwise plausible sufficient conditions for responsibility. The aim of the paper, then, is twofold. First, it will aim to show that ASD ought to be understood, in part, as a disorder of emotional self-awareness. Section 2 presents evidence relating to the emotional profile characteristic of individuals with ASD and argues that the most striking feature of this profile is the way in which the individual seems to be separated from his or her emotions in an important sense. Second, the paper aims to show that this distinctive feature of the emotions in ASD casts serious doubt on some prominent accounts of moral responsibility. To this end, section 3.1 presents a challenge to some widely accepted “subjective conditions” for responsibility, namely those articulated by John Martin Fischer and Ravizza and makes a case, based on the empirical data regarding autism, that these conditions actually are not necessary for one’s being a responsible agent. Section 3.2 then presents a challenge for theories of responsible agency which assign primary importance to the connection between an agent’s actions and her judgment-sensitive attitudes. I argue there that the evidence from autism suggests that these theories fail in their efforts to provide sufficient conditions for responsibility. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that many find Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of la mauvaise foi puzzling, unclear and troublesome, he remains a recurring figure in the debate about self-deception. Indeed, Sartre’s exposition of self-deception is as puzzling as it is original. The primary task of my paper will be to expose why this is the case and to thereby correct a recurrent misunderstanding of Sartre’s theory of consciousness. In the end, will we see that Sartre offers the following theory: (...) self-deception is to be accounted for by assuming that there are intrinsically self-deceptive epistemic states. The latter are self-deceptive in so far as they claim certainty while nevertheless being accompanied by an inbuilt and incorruptible awareness of being unwarranted. For Sartre, developing this rather peculiar account of self-deception, is, as we will see, not primarily intended as an end in itself. Rather, Sartre thereby hopes to illuminate the nature of self-awareness as epistemically super-secure, pre-reflexive, non-positional and “embryonic” knowledge that does not necessitate but can still ground epistemically super-secure reflexive knowledge, and that can replace Freud’s notion of unconscious knowledge. As an account of self-deception, Sartre’s suggestion, however, comes at a high price. Apart from the presuppositions Sartre makes in the theory of consciousness and intentionality, his account is deflationist with regard to local cases of self-deception. (shrink)

The Confucian idea of “ ming 命 (destiny)” holds that in the course and culmination of human life, there exists some objective certainty that is both transcendent and beyond human control. This is a concept of ultimate concern at the transcendental theoretical level in Confucianism. During its historical development, Confucianism has constantly offered humanist interpretations of the idea of “destiny”, thinking that the transcendence of “destiny” lies inherently within the qi endowment and virtues of human beings, that the certainty of (...) “destiny” is in essence contingency at the beginning of life and linear irreversibility towards its end, and that to live in light of ethics and physical rules — having a “commitment to human affairs” — means putting “destiny” into practice. As all these facts show, the Confucian ultimate concern regarding human life is full of rational awareness. (shrink)

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's (...) theory of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of (...) the view that factual ignorance is the absence of awareness, an account that both comes apart from the dominant views and overcomes their deficiencies. Given the important role that ignorance plays in moral and legal theory and our understanding of various epistemic injustices, a precise and theoretically unproblematic account of the nature of ignorance is important not only for normative epistemology, but also for law, ethics, and applied epistemology. (shrink)

Despite the recent increase in interest in philosophy about ignorance, little attention has been paid to the question of what makes it possible for a being to become aware of their own ignorance. In this paper, I try to provide such an account by arguing that, for a being to become aware of their own ignorance, they must have the mental capacity to represent something as being unknown to them. For normal adult humans who have mastered a language, mental representation (...) of an unknown is enabled by forming linguistic expressions whose content is grasped, but whose referent is unknown. I provide a neo-Fregean, a neo-Russellian, and then a unified account of this. On that basis, I then argue further that the content of ignorance can always be captured by a question. I then distinguish between propositional ignorance and non-propositional ignorance and argue that propositional ignorance attributions can be of three types, that-ignorance, whether-ignorance, and fact-ignorance. I conclude by arguing that the acquisition of truths, even when it yields knowledge that is certain, does not always eliminate one’s ignorance and that there is a degree of ignorance in almost everything we claim to know. (shrink)

In this paper, we report the case of an Inclusive Design workshop. Inclusive Design is a design method that includes elderly and disabled people not only in interviews, but also in the upstream design process such as basic design and survey analysis. In the workshop, participants designed scientific educational materials that visually impaired and sighted people can use together. To work together regardless of visual disability, participants used the image-processing system and the stereo copying machine to make images tactile. We (...) think that collaborative work with elderly and disabled people in Inclusive Design can teach participants different perspectives and help to correct their biased view of each other. In fact, participants of the workshop noticed several facts that they were not aware of before. That is, the Inclusive Design workshop can improve social awareness. (shrink)

Research has shown repeatedly that attention influences implicit learning effects. In a similar vein, interoceptive awareness might be involved in unaware fear conditioning: The fact that the CS is repeatedly presented in the context of aversive bodily experiences might facilitate the development of conditioned responding. We investigated the role of interoceptive attention in a subliminal conditioning paradigm. Conditioning was embedded in a spatial cueing task with subliminally presented cues that were followed by a masking stimulus. Response times to (...) the targets that were either validly or invalidly predicted by the cues served as index of conditioning. Interoceptive attention was manipulated between-subjects. Half the participants completed a heartbeat detection task before conditioning. This task tunes attention to one’s own bodily signals. We found that conditioned responding was facilitated in this latter group of participants. These results are in line with the hypothesis that a rise interoceptive attention enhances unaware conditioned responding. (shrink)

Abstract: Some first person statements, such as ‘I am in pain’, are thought to be immune to error through misidentification (IEM): I cannot be wrong that I am in pain because—while I know that someone is in pain—I have mistaken that person for myself. While IEM is typically associated with the self-ascription of psychological properties, some philosophers attempt to draw anti-Cartesian conclusions from the claim that certain physical self-ascriptions are also IEM. In this paper, I will examine whether some physical (...) self-ascriptions are in fact IEM, and—if they are—what role that fact is supposed to play in arguments for the anti-Cartesian claim that self-consciousness is consciousness of oneself as a material object. I will argue that if we accept the assumptions required to show that physical self-ascriptions are IEM, then IEM cannot play the role it needs to play in these anti-Cartesian arguments. (shrink)

The distinction between the criminal fault elements of recklessness and negligence is one of Anglo-American criminal law’s key distinctions. It is a distinction with practical significance, as many serious crimes require at least recklessness and cannot be committed negligently. The distinction is standardly marked by awareness. Recklessness requires awareness that one’s conduct carries a risk of harm. Negligence only requires that one ought to have been aware that one’s conduct carried such a risk, even if one was in (...) fact unaware of this. But should the recklessness/negligence distinction be marked by awareness of risk, or by something else? Does a defendant’s awareness of risk really have the normative significance to mark such a distinction? In this paper, I answer these questions by discussing a challenge to this ‘standard account’ of the recklessness/negligence distinction raised by the work of Antony Duff, who defends an alternative, non-awareness-based model of the recklessness/negligence distinction. I will argue that, although Duff’s alternative model fails, seeing how it goes wrong helps us see how awareness genuinely does have the right kind of normative significance to mark the distinction between recklessness and negligence. (shrink)

Chronic stress impairs working memory, but few studies have explored the protective factors of the impairment. We aimed to investigate the effect of self-awareness on WM processing in people under chronic stress. Participants under chronic stress completed an n-back task after a self-awareness priming paradigm during which electroencephalograms were recorded. The behavioral results showed that participants whose self-awareness was primed reacted faster and more accurately than the controls. Event-related potentials revealed the following P2 was more positive in (...) the self-awareness group than in the controls, indicating that self-awareness enhanced allocation of attention resources at the encoding stage. N2 was attenuated in the self-awareness group compared with the controls, indicating that smaller attention control efforts were required to complete WM tasks adequately after self-awareness priming; and enhanced late positive potential was evoked in the self-awareness group compared with the controls, suggesting self-awareness enabled participants to focus attention resources on the information at the maintenance stage. Critically, mediational analyses showed that LPP mediated the relationship between self-awareness and WM response times. This result suggests that the fact that participants whose self-awareness was primed were able to achieve better behavioral performances may be attributed to their mobilization of sustained attention resources at the maintenance stage. In summary, self-awareness exerted a protective effect on WM in those under chronic stress, which may be due to the enhancements in the allocation and mobilization of attention. These results could be used to develop more specific coping strategies for people under chronic stress. (shrink)

Any convincing theory of self-awareness must do the following: (a) avoid what Henry terms “ontological monism” (OM), the belief that there is only one kind of awareness, namely, object-awareness; for as long as we stick to OM, we remain wedded to the reflection theory of self-awareness and its well-known difficulties (the infinite regress being the worst). And, (b) account for the concrete personal facts about self-awareness: familiarity, unity, identity, etc. First, I go through the tradition, (...) starting with Descartes, of accounts of self-awareness which fail to satisfy constraint (a). Second, I discuss the standard solution to the problem of self-awareness found in Sartre’s pre-reflective self. I argue that Sartre’s pre-reflective self contains a residue of the bias of “ontological monism,” therefore satisfying neither (a) nor (b). Third, I suggest an alternative in Kant’s transcendental subject, which possesses self-awareness independently of a cognitive attitude in the traditional sense of object-intentionality, and thereby intimates the beginnings of a phenomenology of the invisible. (shrink)

This article focuses on the question of how we perceive and represent ourselves at the most minimal, pre-reflective level. We first review recent work emphasizing the multisensory basis of our perceptual experiences and the embodied nature of self-awareness. We then focus on interoceptive and tactile signals, as key components of bodily self-consciousness, and discuss one crucial yet overlooked aspect of our embodiment, namely the fact that bodily self-consciousness emerges from the outset within the body of another experiencing subject. (...) Next, we review empirical findings highlighting the developmental primacy of tactile and interoceptive over visual experiences, in shaping the foundations of perceptual awareness. Building upon the influential predictive processing framework in philosophy and theoretical neuroscience, we argue that self-awareness is not only embodied, but also that perceptual experiences are fundamentally 'selfish', that is, imperatively driven by basic constraints of physiological regulation that subserve self-preservation. We then evaluate. (shrink)

In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen years of Judt's life, the years in (...) which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11; and issues of social inclusion and social justice in an age of increasing inequality. Judt was at once most at home and in a state of what he called internal exile from his native England, from Europe, and from America, and he finally settled in New York--between them all. He was a historian of the twentieth century acutely aware of the dangers of ethnic exceptionalism, and if he was shaped by anything, it was the Jewish past and his own secularism. His essays on Israel ignited a firestorm debate for their forthright criticisms of Israeli government polices relating to the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Those crucial pieces are published here in book form for the first time, including an essay, never previously published, called 'What Is to Be Done?' These pieces are suffused with a deep compassion for the Israeli dilemma, a compassion that instilled in Judt a sense of responsibility to speak out and try to find a better path, away from what he saw as a road to ruin. When the Facts Change also contains Judt's homages to the culture heroes who were some of his greatest inspirations: Amos Elon, Francois Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, and perhaps above all Albert Camus, who never accepted the complacent view that the problem of evil couldn't lie within us as well as outside us. Included here too is a magnificent two-part essay on the social and political importance of railway travel to our modern conception of a good society; as well as the urgent text of 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy,' the final public speech of his life, delivered from a wheelchair after he had been stricken with a terrible illness; and a tender and wise dialogue with his then-teenage son, Daniel, about the different outlooks and burdens of their two generations. To read When the Facts Change is to miss Tony Judt's voice terribly, but to cherish it for what it was, and still is: a wise, human, deeply informed view on our most pressing concerns, delivered in good faith. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference— and key axioms of the system merely postulate "deductive closure". In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence (...) we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ' awareness' set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ' dynamification' of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

Context: Despite the fact that pain and body awareness are by definition subjective experiences, most studies assessing these phenomena and the relationship between them have done so from a “third-person” perspective, meaning that they have used methods whose aim is to try to objectify the phenomena under study. Problem: This article assesses the question of what is the impact of a widespread chronic pain condition in the bodily experience of persons suffering from fibromyalgia. Method: I used an interview (...) methodology stemming from a phenomenological approach called the “elicitation interview.” Results: The results indicate that the intensification of fibromyalgia pain does in fact affect different aspects of body awareness: in particular, experienced body size, weight and localization, as well as the experience of owning one’s own body. In addition, these disruptions in patient’s body awareness have as a result, a modification of the experience of pain, leading to the apparently paradoxical experience of being in pain while not feeling it. Implications: The elicitation interview approach made it possible to gather and analyze descriptions of the bodily experience of persons suffering from fibromyalgia. This approach allowed the consideration of the hypothesis that the disruption of implicit knowledge of the topography of patients’ bodies prevents them from referring to the pain sensation in terms of its localization and intensity, transforming the sensation in a way that is experienced as paradoxical. Further studies should be conducted that focus on the interplay between attention, pain and body perception. Constructivist content: The study presented in this article is framed within the perspective that the study of conscious phenomena should consider a first-person perspective, which is in line with constructivist approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 339-341 [Access article in PDF] Schizophrenia and Self-Awareness Dan Zahavi In his paper, "Cogito and I: A Bio-Logical Approach," Kimura Bin raises a number of intriguing issues. Let me in the following address a few of them. Kimura Bin's point of departure is the idea that schizophrenia is basically to be understood as a disorder of self and self-experience. Thus, fundamental alterations (...) in the sense of possession and control of one's own thoughts, actions, sensations, or emotions figure among the most prominent symptoms in its advanced stages. But even in the absence of overt symptoms, the schizophrenic may feel uncertain about her selfhood, and it is often in an attempt to restore or at least sustain her precarious self-identity that the patient engages in characteristic obsessive self-reflections that frequently simply exacerbate the problem.1. One way to illustrate what is peculiar about the self-disorder in schizophrenia is by contrasting it with the symptoms found in senile dementia. Whereas the demented patient might lack any knowledge about the features that characterize him from a third-person perspective, i.e., age, nationality, profession, location, etc., he is usually in possession of an intact first-person perspective: He is still aware of the I-Here-Now. In schizophrenia, the problem is typically exactly the reverse (Tatossian 1997, 26). This contrast makes it tempting to argue, as Kimura Bin in fact does, that we need to distinguish two different dimensions of selfhood: the self as subject and the self as object. Of course, by making that distinction, we are immediately partaking in a classical philosophical discussion. Thus, at least since Kant, it has been customary to distinguish between the transcendental subject and the empirical or mundane subject. This distinction can be cashed out as a distinction between two different ways of being aware of oneself, one external, the other internal. On the one hand, I can think of myself from a third-person perspective, that is, I can refer to an object by way of a proper name, a demonstrative, or a definite description, and occasionally this object happens to be myself. When I refer to myself in this way, I am referring to myself in exactly the same way that I can refer to Others, and Others can refer to me (the only difference being that I am the one doing it, thus making the reference into a kind of self-reference). Apart from being external and contingent, this kind of self-reference is also non-thematic, since it can occur without my knowledge of it, that is, I can refer to myself from the third-person perspective without realizing that I myself am the referent. In contrast, the self-reference available from the first-person perspective—the one expressed in the subject-use of "I"—is of an internal kind. Not only is it impossible to refer to anybody and anything apart from oneself in the first-person way, but it also belongs to the proper use of "I" that one knows that one is referring to oneself. That is, apart from being internal and necessary, the self-reference in question is also of a thematic nature. In [End Page 339] more traditional terms: One can be conscious of oneself as an empirical object with mental properties, and one can be conscious of oneself as the subject of intentionality. Or again, one can be aware of oneself as a causally determined known object, as a part of the world, and one can be aware of oneself as a knowing subject, as—to paraphrase Wittgenstein—the limit of the world. In short, the difference between the empirical subject and the transcendental subject is closely linked to the difference between being aware of oneself as an object in the world and being aware of oneself as a subject for the world.Utilizing this distinction, it can be said that schizophrenia involves a disturbance on the transcendental level (this way of speaking would, by the way, be anathema to a classical Kantian transcendental philosophy but more acceptable to the... (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference—and key axioms of the system merely postulate “deductive closure”. In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence we (...) also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ‘awareness’ set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ‘dynamification’ of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss the relationship between Herodotus and Thucydides. New scholarly trends date the composition of Herodotus’ Histories to 413 BC, or even later, against high chronology of 431, and suggest Herodotus’ use of Thucydides’ narrative. Herodotus’ debt to Thucydides has been suggested by scholars either cautiously or boldly. This examination will show cases where Herodotus is alluding to events of the Peloponnesian War or even responding to Thucydides’ narrative. In fact, anachronisms, presentisms, and allusions to Thucydides’ (...) text can be found throughout Herodotus’ narrative. We will explore the reasons for Herodotus’ engaging with the events of that War, conjecturing about his goals: attracting the interest of his audience, or providing a warning to his contemporaries; moreover, it is important to understand whether this engagement was just coincidental. (shrink)

It is argued that the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. the fact that we have experience, stems from a conceptual confusion between consciousness and experience. It is concluded that experience has to be considered as a basic characteristic of ongoing interactions at even the most simple level, while consciousness is better defined as reflexive awareness, possible since symbolic language was developed. A dynamic evolutionary point of view is proposed to make more appropriate distinctions between experience, awareness and (...) consciousness. Experience can be defined as a characteristic linked closely to specific pattern matching, a characteristic which is already apparent at the molecular level at least. Awareness then can be regarded as the special experience of one or more central, final modules in the animal neuronal brain. From evolutionary considerations, awareness can be understood functionally and physiologically. As such, awareness is what experience is to animals. Finally, consciousness could be defined as reflexive awareness, instead of using the term as synonymous to awareness. The ability for reflexive awareness is distinctly different from animal and human awareness and depends upon the availability of a separate frame of reference, as provided by symbolic language. As such, words have made reflexive awareness - a specific and infrequent form of awareness - possible. Conciousness might be defined as the experience evoked by considering, i.e. thinking about experiences themselves. Explaining and understanding awareness and consciousness as evolved biological characteristics of the functioning of animals and later humans, poses no philosophical problems. The nature of experience itself remains elusive, but this is not a problem specific toawareness or consciousness. If there is a hard problem of explaining consciousness, than this actually must be considered as the hard problem of explaining experience. While the definition of experience could be broadened to include all molecular and biological pattern specific recognition events, the true nature of consciousness might be better understood when considering it as a very specific form of awareness, made possible by language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Can “facts” survive the advent of modern political practices of lying? This essay revisits Arendt's “Truth and Politics” to explore this question. Arendt ties the fate of facts closely to that of common sense, which both depends upon facts and is charged with combating the lies that would assault not only individual facts but factuality itself. Arendt hewed closely to our two major philosophical traditions of common sense. While she recognized the ways in which common sense as koine aisthesis, (...) or an individual faculty of epistemological coherence, could be co-opted by totalitarian ideology, she was less aware of how her own notion of “community sense” could be pressed into the service of an accelerating democratic/capitalist conversion of facts into opinions. Given the co-optation of these traditions of common sense by modern practices of political lying, I argue for an alternative approach, inspired by Aristotle and rooted in perception, where “sensing in common” nurtures a sense of [what can come to be held in] common. (shrink)

In *Austerlitz* by W.G. Sebald, we go through a detailed report of Austerlitz of Austerlitz's life as delivered by him to a narrator about whom we know very little. The story dwells on a wealth of events and situations that Austerlitz experienced at the time as strange or episodic. There is however a constant impulse that, in hindsight, Austerlitz regards as unifying all those events and situations. I will approach the story in *Austerlitz* as the recounting of the process by (...) which Austerlitz becomes aware of the direction of this impulse and engages in a quest for truth the details of which will reveal (and determine) the ethical nature of the impulse that unifies his life. More specifically, I will account for Austerlitz's constant impulse in terms of the inescapability of a certain dynamics of projection that connects a particular situation to which his life is anchored to a more universal concern. (shrink)

Modern East Asian philosophy faced a difficulty in endowing objective knowledge with its adequate location in the traditional Eastern view of mind. This led some philosophers to reconsider intellectual intuition and the relevant question of things themselves from an Eastern perspective, and among them most notably are Nishida Kitarō and Mou Zongsan. Although these philosophers have recently been comparatively studied, their core concepts such as ＂absolute nothing＂ and ＂infinite mind＂ have not been sufficiently discussed from the perspective of objective knowledge. (...) This paper examines the question of grasping things themselves or facts themselves by reconsidering two philosophers' middle works on the theory of knowledge. The result is the synthetic view of their seemingly divergent theories, based on the pursuit of self-awareness and the principle of bidirectional transcendence; according to this principle, the outward transcendence is correlated to the inward or immanent transcendence, so that the knowledge of facts themselves are epistemologically correlated to absolute nothing or infinite mind, which gives foundation to objective knowledge. This view not only explains the meaning of the ＂knowledge＂ of facts themselves, but also strongly implies the epistemic value of the two philosophers' seemingly esoteric concepts of mind and nothingness. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing (...) two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions. (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of (...) the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness”, “for-me-ness”, “pre-reflective self-awareness” and “subjective character”, among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing (...) two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to show how the so called 'hard problem' in the philosophy of mind may in fact not be as hard as is usually supposed.

From the foregoing discussion we can note that whilst Marx transcends the fact-value distinction he embraces neither a scientistic approach nor a moral theory. Rather he gives a sociological account of morality, illustrating that description and evaluation cannot be separated and that juridical conceptions need to be understood in relation to the mode of production in which they arise.30 In the absence of an absolute notion of justice it is mistaken to see Marx as offering a critique of capitalism (...) based on moral principles. Of course Marx had reasons for attacking capitalism but these are contained within his account of the capitalist mode of production. Yet whilst this theory is not a moral theory it cannot be described as a descriptive theory either. In Marx's work description and evaluation cannot be meaningfully separated.In portraying Communist society as the solution to problems generated within capitalist society Marx is not sketching out a picture of a morally superior society but rather considering the possibilities of an alternative way of life with its own moral and judicial standards. Indeed the fact that Marx did not provide blueprints for future Communist society is itself symptomatic of his awareness of the difficulties involved in the attempt to describe in detail a form of social life based upon principles different from our own. (shrink)

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is an essential component of legal assistant systems, which aims to automatically predict judgment results from a given criminal fact description. As a vital subtask of LJP, researchers have paid little attention to the numerical LJP, i.e., the prediction of imprisonment and penalty. Existing methods ignore numerical information in the criminal facts, making their performances far from satisfactory. For instance, the amount of theft varies, as do the prison terms and penalties. The major challenge is (...) how the model can obtain the ability of numerical comparison and magnitude perception, e.g., 400 < 500 < 800, 500 is closer to 400 than to 800. To this end, we propose a judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning architecture, called NumLJP, for the numerical LJP task. Specifically, we first implement a contrastive learning-based judicial knowledge selector to distinguish confusing criminal cases efficiently. Unlike previous approaches that employ the law article as external knowledge, judicial knowledge is a quantitative guideline in real scenarios. It contains many numerals (called anchors) that can construct a reference frame. Then we design a masked numeral prediction task to help the model remember these anchors to acquire legal numerical commonsense from the selected judicial knowledge. We construct a scale-based numerical graph using the anchors and numerals in facts to perform magnitude-aware numerical reasoning. Finally, the representations of fact description, judicial knowledge, and numerals are fused to make decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and select several competitive baselines. The results demonstrate that the macro-F1 of NumLJP improves by at least 9.53% and 11.57% on the prediction of penalty and imprisonment, respectively. (shrink)

To verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice three facts must be established. The first is whether the hearer in fact has an identity prejudice of which she may or may not be aware; the second is whether that prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit; and the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange. These three elements constitute the facts of the matter (...) of testimonial injustice. In this essay we argue that none of these facts can be established with any degree of confidence, and therefore that testimonial injustice is an undetectable phenomenon in singular instances. Our intention is not to undermine the idea of testimonial injustice, but rather to set limits to what can be justifiably asserted about it. According to our argument, although there are insufficient reasons to identify individual acts of testimonial injustice, it is possible to recognize recurrent patterns of epistemic responses to speakers who belong to specific social groups. General testimonial injustice can thus be characterized as a behavioral tendency of a prejudiced hearer. (shrink)

There is growing concern that a global economic system fueled predominately by financial incentives may not maximize human flourishing and social welfare externalities. If so, this presents a challenge of how to get economic actors to adopt a more virtuous motivational mindset. Relying on historical, psychological, and philosophical research, we show how such a mindset can be instilled. First, we demonstrate that historically, financial self-interest has never in fact been the only guiding motive behind free markets, but that markets (...) themselves are representations of our individual and collective moral identities. Building on this understanding, we review the research on how economic incentives crowd out virtue-oriented concerns. We then introduce the concept of moral self-awareness (MSA), an evolving mindset informed by reflection on moral identity, namely what one’s actions say about oneself given the impacts on others or society that one’s action may effect. MSA comprises three fundamental aspects of virtue-oriented reasoning: pride, shame, and guilt. Finally, we offer a four-stage model anchored in systems theory, yielding ever more refined motivating strategies for maximizing human flourishing and social welfare externalities. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of personal identity was philosophically groundbreaking for its attempt to establish a non-substantial identity condition. Locke states, “For the same consciousness being preserv’d, whether in the same or different Substances, the personal Identity is preserv’d” (II.xxvii.13). Many have interpreted Locke to think that consciousness identifies a self both synchronically and diachronically by attributing thoughts and actions to a self. Thus, many have attributed to Locke either a memory theory or an appropriation theory of personal identity. But the former (...) stumble on circularity and the latter is insufficient for Locke’s moral theory insofar as he is committed to a theory of divine rectification. The common problem is that Locke’s theory seems to demand an objective, or metaphysical, fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to a traditional notion of substance for the continuity. I’m suggesting something new. In II.xxvii of the Essay, we see an ambiguity in Locke’s use of the term ‘consciousness’. Locke seems to see consciousness as both a mental state by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving and as the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states. First, I make the textual argument why we should read Locke as having a conception of a metaphysical fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to thinking or bodily substance to establish its continuity. I then argue that the metaphysical fact of an enduring consciousness is revealed to us as a phenomenological fact of experience. Due to the nature of certain kinds of perceptual situations we have an experience of ourselves as temporally extended. Although the text bears out that Locke seemed to think there is a fact of an ongoing consciousness, I argue that it is consistent with his reluctance elsewhere that he makes no further epistemological or ontological claims about it. Finally, I provide an account of Locke’s understanding of memory and its relation to consciousness that supports the claim that consciousness is something ontologically distinct from either thinking or bodily substance. (shrink)

From the initial analysis of John Morris in 1976 about if computers can lie, I have presented my own treatment of the problem using what can be called a computational lying procedure. One that uses two Turing Machines. From there, I have argued that such a procedure cannot be implemented in a Turing Machine alone. A fundamental difficulty arises, concerning the computational representation of the self-knowledge a machine should have about the fact that it is lying. Contrary to Morris’ (...) claim, I have thus suggested that computers – as far as they are Turing Machines – cannot lie. Consequently, I have claimed that moral agency attribution to a robot or any other automated AI system, cannot be made, strictly grounded on imitating behaviors. Self-awareness as an ontological grounding for moral attribution must be evoked. This can pose a recognition problem from our part, should the sentient system be the only agent capable of acknowledging its own sentience. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, it was (...) more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 101-116 [Access article in PDF] Persons and Awareness Tyson Anderson Saint Leo University The aim of this essay is to relate Christianity and Buddhism through a consideration of two key terms, "persons" and "awareness," the first being central for Christianity and the second being central for Buddhism.The first thing that needs to be noticed is the relatively indefinable character of these words. I (...) of course intend to give as clear an indication as is possible concerning their meaning, but as I considered some of the important concepts that are involved in the topic—language, world, love, understanding—I began to realize that we are surely in the realm of mystery here. By "mystery" I mean something that we can understand somewhat but cannot comprehend, much as Saint Thomas Aquinas thought of God. 1 As is well known, LudwigWittgenstein believed that there is something mysterious even about language itself, that basically what it is can be "shown" but not "said." 2 A certain tentativeness here in regard to propositional adequacy, I might add, is perfectly compatible with strong confidence in one's relation to what Wittgenstein called "the higher." 3 In regard to the truth to be found in the beliefs of others, even a megapandit such as Ken Wilber—not noted for his modesty and circumspection—observes that "the human mind is incapable of producing 100% error." 4 Perhaps some misunderstandings among those engaging in dialogue can be avoided if we remain mindful of the mysterious character of the subject matter and are less confident about the sufficiency of our own articulation of the truth.As to dialogue itself, it is perhaps well to remember when the issues of "fruit salad" and syncretism arise, 5 that thinking itself has typically a dialogical structure, with the result that "fruit salad" is actually the normal condition of persons as they develop in understanding themselves and their world. 6 In conversation with Laurence Freeman, O.S.B., the Dalai Lama appears to disapprove of mixing traditions—"Do not try to put a yak's head on a sheep's body" 7 —but it would be difficult to conceive of a more syncretistic religion than Tibetan Buddhism or Catholicism. Indeed, if we compare the early Jesus movement to the medieval church, the development of Catholicism might well be described by Luther or Calvin, had they thought of it, as an operation that put a yak's head on a sheep's body. The dialogical and finite structure of thinking is in fact one of the reasons why it is possible to conceive of a "universal religion," contrary to what the Dalai Lama thinks. 8 This is so because, since human understanding is never absolute and completed, there is always the possibility that future [End Page 101] understanding will yield a vision that embraces a multiplicity and diversity of religious insights in a way that is impossible for us to foresee at this time. Moreover, part of the point of American culture, I would think, is the benefits of mongrelization, and so perhaps Americans ought to be less suspicious than some at the thought of having "strange bedfellows." Looking for historical examples of conscious syncretism, one thinks of Mani and Jesuit syncretism exemplified in Matteo Ricci (outfitted first as a Buddhist monk and then later as a Confucian scholar) and the evangelization of New Spain, 9 and more recently, Hazrat Inayat Khan and his son, Pir Vilayat Khan. Also, there is Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, a Jewish thinker who interprets the Holocaust in terms of the Christ. 10 I find such efforts to be commendable, and so although doctrinal and cultural immaculacy has its charms, I believe it to be the call of maya. I will proceed, then, in constructing a mysterious and miscegenational fruit salad, my only justification being that this seems to reflect accurately the truth of the matter and that we really have no other peaceable choice. 11 Persons "Person" is often used in the same sense as "human being." By "person" I mean a being who can love and who, as a human being, is the... (shrink)

This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’. Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid something’. The claim that animals possess such self-awareness is regarded by many as problematic and, if this is correct, it would jeopardize Korsgaard’s account. This paper argues that animals can, in fact, be aware of themselves in the way required by Korsgaard’s account.

Habermas claims that although modern thought “treats revelation and religion as something alien and extraneous,” religion is still present in today’s world. The memorable events of 9/11 confirmed that modernist secular society is not the end of history, and that the theme of religions and civilizations, and of potential conflicts between them, is still alive. There is now a growing conflict between fundamentalist religion and the secular state. While challenging Habermas' view on religion, I claim that in just one generation (...) the inhabitants of the West—who made their own deconstruction by becoming a people without God, without virtue, without manners, and often without families and without children—are at risk of losing their current leading economic, political, and cultural role in the world. They have created a void that is now to be filled by other, non-Western civilizations. The greatest loss of modern humanity, however, in both the West and the East, is the loss of the human soul. By forsaking God and virtue, and the awareness of the proper order of things, human beings lose themselves in superficial desires. They are not even aware of what has been lost. The solution is obviously not the politicized and often violent religiosity of fundamentalism. That only contributes further to human degradation. To save themselves, modern individuals must learn to know themselves again. By deep philosophical reflection and authentic religion, they must fill up the void that created postreligious and postmetaphysical thought. They must in the end rediscover their deeper selves. One cannot live by power or desire alone. Human beings are not one-dimensional, as Hobbes and his followers tried to make us believe, but in fact have many dimensions and many needs. The classical tradition reveals some of those. It speaks to us of community and friendship, virtue and corruption, self-interest and self-control, justice and order, freedom and law, happiness and sorrow, the purposes of life and the dangers of war. It is only through action that can be defined as a return to origins, namely, by creatively repeating and recalling the sources of Western civilization—the ideas contained in the classical tradition—that the declining civilization can be rebuilt. (shrink)

By hypothesis, awareness is involved in the modulation of feedback from semantics to the lexical level in the visual word recognition system. When subjects are aware of the fact that there are many related prime–target pairs in a semantic priming experiment, this knowledge is used to configure the system to feed activation back from semantics to the lexical level so as to facilitate processing. When subjects are unaware of this fact, the default set is maintained in which (...) activation is not fed back from semantics to the lexical level so as to conserve limited resources. Qualitative differences in the pattern of data from two lexical decision experiments that employ masked priming are consistent with this hypothesis. Semantic context and stimulus quality interact when the prime is processed with awareness whereas these same two factors produce additive effects on RT when the prime is unlikely to have been processed with awareness. These experiments thus illustrate one way in which awareness affects the dynamics of visual word recognition. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of (...) awareness. We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, the mind enjoys a form of presence to itself. That is to say, in addition to being aware of whatever objects it is aware of, it is also (co-presently) aware of itself. This paper explores the proposal that we should think about this kind of experiential-presence in terms of a form of non-intentional awareness. Various candidates for the relevant form of awareness, as constituting supposed non-intentional experiential-presence, are considered and are shown to encounter significant (...) problems. The fact that a plausible account of the non-intentional awareness which experience putatively has of itself cannot be framed with reference to such forms of awareness is grounds for scepticism concerning the cogency of non-intentional experiential presence. (shrink)

Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as “opposites”: Newton the great systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks the intricacies of each thinker's work. Further, this straightforward “opposition” fails to account for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position, applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful “Newton” and (...) a useful “Blake” with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre's technique of “critical thirding” (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for “an-Other” position in the dialectic of “Blake” and “Newton”. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself mobilizes (or indeed “creates”) its own, subjectively useful, “Blake” and “Newton” in order to make particular arguments. (shrink)