What is wrong with abstraction’, Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan explain a further objection to the abstractionist programme in the foundations of mathematics which they first presented in their ‘Hale on Caesar’ and which they believe our discussion in The Reason's Proper Study misunderstood. The aims of the present note are: To get the character of this objection into sharper focus; To explore further certain of the assumptions—primarily, about reference-fixing in mathematics, about certain putative limitations of abstractionist set theory, (...) and about the effects of impredicativity in abstraction principles—which underlie it; and To advance the debate of the issues thereby raised. Thanks for helpful comments to Roy Cook and to an anonymous referee. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Crispin Wright and Bob Hale have defended the strategy of defining the natural numbers contextually against the objection which led Frege himself to reject it, namely the so-called ‘Julius Caesar problem’. To do this they have formulated principles (called sortal inclusion principles) designed to ensure that numbers are distinct from any objects, such as persons, a proper grasp of which could not be afforded by the contextual definition. We discuss whether either Hale or Wright has provided independent motivation for a (...) defensible version of the sortal inclusion principle and whether they have succeeded in showing that numbers are just what the contextual definition says they are. (shrink)

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

A collection of essays examining the writings of William James. Provides a reinterpretation of pragmatism to devise philosophical resources for pragmatist feminism that challenge sexism and male privilege"--Provided by publisher.

Intensive animal agriculture wrongs many, many animals. Philosophers have argued, on this basis, that most people in wealthy Western contexts are morally obligated to avoid animal products. This book explains why the author thinks that’s mistaken. He reaches this negative conclusion by contending that the major arguments for veganism fail: they don’t establish the right sort of connection between producing and eating animal-based foods. Moreover, if they didn’t have this problem, then they would have other ones: we wouldn’t be obliged (...) to abstain from all animal products, but to eat strange things instead—e.g., roadkill, insects, and things left in dumpsters. On his view, although we have a collective obligation not to farm animals, there is no specific diet that most individuals ought to have. Nevertheless, he does think that some people are obligated to be vegans, but that’s because they’ve joined a movement, or formed a practical identity, that requires that sacrifice. This book argues that there are good reasons to make such a move, albeit not ones strong enough to show that everyone must do likewise. (shrink)

Suppose that animals have rights. If so, may you go down to your local farm store, buy some chicks, raise them in your backyard, and eat their eggs? You wouldn't think so. But we argue, to the contrary, that you may. Just as there are circumstances in which it's permissible to liberate a slave, even if that means paying into a corrupt system, so there are circumstances in which it's permissible to liberate chickens by buying them. Moreover, we contend that (...) restrictions on freedom of movement can be appropriate for chickens, but not humans, because of the obvious differences between the interests of healthy, adult humans versus those of chickens who have been bred for human use. We also argue that egg consumption is permissible based on the plausible assumption that no one's rights are violated in their consumption, and so while there may sometimes be morally preferable uses for eggs, you do nothing unjust in eating them. If we're right, then the rights view doesn't imply that veganism is obligatory; rather, it implies that the constraints on how we source animal products, though highly demanding, are not so demanding that they can't be met. (shrink)

A theory of categorization is presented in which knowledge of causal relationships between category features is represented in terms of asymmetric and probabilistic causal mechanisms. According to causal‐model theory, objects are classified as category members to the extent they are likely to have been generated or produced by those mechanisms. The empirical results confirmed that participants rated exemplars good category members to the extent their features manifested the expectations that causal knowledge induces, such as correlations between feature pairs that are (...) directly connected by causal relationships. These expectations also included sensitivity to higher‐order feature interactions that emerge from the asymmetries inherent in causal relationships. Quantitative fits of causal‐model theory were superior to those obtained with extensions to traditional similarity‐based models that represent causal knowledge either as higher‐order relational features or “prior exemplars” stored in memory. (shrink)

We argue that extreme endurance sport can be valuable for some nonhuman animals. To make the case, we focus specifically on dogsled racing. We argue that, given certain views about the nature of self-affirmation, perceptual agency, and affordances, sled dogs are capable of realizing significant value through extreme endurance running. Because our focus is on the axiological question of the nature of the value of the sport for its participants, we do not claim that extreme dogsledding is ethical; indeed, we (...) acknowledge the morally objectionable aspects of the practice in its current form. Still, we offer our argument as a critical step in providing an adequate moral justification for a reformed model of dogsled racing. If it is permissible, that is likely because it offers some significant benefits to sled dogs. Given some assumptions about sled dogs’ capacity to be guided by both internal and external affordances, those benefits include self-affirmation. (shrink)

A central question in cognitive research concerns how new properties are generalized to categories. This article introduces a model of how generalizations involve a process of causal inference in which people estimate the likely presence of the new property in individual category exemplars and then the prevalence of the property among all category members. Evidence in favor of this causal‐based generalization (CBG) view included effects of an existing feature’s base rate (Experiment 1), the direction of the causal relations (Experiments 2 (...) and 4), the number of those relations (Experiment 3), and the distribution of features among category members (Experiments 4 and 5). The results provided no support for an alternative view that generalizations are promoted by the centrality of the to‐be‐generalized feature. However, there was evidence that a minority of participants based their judgments on simpler associative reasoning processes. (shrink)

I plot accounts of slurs on a [semanticist – non-semanticist] spectrum, and then I give some original arguments in favor of semanticist approaches. Two core, related pro-semanticist considerations which animate this work are: first, that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable; and, second, that ignorance of the pejorative dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage. I bolster these considerations via cases in which slurs are embedded (...) within complex constructions, in which cases the pejorative dimension of a slur gets ensnared within the compositional semantic machinery. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 5: Development, Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 34-36, May–June 2022.

A distinct logic to Gadamer's early writings makes them more than mere precursors to the mature thought that appeared in _Truth and Method_. They contain their own, new and different, "philosophical hermeneutics" and are worth reading with a fresh eye. The young Gadamer began his publication career by arguing that Plato's ethical writings did not "express" doctrine but rather depended upon the "play" of language among speakers in an ethical discourse community. This was the key idea of _Plato's Dialectical Ethics_, (...) Gadamer's first book. Following the classical formula of seeing politics as the continuation of ethics, Gadamer's writings in the 1930s and 1940s concentrated on the Platonic idea of the state and argued two key points. First, the exiling of poets from the city was a way of banishing monologue and clearing the way for a dialogue as the language form appropriate to political discourse communities. Second, the Platonic state's defining task was the educational one of shaping the soul, and this could not be achieved monologically but rather had to take place as a dialogical play between the educator and the soul. The mature philosophical hermeneutics of _Truth and Method_ is a metaphor taken from the literary experience of constructing textual meaning out of the play of parts and whole. The philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer's early writings rests on a play between the ethical whole initially the Gestalt figure of the "Platonic Socrates" but later the Platonic state and the individual soul in need of ethical guidance. There is no conflict between the early and the later hermeneutics, but the early hermeneutics retain a freshness of spirit and boldness of interpretation that is characteristic of the Weimar culture of Gadamer's Marburg youth.From beginning to end, Gadamer's early writings remind us that Plato's dialogues really do record the conversational essence of Western philosophy at its birth. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that the human visual system, the primary sensory conduit for primates, processes ambient energy in a way that obligatorily constructs the objects that we ineluctably perceive. And since our perceptual apparatus processes information only in terms of objects (along with the properties and movements of objects), we are limited in our ability to comprehend ‘what is’ when we move beyond our ordinary world of midsize objects—as, for example, when we address the micro microworld of quantum physics.

It is argued that the emotional feeling comprises the following two emotional qualia. (1) A nucleus feeling or primary emotional quale, which is the phenomenological counterpart of the end product of appraisal by the central nervous system. (2) The experience of being urged to emotion-related reflection or secondary emotional quale, which is the phenomenological counterpart of the brain's decision to inhibit pre-programmed emotional behaviour, and to initiate emotion-related reflections. Different brain modules regulate these two qualia, and thus each can be (...) experienced independently of the other. The primary emotional quale is related to activation of the amygdala, it is emotion specific, and neutral with respect to affect. The secondary emotional quale is related to activation of the orbito-prefrontal cortex (O-PFC), and includes affective aspects.It is argued that emotional behaviour is regulated by the following three neural mechanisms, two of which two are directly related to the two qualia. (1) An evolutionary ancient system (amygdala-system), which comprises the amygdalae and subcortical nuclei, and which activates pre-programmed emotional behaviour. (2) An evolutionary recent system (PFC-system), comprising the prefrontal cortex, which inhibits pre-programmed emotional behaviour, activates emotional reflection, generates and evaluates behavioural alternatives. In contrast to the pre-programmed behaviour, the behavioural alternatives are more likely to serve long-term goals. (3) A default mechanism, which gives rise to default (i.e., “just do something”) behaviour. The first two systems are mutually competitive, while the third mechanism takes over if either the competition between the first two mechanisms, or the decision process of the PFC-system, takes too long. This default mechanism involves the function of the medial-prefrontal cortex (M-PFC). (shrink)

The Müller-Lyer illusion is the natural consequence of the construction of the vertebrate eye, retina and visual processing system. Due to imperfections in the vertebrate eye and retina and due to the subsequent processing in the system by ever increasing receptive fields, the visual information becomes less and less precise with respect to exact location and size. The consequence of this is that eventually the brain has to calculate a weighted mean value of the information, which is spread out over (...) a population of neurons. In the case of the Müller-Lyer illusion this inevitably leads to extension of one and reduction of the other line. The arguments presented explain several published experimental results concerning the Müller-Lyer illusion and shed new light upon the philosophical neutrality of observation sentences. (shrink)

This article assesses how people reason with categories whose features are related in causal cycles. Whereas models based on causal graphical models have enjoyed success modeling category-based judgments as well as a number of other cognitive phenomena, CGMs are only able to represent causal structures that are acyclic. A number of new formalisms that allow cycles are introduced and evaluated. Dynamic Bayesian networks represent cycles by unfolding them over time. Chain graphs augment CGMs by allowing the presence of undirected links (...) that model feedback relations between variables. Unfolded chain graphs are chain graphs that unfold over time. An existing model of causal cycles is also evaluated. Four experiments in which subjects reason about categories with cyclically related features provided evidence against DBNs and alpha centrality and for the two types of chain graphs. Chain graphs—a mechanism for representing the equilibrium distribution of a dynamic system—may thus be good candidates for modeling how people reason causally with complex systems. Applications of chain graphs to areas of cognition other than category-based judgments are discussed. (shrink)

Self‐evidently the standard work on the topic its whole title defines, Sir Michael Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (FPM) is also the most profound and creative discussion in recent decades of the problems confronting the branch of philosophy mentioned after the colon. Chapters 14‐18 and 23‐24 of this book constitute a continuous and challenging diagnosis of these problems.1 They culminate in the proposal that these problems present an impasse that can be escaped only by adopting a constructivist understanding of mathematical (...) generality. Dummett’s case for that conclusion is no less complexly over‐layered than the problems themselves. By contrast my aims in this discussion of his case are limited in various ways, and three of these should be mentioned straightaway. In the first place, I will aim to consider a case that, if sound, would warrant a constructivist understanding of generality in mathematics generally (and so I will not be considering lines of argument specific to set theory, or to those parts of mathematics plausibly dependent on notions intrinsic to set theory). Secondly, I aim to consider a case which, while general in its application within mathematics, is not more general than that (and so would not warrant a broader anti‐realism). Reasons for these first two limitations are discussed in section 1. A third limitation is that I will aim only to understand Dummett’s case, and not to assess it. Perhaps some will think this third limitation calls for explanation or excuse. I think it needs no excuse and that the explanation is obvious. When we are dealing with fundamentally important work by a great philosopher, understanding is often ambition enough. In Michael Dummett’s work, that is what we are dealing with. (shrink)

We applaud Müller & Schumann (M&S) for bringing needed attention to the problem of motivation for common non-addictive drug use, as opposed to the usual focus on exotic drugs and addiction. Unfortunately, their target article has many underdeveloped and sometimes contradictory ideas. Here, we will focus on three key issues.

Chapter 5 presents three very different examples one of the PTEV’s key strengths: the ability to foster communities of learning around vocational themes. The largely first-generation students at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, were drawn into deeper engagement with their own quest for purpose and a meaningful future by entering into service among communities of recent immigrants, making personal connections while learning to understand these experiences within a larger historical and religious perspective. At Marquette University (...) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the PTEV was able to creatively adapt the Jesuit tradition of self-examination and awareness to form learning communities among faculty and staff that deepened their participants’ commitment to their common educational mission. This trajectory of revitalizing tradition to enhance educational mission converged with the parallel PTEV developments at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, that drew on Protestant traditions to develop a learning community among new and continuing faculty and staff that was focused on their common calling as educators. (shrink)

This article is a theoretical examination of the relationship between truth and forms of dialogue, in discursive psychology. To do this, I mainly draw on Bakhtin and Kiekegaard . In contrast to a hermeneutic tradition that has sidelined the importance of the author to discourse , these authors offer an understanding of truth that depends on the author's emotional connection to the truth they are expressing. They most clearly demonstrate the dynamics of our emotional connection to truth in their descriptions (...) of different forms of speech. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between self and truth in irony, while Bakhtin does the same in the epic, the confession and the quarrel. It is my argument that these forms of speech interact with truth and help organise selfhood. I also argue that our current methodological emphasis on the function of words or the play of dominant discourses tend to overlook the experiential landscape of language and its reciprocal relationship with our subjectivity. (shrink)