In this essay I respond to criticisms of semantic externalism that Noam Chomsky has presented in several recent publications. In the first section of the essay I present reasons to think that there are virtues to both semantic externalism and to semantic internalism, and that these two views are compatible. Linguistic items and intentional phenomena might have semantic content which is determined by factors external to their possessor, and also have semantic content which is determined by factors that are internal. (...) In the second section I respond to Chomsky's argument that the cognitive sciences are internalist, and hence semantic reference has no place in naturalistic inquiry. I argue that the cognitive sciences are not exclusively internalist, that they are significantly externalist. In my discussion I attend mainly to the case of scientific studies of vision. In the third section I deal with issues specifically concerning language. I counter Chomsky's arguments that semantic reference can play no role in the scientific study of language; I argue that it in fact does play a role in significant developments that should be regarded as belonging to the scientific study of language. I also present considerations in defense of semantic externalism with regard to proper names and natural kind terms, and in defense of there being a social factor to semantic content. (shrink)

In this essay I enter into a recently published debate between Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor concerning whether adequate sense can be made of the ceteris paribus conditions in special science laws, much of their focus being on the case of putative psychological laws. Schiffer argues that adequate sense cannot be made of ceteris paribus clauses, while Fodor attempts to overcome Schiffer's arguments, in defense of special science laws. More recently, Peter Mott has attempted to show that Fodor's response to (...) Schiffer fails, and furthermore that further study shows that the logical framework in which Schiffer and Fodor address their issue is susceptible to inconsistency.In this essay I argue that adequate sense can be made of ceteris paribus conditions. Against Mott, I argue that recent work in the model theory of non-monotonic logic indicates how his problem involving logical inconsistencies can be overcome. Against Schiffer, I argue that the claims that he makes against ceteris paribus clauses would lead to a fatal skepticism concerning indefinitely many of the claims we make about the world (and indeed that his claims would be destructive of the view of the special sciences that Schiffer himself presents in his paper), and that the semantical considerations from non-monotonic logic that I present provide a suitable framework for dealing with his complaints. Thus I come out on the whole on Fodor's side of this debate, although for my own reasons, as I argue against much of Fodor's own argumentation. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr.

John McDowell claims that the propositional attitudes, and our conceptual abilities in general, are not appropriate topics for inquiry of the sort that is done in natural science. He characterizes the natural sciences as making phenomena intelligible in terms of their place in the realm of laws of nature. He claims that this way of making phenomena intelligible contrasts crucially with essential features of our understanding of propositional attitudes and conceptual abilities. In this article I show that scientific work of (...) the sort McDowell claims cannot be done is in fact being done, and that this work presents strong evidence that there are psychological laws. The research I discuss is that by the psychologist Norman H. Anderson and his colleagues. I also argue that the considerations McDowell presents in defense of his claims do not constitute a significant challenge to the research that Anderson and his colleagues have done. It will be noted in the article that Anderson's work is relevant not just to McDowell's writings, but also to several much discussed issues in philosophy of cognitive science: the above two issues of whether there can be a science of ordinary psychological phenomena, higher cognition, comparable to that of the natural sciences and whether such a science would present laws, and also the issue of whether in such a science, and its laws, notions of folk psychology would play crucial constitutive roles. Anderson's work presents strong grounds for affirmative answers to all of these questions. (shrink)

In this essay I defend meaning holism against certain criticisms that Jerry Fodor has presented against it. In "Psychosemantics" he argued that meaning holism is incompatible with the development of scientific psychology given the ways in which scientific psychology adverts to intentional content. In his recent book "Holism" (co-authored with Ernest Lepore) he indicates that he still upholds this argument. I argue that Fodor's argument fails, and argue in favor of the compatibility of meaning holism with scientific psychology. I also (...) argue positively in favor of meaning holism, arguing in part that, contrary to Fodor's claims, psychofunctionalism provides a strong basis for defending meaning holism. As part of this argument, I contend, contrary to Fodor, that narrow content, as derived from psychofunctionalism, should be construed as semantic. (shrink)

When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities. These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have (...) important implications for understanding the development of stereotyping and norm enforcement. (shrink)

Empirical research pertaining to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), clinician behaviors related to do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders and substituted judgment suggests potential contributions to medical ethics. Research quantifying the likelihood of surviving CPR points to the need for further philosophical analysis of the limitations of the patient autonomy in decision making, the nature and definition of medical futility, and the relationship between futility and professional standards. Research on DNR orders has identified barriers to the goal of patient involvement in these life and death (...) discussions. The initial data on surrogate decision making also points to the need for a reexamination of the moral basis for substituted judgment, the moral authority of proxy decision making and the second-order status of the best interests standard. These examples of empirical research suggest that an interplay between empirical research, ethical analysis and policy development may represent a new form of interdisciplinary scholarship to improve clinical medicine. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)

The separation, uniformization, and other properties of the Borel and projective hierarchies over hyperfinite sets are investigated and compared to the corresponding properties in classical descriptive set theory. The techniques used in this investigation also provide some results about countably determined sets and functions, as well as an improvement of an earlier theorem of Kunen and Miller.

The division of Christianity into two: Orthodox Christian and Western Civilizations by Arnold Toynbee should be understood to describe not a difference of creedal belief but different spiritualities. Christian spiritualities are the animating forces for the material disposition of religious resources and the motivation that patterns individual behavior. The past offers many examples of how spirituality provides discipline to believers to overcome conflictive social pressures and follow doctrinal obligations. The monastic orders recast the evangelical counsel to holding material goods (...) in common during the Middle Ages and groups like the Franciscans, Jesuits, Methodists, Quakers, etc. have performed similar functions. Despite the erosion of institutional resources since the Enlightenment and contemporary secularism, Christianity has produced various new spiritualities. For the III Millennium, it appears the two major characteristics of Christian spirituality include the discipline to “let go” that rejects the dystopia of contemporary society; and the embrace an earth spirituality that extends respect for life to the environment and an equitable distribution of material resources. (shrink)

The guiding theme of this collection is the concept of the "poetic imagination." Here the emphasis is on a group of writers and thinkers that have embraced, each in his own way, such a concept only to have been misunderstood or ignored by their later readers and interpreters and thus to have been disregarded or held to be irrelevant in the present academic climate. These essays demonstrate that the community of literature is a living one, in which the present can (...) speak to and even modify the past, as the past can speak to and modify the present and the future. (shrink)

Esse artigo foi originalmente publicado como capítulo do livro Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, organizado por Steven T. Katz e publicado pela Oxford University Press em 1978. O texto trata de questões epistemológicas da mística e problematiza uma série de concepções dessa temática, tendo por principal objetivo marcar uma maneira de abordar os dados fornecidos pelos místicos, concentrando-se especialmente na tentativa de defender a concepção de que assim como as ideias são mediadas por contextos culturais, sociais e religiosos, as experiências (...) místicas são vivenciadas, ou como prefere dizer o autor, interpretadas, de formas diferenciadas de acordo com esses mesmos contextos. (shrink)

Zaradi svoje vsenavzočnosti v izkustvu ima estetska čutnost mnoge manifestacije, tako očitne kot prikrite. Članek preučuje nekatere večinoma skrite načine, v katerih sta okus in estetska sodba, ki se kažeta v čutnem izkustvu, prefinjeno prisvojena in izrabljena. Te postopke opisujem kot prilastitev estetske čutnosti in imajo škodljive posledice za zdravje, družbo in okolje. Omenjene prakse so oblika estetske negacije, ki izkrivlja čutno izkustvo in manipulira z njim, kot je v interesu množičnega trženja in njegovih dobičkov. Ta vzorec imenujem prilastitev čutnosti. (...) Tovrstne prakse imajo resen etičen pomen in nosijo družbene ter politične implikacije. Estetska analiza navadnega življenja ima pomen, ki sega onstran akademske vednosti in sugerira drugo vlogo estetike, in sicer kritično: estetika kot orodje družbene analize in politične kritike. (shrink)

Tackling the question whether beauty is a property as if the problem of universals could safely be ignored leads to confusions exemplified in Scruton 2009, McMahon 2007, Zangwill 2001 and Scarry 1999, among recent writers. I frame the question in the proper context with a measure of precision, clear away misunderstandings, present a logically valid argument for an affirmative answer, list three relevant and four irrelevant ways of countering the argument, and show that well-known views of Hume and Kant yield (...) relevant objections only if construed in Russellian terms, but still fail. Finally, I sketch a realization account of beauty along Platonist lines, similar to Hogarth’s. (shrink)

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion--one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment--the right to pursue happiness--become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy--and what might we (...) do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness. Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves--sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind--in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck. A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy.". (shrink)

This book develops the idea that meaningfulness is specified as a relation between an acknowledged appeal and an adopted attitude. In the Axial Age classics and again in modern refoundings of philosophy and theology, ideals of a fully commanding supreme appeal and a fully adequate orientation to the world in cognizance of that appeal--a sovereign attitude--are intellectually and spiritually central. Some of the most fundamental challenges of pluralism stem from differences in appeal and attitude ideals.

Life is characterized by a selectivity for asymmetric molecules. A great deal of theoretical and experimental work has yet to explain why living organisms utilize only L‐amino acids in proteins and D‐sugars in RNA and DNA. Also unknown is how a form of life based on asymmetric molecules evolved from an environment containing a racemic mixture of prebiotic molecules. By what mechanism did this selectivity for asymmetric molecules take place?

My dissertation has two main parts. In the first half, I draw out an underlying presupposition of Descartes' philosophy: what I term "atomism of thought." Descartes employs a radical procedure of doubt in order to show that the first principle of his philosophy, the cogito, is an unshakeable foundation of knowledge. In the dialogue that follows his dissemination of the Meditations, Descartes reveals that a whole set of concepts and rational principles innate in our minds are never doubted. These fundamental (...) units of thought are indivisible, distinct, and isolated, and enable the possibility of any rational demonstration. Atoms of thought are perfectly individuated because God has created them as such. Likewise, our minds have been fashioned such that we necessarily have a clear and distinct perception every time we alight upon these simple notions. In the second part of the dissertation, I take up critiques of Descartes' view given by Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the chapter on Nietzsche, I attempt to fill a lacuna in scholarship about Nietzsche's commentary on Descartes. More specifically, I argue that once the foundation of God is displaced, the basis for accepting atomism of thought dissolves. In the final chapter, I analyze Heidegger's critique of Cartesian atomism. I first look at Heidegger's critique of classical truth as correspondence from Being and Time, and show how it is relevant to a critique of atomism. Then I show how the early Heidegger's holistic philosophical framework can provide an alternative that avoids the pitfalls of atomism. While I limit the scope of my analysis to Descartes' particular formulation, atomism of thought was an influential doctrine throughout modern philosophy. This aspect of Cartesianism has persisted and continues to be a significant theoretical underpinning of many contemporary views. It is my contention that Nietzsche and Heidegger have important contributions to make to this area of thought, and the relative neglect of their work in recent scholarship is a detrimental oversight. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Location of the Houses of Cicero and Clodius and the Porticus Catuli on the Palatine Hill in RomeSteven M. CeruttiThe location of cicero’s house on the Palatine hill in Rome is a matter of more than ordinary interest, inasmuch as he locates it for us in relation to a number of other important houses and buildings, and recent archaeological investigations at the southwest corner of the hill can (...) be used to throw fresh light on this question. Cicero’s house almost certainly stood along the higher leg of the Clivus Victoriae, along the northwest side of the hill running from the north corner to the precinct of the Magna Mater. Here it would have overlooked the Forum Romanum, as Cicero says in conspectu prope totius urbis (Dom. 100). 1 On one side it adjoined the Porticus Catuli, which Clodius enlarged by the addition of a part of Cicero’s property, but only a fraction (vix pars aedium mearum decima,Dom. 116), after destroying Cicero’s house during Cicero’s self-imposed exile in 58 B.C. However, since Cicero regarded his as a large and noble house (Dom. 115; cf. Har. Resp. 16, Fam. 6.18.5), that tenth might have been a not inconsiderable parcel. Furthermore, in De Haruspicum Responso (49) Cicero tells us that Clodius announced in public assembly that he wished to build on the Carinae on the Mons Oppius a second porticus quae Palatio responderet. In context he clearly means that Clodius hoped to drive Pompey into exile as he had Cicero, to destroy Pompey’s Domus Rostrata, and to use the land for the construction of a porticus, perhaps in conjunction with the Temple of Tellus that was located nearby, that would match the Porticus Catuli as he had rebuilt it. 2 This has been taken to mean that Cicero’s house on the Palatine faced the Carinae, but that is not necessarily the case, as before the removal of the Velia in the 1930s the view from the Palatine to the Carinae was not uninterrupted, and it is questionable whether any significant [End Page 417] part of the Carinae was in view of the Palatine. 3 But since we cannot bound the Carinae, the question must be left open.On another side Cicero’s house adjoined the house of Q. Seius Postumus, which Cicero seems to have thought architecturally in a class with his own (Dom. 115). Seius’ house, either on the opposite side or in back, adjoined that of P. Clodius Pulcher, for when Clodius wanted to enlarge his house by annexing that of Seius, and Seius was reluctant to part with his house, Clodius threatened to block his light, presumably by the construction of walls that would cover windows that let into open areas such as gardens in his own house. 4 Cicero’s house, when it was later rebuilt, also adjoined that of his brother Quintus, closely enough that Cicero says he and his brother would be contubernales, once his brother’s house was finished, and the adherents of Clodius set fire to the building in progress in November 57 while they were trying to discourage Cicero from rebuilding (Att. 4.3.2; QFr. 2.4.2, 2.5.3). From this it seems almost certain that Cicero must have ceded a slice of his plot to his brother when the time for rebuilding came. Space on the Palatine had long been expensive and difficult to obtain, and at that time Marcus Cicero was worried about his financial condition and complained that the indemnity awarded him by the Senate was woefully inadequate (Att. 4.2.5). One might also imagine that the brothers’ houses adjoined at the rear, facing on different streets, but given the space available between the two legs of the Clivus Victoriae and the Via Nova, that is less likely. 5Clodius’ object in acquiring the houses of Seius and Cicero, although in the case of the latter ostensibly to enlarge the Porticus Catuli and to build a temple of Libertas (Dom. 108), was actually, Cicero asserts, to enlarge his own house and to make it one of the most sumptuous residences in the... (shrink)

Patient To examine neural responses to aurally-presented sentences, a sparse imaging technique was used to minimize interference from scanner noise. The patient was played a single sentence (or noise-equivalent) in the 7.4s silent period before a single 1.6s scan with stimulus timing jittered relative to scan onset. There were 118 spoken sentences trials, 59 signal correlated noise trials, and an additional 60 silent trials for the purpose of monitoring data quality. The signal correlated noise stimuli had the same duration, spectral (...) profile and amplitude envelope as the original speech, but were entirely unintelligible (S1). The experiment was divided into three sessions of 79 trials with events pseudo-randomly ordered within each scanning session. The sentences were presented using a MRI compatible auditory stimulusdelivery system (Resonance Technology, Northridge, CA), with insert earplugs to further attenuate scanner noise. DMDX software running on a Windows XP PC was used to present the stimulus items. (shrink)