Extract from Hofstadter's revew in Bulletin of American Mathematical Society : http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1980-02-02/S0273-0979-1980-14752-7/S0273-0979-1980-14752-7.pdf -/- "Aaron Sloman is a man who is convinced that most philosophers and many other students of mind are in dire need of being convinced that there has been a revolution in that field happening right under their noses, and that they had better quickly inform themselves. The revolution is called "Artificial Intelligence" (Al)-and Sloman attempts to impart to others the "enlighten- ment" which he clearly regrets not (...) having experienced earlier himself. Being somewhat of a convert, Sloman is a zealous campaigner for his point of view. Now a Reader in Cognitive Science at Sussex, he began his academic career in more orthodox philosophy and, by exposure to linguistics and AI, came to feel that all approaches to mind which ignore AI are missing the boat. I agree with him, and I am glad that he has written this provocative book. The tone of Sloman's book can be gotten across by this quotation (p. 5): "I am prepared to go so far as to say that within a few years, if there remain any philosophers who are not familiar with some of the main developments in artificial intelligence, it will be fair to accuse them of professional incom- petence, and that to teach courses in philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics, and other main areas of philosophy, without discussing the relevant aspects of artificial intelligence will be as irresponsible as giving a degree course in physics which includes no quantum theory." -/- (The author now regrets the extreme polemical tone of the book.). (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 128-132.

On the aesthetics and poetics of Hawks and Ford; their resurgence in film studies.

Retrieval practice, relative to further study, leads to long-term memory enhancement known as the “testing effect.” The neurobiological correlates of the testing effect at retrieval, when the learning benefits of testing are expressed, have not been fully characterized. Participants learned Swahili-English word-pairs and were assigned randomly to either the Study-Group or the Test-Group. After a week delay, all participants completed a cued-recall test while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Test-Group had superior memory for the word-pairs compared to the Study-Group. (...) While both groups exhibited largely overlapping activations for remembered word-pairs, following an interaction analysis the Test-Group exhibited differential performance-related effects in the left putamen and left inferior parietal cortex near the supramarginal gyrus. The same analysis showed the Study-Group exhibited greater activations in the dorsal MPFC/pre-SMA and bilateral frontal operculum for remembered vs. forgotten word-pairs, whereas the Test-Group showed the opposite pattern of activation in the same regions. Thus, retrieval practice during training establishes a unique striatal-supramarginal network at retrieval that promotes enhanced memory performance. In contrast, study alone yields poorer memory but greater activations in frontal regions. (shrink)

The following article is a response to Virginia Aspe’s “The Political Dilemmas of the Transformations of Mexico: A Philosophical Approach”. My aim is to discuss some ideas developed by Aspe Armella, pointing out, from the perspective of the history of Mexican philosophy, both the successes of her approach, as well as some aspects that deserve more debate.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in the present volume. It highlights the interdisciplinary approach taken in the choice of contributors to the volume which it is hoped will result in new perspectives on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. The chapter notes that the contributors approach Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Reid from new points of view, and other important figures and philosophical themes are discussed in terms of their contributions to a distinctively Scottish philosophical (...) scene in the eighteenth century. The chapter presents an outline of these themes including Scottish institutions and education, moral philosophy, aesthetic theory, religious thought, and historical and political theory. (shrink)

Perinatal palliative and hospice care (hereafter, perinatal hospice) is a novel approach to addressing a family’s varied needs following an adverse in utero diagnosis. Christian defenses of perinatal hospice tend to focus on its role as an ethical alternative to abortion. Although these analyses are important, they do not provide adequate grounds to characterize the wide range of goods realized through this compassionate form of care. This essay draws on an analysis of the Christian virtue of humility to highlight the (...) ways a Christian virtue-based defense of perinatal hospice can account for these goods. I argue that humility can play an important facilitating role in helping Christian physicians to meet the needs of families in profoundly difficult circumstances. (shrink)

It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types of (...) natural law, grounding relations, and ontological levels, I show that his early works present a coherent and sophisticated laws-first account of the natural order. (shrink)

I present three versions of the argument from divine hiddenness that are grounded in moral considerations regarding how a just deity would act and auxiliary commitments that theists often have. First, I argue that the problem of hiddenness is made worse if one also holds that many will suffer in the afterlife due to not achieving a proper orientation towards God and the demands of morality in this life. Second, I argue that if any version of the moral argument for (...) theism is successful, then God has a very good reason to not remain hidden. Third, I argue that a just God would not allow people to do evil in her name. (shrink)

Achieving valid informed consent from a human research participant involves an ongoing process designed to protect the participant and ensure their rights, safety, and well-being are not compromise...

Andrew Cullison There is one final worry about bringing emotions into a theory of moral perception that might be best drawn out with an analogy to nonmoral perception. Suppose we were beings with a slightly different nonmoral perceptual apparatus. Suppose phenomenal qualia that we typically experience when we observe objects also showed up in our cognitive life when we weren’t experiencing the presence of an object. Basically, we would periodically have apparent perceptions of objects when there were no objects. Furthermore, (...) suppose we could know that this was sometimes the case. I suspect we would feel rational pressure to be a bit more skeptical about our nonmoral judgments based on perception. One might argue that we’re kind of in that situation if our moral perception apparatus includes an emotional component. We often experience emotions when there is nothing moral about the situation we’re in, and so by analogy to the perception case, we might think that we should be a bit more skeptical about moral judgments. A possible virtue of a moral perception view that didn’t make emotions a component of the view might not have to address this worry, but if emotions are indeed an important part of Audi’s moral perception theory, then it is worth asking why we shouldn’t take ourselves to have some defeaters for moral beliefs. Aaron Bronfman The official topic of John Broome’s Rationality through Reasoning is the “motivation question”: How does the belief that you ought to do something cause you to intend to do that thing? And indeed, the parts of the book do combine to offer an answer to that question. But, as Broome himself suggests, much of the interest comes from the steps along the way. The book greatly expands and develops Broome’s earlier work, drawing rich connections throughout ðaddressing how ought figures in requirements of rationality, how reasons may be defined in terms of ought, whether there is reason to be rational, how rationality is connected to the process of reasoning, etc.Þ. This review considers Broome’s account of four main concepts in turn: ought, reasons, rationality, and reasoning. (shrink)

If social critique is to play a role in broad social transformation, then it must be able to engage with the terms that people use to understand their lives. This essay argues that we can find an important model for performing social critique in the quite different work of Jeffrey Stout and Judith Butler. For both, social critique must be immanent and it must make explicit the character of the norms by which people currently live. This model is especially important (...) in a situation where various moral and cultural traditions are confronting one another, and where it is necessary to work towards shared social and political goals. Stout and Butler present a method for achieving one's political goals by engaging with others on terms that they would recognize and seeking to transform the political structures they inhabit. Furthermore, their approaches provide helpful insights for further reflection on the critical possibilities in current ethnographic work. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, middle-class progressives embraced visions of democracy rooted in their relatively privileged life experiences. Progressive educators developed pedagogies designed to nurture the individual voice within egalitarian classrooms, assuming that collective action in the public realm could be modeled on the relatively safe small-group interactions they were familiar with in their families, schools, and associations. Partly as a result, they remained blind to (and often denigrated) the democratic aspects of working-class organizations, such as unions and community action groups, (...) which found strength in solidarity. In this article Aaron Schutz argues that progressives must integrate into their models the often brutal lessons about power learned by those with less privilege. Until they do so, their approaches to democratic education will continue to have limited capacity to support social transformation and empowerment in the world as it is. (shrink)

Humans have now amassed a sizable knowledge of widespread, nonconscious cognitive biases which affect our behavior, especially in social and economic contexts. I contend that a democratic government is uniquely justified in using knowledge of cognitive biases to promote pro-democratic behavior, conditionally justified in using it to accomplish ends traditionally within the scope of government authority, and unjustified in using it for any other purpose. I also contend that the government ought to redesign institutional infrastructure to avoid triggering cognitive biases (...) where it is not permitted intentionally to manipulate such biases and to optimize the effects of such biases where permissible. I shall use the United States of America as an example throughout, but my conclusions apply equally to any democracy which values the political autonomy of its populace. (shrink)

Human motor learning is governed by a suite of interacting mechanisms each one of which modifies behavior in distinct ways and rely on different neural circuits. In recent years, much attention has been given to one type of motor learning, called motor adaptation. Here, the field has generally focused on the interactions of three mechanisms: sensory prediction error SPE-driven, explicit, and reinforcement learning. Studies of these mechanisms have largely treated them as modular, aiming to model how the outputs of each (...) are combined in the production of overt behavior. However, when examined closely the results of some studies also suggest the existence of additional interactions between the sub-components of each learning mechanism. In this perspective, we propose that these sub-component interactions represent a critical means through which different motor learning mechanisms are combined to produce movement; understanding such interactions is critical to advancing our knowledge of how humans learn new behaviors. We review current literature studying interactions between SPE-driven, explicit, and reinforcement mechanisms of motor learning. We then present evidence of sub-component interactions between SPE-driven and reinforcement learning as well as between SPE-driven and explicit learning from studies of people with cerebellar degeneration. Finally, we discuss the implications of interactions between learning mechanism sub-components for future research in human motor learning. (shrink)

Confronted by the White supremacists who had murdered their loved ones in June 2015, many of the family members of those killed at Mother Immanuel AME Church spoke words of forgiveness. The familie...

Most specialists agree that Peirce upholds his abstract definitions of reality and truth simultaneously and consistently with his pragmatist clarifications of those concepts. But some might assume that his pragmatist clarifications (the third grade of clearness) restrict the extensions of abstract definitions (the second grade of clearness), such that anything real must both be independent of what anyone thinks about it, per the abstract definition, and be an object of the would-be “final opinion”, per the pragmatist clarification. I call this (...) reading Interpretive Dependence of the second grade of clearness on the third grade. In contrast, on Interpretive Independence, which I defend here, a concept can have a different extension on the second grade than it has on the third grade, such that it could be true, in a purely abstract sense, that there are realities that can never be known (metaphysical realism). “True” here must also be interpreted only according to an abstract definition, namely, one which Peirce endorses in 1906 and which, I argue, is a deflationary definition. Interpretive Independence not only allows Peirce to explain the intuitive appeal of metaphysical realism, while at the same time rejecting it, it also allows him to explain how there can be truths about fictional objects and truths in pure mathematics. (shrink)