Episodic memory involves the sense that it is “first-hand”, i.e., originates directly from one’s own past experience. An account of this phenomenological dimension is offered in terms of an affective experience or feeling specific to episodic memory. On the basis of recent empirical research in the domain of metamemory, it is claimed that a recollective experience involves two separate mental components: a first-order memory about the past along with a metacognitive, episodic feeling of knowing. The proposed two-tiered account is contrasted (...) with other, reductionist two-tiered accounts as well as with reflexive accounts of episodic memory to be found in the literature. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive (...) processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

This book provides a much-needed critical introduction to the main doctrines of Frank Ramsey's work and assesses their contemporary significance.

In Swiss semi-direct democracy, citizens are often summoned to the polls. To vote reasonably, they need to be properly informed. The media therefore have the responsibility to provide them with arguments for and against each issue of voting. Here, we focus on argumentation in a television ‘civic debate’ about abolishing compulsory military service. To provide a unified and integrated overview of the debate dynamics, we combine the Dialogical Model of Argumentation and the Argumentum Model of Topics, which share a similar (...) emphasis on the discursive dimension of argumentation. This analysis underlines the importance of linguistic and communicative resources and procedures, without neglecting the macro socio-political environment of the debate. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences have been construed either as representational mental states—Representationalism—or as direct mental relations to the external world—Disjunctivism. Both conceptions are critical reactions to the so-called ‘Argument from Hallucination’, according to which perceptions cannot be about the external world, since they are subjectively indiscriminable from other, hallucinatory experiences, which are about sense-data ormind-dependent entities. Representationalism agrees that perceptions and hallucinations share their most specific mental kind, but accounts for hallucinations as misrepresentations of the external world. According to Disjunctivism, the phenomenal (...) character of perceptions is exhausted by worldly objects and features, and thus must be different from the phenomenal character of hallucinations. Disjunctivism claims that subjective indiscriminability is not the result of a common experiential ground, but is because of our inability to discriminate, from the inside, hallucinations from perceptions. At first sight, Representationalism is more congenial to the way cognitive science deals with perception. However, empirically oriented revisions of Disjunctivism could be developed and tested by giving a metacognitive account of hallucinations. Two versions of this account can be formulated, depending on whether metacognition is understood as explicit metarepresentation or as implicit monitoring of first-order informational states. The first version faces serious objections, but the second is more promising, as it embodies a more realistic view of perceptual phenomenology as having both sensory and affective aspects. Affectbased phenomenology is constituted by various metacognitive feelings, such as the feeling of being perceptually confronted with the world itself, rather than with pictures or mere representations. (shrink)

This work exposes the practices that are controlling education and reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work. It questions the strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

Prologue: retrospective and prospective -- The ethics of enough -- Real and apparent goods -- Wrong desires: pleasure, money, fame, and power -- Right desires: the totum bonum and its constituents -- Fundamental errors in moral philosophy -- Necessary but not sufficient -- Epilogue: transcultural ethics.

My paper addresses the possibility of Jews and Christians becoming theologically closer than in the past, given Ward’s Trinity. I address the question of whether Ward’s version of the Trinity necessarily clashes with Jewish tradition. I contend that it does not so clash, especially because for Ward Jesus is only a contingent instantiation of the Word. A Jew could accept the purely logical implications of the Wardian Trinity. I then present a new Jewish theology of Jesus, one that is sympathetic (...) to Jesus, but which denies his divinity. The result is a moving closer of Jewish and Christian theology. (shrink)

The image of perception as openness to fact is best understood as the claim that the contents of perception are mind-independent facts. However, I argue against John McDowell that this claim, which he accepts, is incompatible with his conceptualism, namely the thesis that the contents of perception are fully conceptual. If we want to give justice to the image of perception as openness to facts, we have to acknwoledge that perception relates us to a non-conceptual world.

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities. Our aim in this paper is to assess Levinson's neo-Whorfian hypothesis at the philosophical level and to explore the further possibility that perception may (...) not just use frames of reference other than the relative one but may also, in some cases at least, be perspective-free. (shrink)

Preface by Dr. Franz Alexander - Director, Psychiatric and Pychosomatic Research Institute Mount Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles. Vol. 9.

Understanding cognitive processes with a formal framework necessitates some limited, internal prescriptive normativism. This is because it is not possible to endorse the psychological relevance of some axioms in a formal framework, but reject that of others. The empirical challenge then becomes identifying the remit of different formal frameworks, an objective consistent with the descriptivism Elqayam & Evans (E&E) advocate.

This book critically explores indigenous sub-Saharan African agrarian thought. Indigenous African agrarian philosophy is an uncharted and largely overlooked area of study in the burgeoning fields of African philosophy and philosophy of nature. The book shows that wherever human beings have lived, they have been preoccupied with exploring ways to ensure the sustainable management of limited resources at their disposal, to attain to their basic needs: food, shelter, and security. The book also shows that agriculture and the way people relate (...) with nature are an essential, but generally neglected, determinant of the emergence and orientation of all philosophical traditions. In traditional, pre-colonial African culture, it was difficult to separate agriculture from African relational ontology. Agriculture and the use of natural resources were at the centre of community life and influenced the social, political, economic, and spiritual worldviews of the people. In their contact with nature through agriculture, different beliefs, knowledge systems, norms, moral outlooks, cultural practices and institutions emerged and have been valorized to guide societies on how to sustainably manage the environment. As a way of life, then, agriculture was deeply connected with indigenous beliefs, values, and practices which transcended a wide range of issues related to ecological ethics, food ethics, religion, traditional medicine, political economy, social organisation, biological reproduction and species survival, indigenous knowledge, and property rights. This book will thus be a valuable resource for policy makers and researchers in diverse fields such as philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology, and development studies. (shrink)

On a cognitivist account of self-ascription, I can have direct, non-inferential knowledge about my own beliefs. This account makes traditionally appeal to the notion of introspection, conceived as an internal source of knowledge. At least since Wittgenstein, many philosophers have justly worried that such a notion makes it impossible to make sense of the ascription of a unified notion of belief, which can be shared with others. In this essay, I explore another method of self-ascription, which was also envisaged by (...) Wittgenstein (and later by Gareth Evans), which I call “the method of deployment”. This method is such that I can gain knowledge about my own beliefs by attending not inwards but outwards, on the external world as I found it. Wittgenstein feared that the method of deployment would inevitably lead to solipsism. With reference to recent work in the theory of mental simulation, I try to show that Wittgenstein’s fear is ungrounded. I draw two general conclusions. First, the method of deployment does not concern self-ascription only ; it can also ground the ascription of beliefs to others. Second, what is special about self-ascription is the “ontological substrate” on which it is based. For instance, I am warranted in believing that I believe that it is raining because I am presented with the fact that it is raining, in contrast to a mere possibility. The method of deployment does not lead to solipsism if it is based on a naïve ontological distinction between facts and mere possibilities. (shrink)

Si l’accointance est définie comme une relation mentale entre un sujet et un fragment de réalité, le sens de l’accointance est le sentiment pour le sujet d’être en rapport direct avec un fragment de réalité. Pour de nombreux philosophes, le sens de l’accointance fait partie de l’essence de la perception consciente : voir une montagne, par exemple, implique le sentiment d’être en rapport direct avec elle, de l’avoir « en chair et en os » sous les yeux, plutôt que de (...) la viser à travers une représentation mentale indépendante. La thèse principale défendue dans cet essai est que le sens de l’accointance est indépendant et distinct de l’accointance elle-même. Plusieurs exemples présentés montrent que pour être véritablement accointé avec la réalité, il n’est ni nécessaire ni suffisant d’avoir le sentiment d’accointance. Le sens de l’accointance est mieux conçu comme une expérience métacognitive séparée de l’accointance. L’article examine enfin les conséquences de cette thèse pour la question de savoir si la perception implique ou repose sur une représentation mentale de ce qui est perçu. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je me demande ce qui distingue la conscience 'externe' du monde (par exemple, la perception visuelle) et la conscience 'interne' du corps propre (par exemple, l'expérience de la douleur). Je rejette les théories analytiques récentes qui assimilent l'expérience de la douleur à une forme de perception externe, à savoir la perception d'un dommage physique relatif au corps du sujet. Mais je ne souscris pas pour autant à la thèse phénoménologique selon laquelle il y a un 'espace douloureux', (...) et plus généralement un espace corporel, distinct de l'espace de la perception externe. Selon moi, la différence entre la conscience 'à l'extérieur' et la conscience 'de l'intérieur' ne réside ni dans la forme de la perception, ni dans la nature de l'espace perçu, mais dans l'objet intentionnel lui-même, indépendant de l'expérience dans le premier cas, mais dépendant de celle-ci dans le second. (shrink)

In prior work [7] we considered networks of agents who have knowledge bases in first order logic, and report facts to their neighbors that are in their common languages and are provable from their knowledge bases, in order to help a decider verify a single sentence. In report complete networks, the signatures of the agents and the links between agents are rich enough to verify any deciderʼs sentence that can be proved from the combined knowledge base. This paper introduces a (...) more general setting where new observations may be added to knowledge bases and the decider must choose a sentence from a set of alternatives. We consider the question of when it is possible to prepare in advance a finite plan to generate reports within the network. We obtain conditions under which such a plan exists and is guaranteed to produce the right choice under any new observations. (shrink)

This collection of articles pays homage to the creativity and scientific rigor Jerome Singer has brought to the study of consciousness and play. It will interest personality, social, clinical and developmental psychologists alike.

Here in more than a hundred photographs is portrayed Liebling's Minnesota. During two decades marked by social, political and cultural change, Liebling travelled the state and found his largest subject -- the depiction and interpretation of commonplace human experience. The images range from the grain elevators and skid row of Minneapolis to the slaughterhouses in South St. Paul and the poor, working-class streets of St. Paul's West Side; from the Iron Range and the Red Lake Indian reservation in the north (...) to the farming towns in the south. The vision of Minnesota that emerges from the extraordinary photographs is uniquely that of the artist, yet it leads viewers effortlessly to an enhanced understanding of the places, the times, and, always, the people. (shrink)

Virgilian scholars appear not to have appreciated the full dramatic significance of this passage, which provides a further example of Virgil's use of divine intervention in events which he wishes to mark as particularly significant in the course of the poem. These three lines signal the onset of the war with which the remainder of the Aeneid will be concerned; since line 607, Virgil has been working towards them by means of a detailed description of the gates of war themselves (...) and of the tradition attached to them. But at this point in Italian history there is an ominous departure from the traditional procedures regarding the declaration of war. Latinus, who according to what Virgil depicts as the already well-established tradition was bound to open the gates in order to mark the beginning of war against the Trojans, has refused in horror to carry out his duty, opposed as he is to the turn recent events have taken in Latium. At this point Juno intervenes dramatically, as she had intervened before to sow the seeds of the ‘horrida bella’ between the Trojans and the indigenous population . Virgil depicts her as sweeping down from heaven in person in order to push open the gates. The reader is shown how at her touch the gates burst open without the involvement of any human or visible agency. It is an action which apparently has only a supernatural explanation, clearly described to the reader as the work of Juno. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

Much of our understanding of human thinking is based on probabilistic models. This innovative book by Jerome R. Busemeyer and Peter D. Bruza argues that, actually, the underlying mathematical structures from quantum theory provide a much better account of human thinking than traditional models. They introduce the foundations for modelling probabilistic-dynamic systems using two aspects of quantum theory. The first, 'contextuality', is a way to understand interference effects found with inferences and decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The second, 'quantum (...) entanglement', allows cognitive phenomena to be modeled in non-reductionist ways. Employing these principles drawn from quantum theory allows us to view human cognition and decision in a totally new light. Introducing the basic principles in an easy-to-follow way, this book does not assume a physics background or a quantum brain and comes complete with a tutorial and fully worked-out applications in important areas of cognition and decision. (shrink)