In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions–primitivism and the causal theory–fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. (...) Primitivists postulate primitive agential capacities in their explanations. The latter neglect to explain how primitive capacities integrate with findings from natural science. The former do not explain why some feedback mechanism’s activity amounts to the agent’s guidance. In this paper I argue that both traditions should acknowledge a capacity to guide, as actually constituted by the executive system. I argue that appeals to this empirically discovered psychological system explain how individuals guide in a way that integrates with explanations from cognitive science. Individuals’ capacity to guide is embedded in the natural world through the activity of its constituent (mechanistic) components. (shrink)

How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...) can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

There has recently been much interest in the role of attention in controlling action. The role has been mischaracterized as an element in necessary and sufficient conditions on agential control. In this paper I attempt a new characterization of the role. I argue that we need to understand attentional control in order to fully understand agential control. To fully understand agential control we must understand paradigm exercises of agential control. Three important accounts of agential control—intentional, reflective, and goal-represented control—do not (...) fully explain such exercises. I argue that understanding them requires understanding how deployments of visual attention implement flexible occurrent control, or a capacity to flexibly adjust the degree of control that individuals exercise over their actions. While such deployments of attention are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising agential control, they constitute an attentional skill for controlling action, understanding which is central to fully understanding agential control. We can appreciate its centrality if we appreciate that this attentional skill for controlling action is plausibly crucial to acting non-negligently. (shrink)

Executive functioning has been said to bear on a range of traditional philosophical topics, such as consciousness, thought, and action. Surprisingly, philosophers have not much engaged with the scientific literature on executive functioning. This lack of engagement may be due to several influential criticisms of that literature by Daniel Dennett, Alan Allport, and others. In this paper I argue that more recent research on executive functioning shows that these criticisms are no longer valid. The paper clears the way to a (...) more fruitful philosophical engagement with findings on the central executive system. (shrink)

Skilled action typically requires that individuals guide their activities toward some goal. In skilled action, individuals do so excellently. We do not understand well what this capacity to guide consists in. In this paper I provide a case study of how individuals shift visual attention. Their capacity to guide visual attention toward some goal (partly) consists in an empirically discovered sub-system – the executive system. I argue that we can explain how individuals guide by appealing to the operation of this (...) sub-system. Understanding skill and skilled action thus requires appreciating the role of the executive system. (shrink)

What is attention? On one influential position, attention constitutively is the selection of some stimulus for coupling with a response. Wayne Wu has proposed a master argument for this position that relies on the claim that cognitive science commits to an empirical sufficient condition (ESC), according to which, if a subject S perceptually selects (or response-couples) X to guide performance of some experimental task T, she therein attends to X. In this paper I show that this claim about cognitive science (...) is false. Cognitive science allows for inattentive selection-for-task, or inattentive response-coupling. This means that Wu’s account is without independent support. (shrink)

One of the most influential recent accounts of attention is Wayne Wu’s. According to Wu, attention is selection-for-action. I argue that this proposal faces a dilemma: either it denies clear cases of attention capture, or it acknowledges these cases but classifies many inattentive episodes as attentive.

How can we argue, from neural facts, that representational states exhibit some specific representational structure? This paper approaches the question through a case study on the priority map-mechanism that underlies our capacity to orient visual attention. Computational models from cognitive neuroscience describe this mechanism as operating over neural topographic structures. These neural structures exhibit the functional profile of topographic representational structure. I argue that this fact warrants attributing topographic structure to the priority map mechanism’s representational states.

We distinguish dynamical and statistical interpretations of evolutionary theory. We argue that only the statistical interpretation preserves the presumed relation between natural selection and drift. On these grounds we claim that the dynamical conception of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces is mistaken. Selection and drift are not forces. Nor do selection and drift explanations appeal to the (sub-population-level) causes of population level change. Instead they explain by appeal to the statistical structure of populations. We briefly discuss the implications (...) of the statistical interpretation of selection for various debates within the philosophy of biologythe `explananda of selection' debate and the `units of selection' debate. (shrink)

Is an appropriate causal connection to the past experience it represents a necessary condition for a mental state to qualify as an episodic memory? For some years this issue has been the subject of an intense debate between the causalist theory of episodic memory (CTM) and the simulationist theory of episodic memory (STM). This paper aims at exploring the prospects for an embodied approach to episodic memory and assessing the potential case for causalism that could be founded on it. In (...) a critical section, it argues that the empirical data to which STM appeals are both incomplete and inconclusive, and on closer examination even provide support for a proceduralist version of CTM. In a constructive section, it elaborates on the notion of a necessary causal connection in terms of particular procedural patterns acquired at encoding and operative at retrieval, grounding this move on recent empirical data about eye movements in mnemonic mental imagery. (shrink)

There are two competing interpretations of the modern synthesis theory of evolution: the dynamical (also know as ‘traditional’) and the statistical. The dynamical interpretation maintains that explanations offered under the auspices of the modern synthesis theory articulate the causes of evolution. It interprets selection and drift as causes of population change. The statistical interpretation holds that modern synthesis explanations merely cite the statistical structure of populations. This paper offers a defense of statisticalism. It argues that a change in trait frequencies (...) in a population can be attributed only to selection or drift against the background of a particular statistical description of the population. The traditionalist supposition that selection and drift are description‐independent causes of population change leads the dynamical interpretation into a dilemma: it must face a contradiction or accept the loss of explanatory power. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

This paper examines a doctrine which David Lewis has called 'Humean Supervenience' (hereafter 'HS'), and a problem which certain imaginary cases seem to generate for HS. They include rotating perfect spheres or discs, and flowing rivers, imagined as composed of matter which is perfectly homogeneous right down to the individual points. Before considering these examples, I shall introduce the doctrine they seem to challenge.

April 15, 2024: This article published in Early View in error. The article will republish shortly.

Robert Pippin's new book, The Culmination, examines Heidegger's reading and critique of Kant and Hegel. Since Pippin is perhaps best known as one of the most influential contemporary advocates for the importance of engaging with the difficult work of Hegel in particular, it will no doubt surprise quite a few of his readers that, on some fundamental points, the book concludes that “Heidegger is right” (p. xi). In the present piece, I explore some intriguing issues that Pippin's book raises. Although (...) the disagreement between his principal parties is obviously central to his discussion, my main focus is on a possible point of important agreement that that discussion also opens up, in light of which Heidegger might be fruitfully interpreted as pursuing a variant of a Kantian/Hegelian project, though this will also lead me to make a number of critical points about Pippin's reading of Heidegger: although there are grounds for thinking that Pippin's Heidegger does subscribe to such a project, some of the considerations that Pippin advances in arguing that “Heidegger is right” sit uncomfortably—it seems to me—with that project. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much interest in epistemic roles of attention, especially in whether visual attention is necessary for warranting (basic) visual belief. Arguably it is not. But attention nevertheless has important roles to play in our warrant from vision. I argue that we must appeal to a competence for shifting visual attention in explaining transsaccadic vision and our epistemic warrant from it. So even if it is not necessary for visual warrant or vision, visual attention plays a central role (...) in both. (shrink)

Conscious Agency is a major driver of evolution. Artificial Selection (i.e. Conscious Selection by human breeders) was the foil against which Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection. In later work, he extended Artificial Selection to other species. That ability for social (e.g. sexual) selection must have evolved. Jablonka and Ginsburg identify markers of conscious agency, such as Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), and show that it must have existed at the time of the Cambrian Explosion. To their insights, my commentary argues that (...) the harnessing of stochasticity was also involved in the evolution of the faculty of choice in organisms. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the case of the discovery of complex numbers by Girolamo Cardano. Cardano acquires the concepts of (specific) complex numbers, complex addition, and complex multiplication. His understanding of these concepts is incomplete. I show that his acquisition of these concepts cannot be explained on the basis of Christopher Peacocke’s Conceptual Role Theory of concept possession. I argue that Strong Conceptual Role Theories that are committed to specifying a set of transitions that is both necessary and sufficient (...) for possession of mathematical concepts will always face counterexamples of the kind illustrated by Cardano. I close by suggesting that we should rely more heavily on resources of Anti-Individualism as a framework for understanding the acquisition and possession of concepts of abstract subject matters. (shrink)

According to a prominent view of evolutionary theory, natural selection and the processes of development compete for explanatory relevance. Natural selection theory explains the evolution of biological form insofar as it is adaptive. Development is relevant to the explanation of form only insofar as it constrains the adaptation-promoting effects of selection. I argue that this view of evolutionary theory is erroneous. I outline an alternative, according to which natural selection explains adaptive evolution by appeal to the statistical structure of populations, (...) and development explains the causes of adaptive evolution at the level of individuals. Only together can a statistical theory of selection and a mechanical theory of development explain why populations of organisms comprise individuals that are adapted to their conditions of existence. (shrink)

Around sixty years ago, Martin and Deutscher (1966) published a paper about the conditions under which an occurring mental state qualifies as episodically remembering. Recent philosophy of memory has developed this ontological interrogation in depth. But while it has significantly contributed to the ontological characterisation of episodic memory, it has also left aside an important part of it. Our memories not only occur, they also reoccur: we re-remember. This raises the ontological issue of their identity over time, along with the (...) related issue of their individuation. In the present paper, I explore this as yet uncharted territory of the ontology of episodic memories. I show first that the notion of re-remembering refers to a genuine mnemic phenomenon, and as such requires a theoretical account. I then proceed to design candidate accounts of said phenomenon, two of which, I claim, are particularly promising. (shrink)

Aesthetic theoriesmayclaim universality, but they are normally conditioned by the aesthetic issues and debates of their own times. Plato and Aristo- tle were motivated both to account for the Greek arts of their day and to connect aesthetics to their general metaphysics and theories of value. Closer to our time, asNo¨el Carroll observes, the theories of Clive Bell and R.G. Collingwood can be viewed as “defenses of emerging avant-garde practices— neoimpressionism, on the one hand, and the mod- ernist poetics of (...) Joyce, Stein, and Eliot on the other.”1 Susanne Langer can be read as provid- ing a justification for modern dance, while the ini- tial version of George Dickie’s institutional the- ory “requires something like the presupposition that Dada is a central form of artistic practice” in order to gain intuitive appeal. The. (shrink)

The extensive range and depth of the twenty commentaries on my target article confirms that something has gone deeply wrong in biology. A wide range of biologists has more than met my invitation for “others to pitch in and develop or counter my arguments.” The commentaries greatly develop those arguments. Also remarkably, none raise issues I would seriously disagree with. I will focus first on the more critical comments, summarise the other comments, and then point the way forward on what (...) I view as a necessary and long-overdue transition in the foundations of biology. (shrink)

Rather than simply outlining the classical and modern theories of learning, this widely adopted text brings the material to life through case studies that engage students in debates about what really happens in classrooms. Students are encouraged to test the strengths and weaknesses of each theory so that, ultimately, they will learn to formulate their own philosophies of teaching and learning. The new Fifth Edition of Perspectives on Learning features: A discussion of common sense and learning theories. A new chapter (...) on Transfer of Learning. Consideration of recent developments in brain science. A thoroughly updated list of Recommendations for Further Reading. Perspectives on Learning is one of the five books in the highly regarded Teachers College Press THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES, now in its Fifth Edition. All of the books in this series are designed to help pre- and in-service teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

A common view about the phenomenology of episodic remembering has it that when we remember a perceptual experience, we can relive or re-experience many of its features, but not its characteristic presence. In this paper, we challenge this common view. We first say that presence in perception divides into temporal and locative presence, with locative having two sides, an objective and a subjective one. While we agree with the common view that temporal and objective locative presence cannot be relived in (...) remembering, we argue that subjective locative presence – the feeling of being immersed in a certain scene – can be so. Our argument for this claim starts by determining independently the underpinning mechanisms of subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination. These mechanisms are self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus. We then proceed to establish that they have been found to underpin conscious states of episodic remembering too. We conclude that episodic remembering can bring us to relive the subjective locative presence characteristic of a perceptual experience, and that the common view is mistaken. Our view – ‘mnemonic immersivism’ – has important consequences regarding the relationships between memory and imagination and the phenomenology of episodic remembering. (shrink)

Europeans seeking to understand tribal arts face obvious problems of comprehending the histories, values, and ideas of vastly remote cultures. In this respect the issues faced in understanding tribal art (or folk art, primitive art, traditional art, third or fourth-world art — none of these designations is ideal) are not much different from those encountered in trying to comprehend the distant art of “our own” culture, for instance, the art of medieval Europe. But in the case of tribal or so-called (...) primitive art, there are special complications. First, objects of tribal art are sometimes so strange to us that we cannot tell immediately whether they are intended to be works of art (or some local analogue of what we would call art) at all.1An African head-rest I once came across had an odd, extravagant extrusion which made the whole piece reminiscent of Arp. It seemed to my baffled, ignorant eyes to be much more than a mere head-rest, but I couldn’t tell what more it was supposed to be. Maybe that extension on the side of the object had some purely utilitarian function, acting as a handle, or perhaps it was a natural part of the original block of wood, left there merely because it looked nice to the eye of the carver. Though the head-rest seemed beautiful, I still don’t know if I was admiring as an essentially expressive object some simple item of practical use, or something that combined expression and utility. (shrink)

For more than a century, the relationship between cinema and the city has constituted an aspect of profound fascination for film and visual studies. Constantly renewing itself, this connection represents the interaction of a complex network of technological forms, ergonomic configurations, evolutionary perspectives, human and material aggregations, all redefined within the canons of filmic language. The cities of the future, before moving from the design phase to the productive phase, have often been modulated and experienced within filmic spaces, sometimes glimpsing (...) subsequent mutations. Through the study of video installations such as Prisma (2022) by Vhils and Hypnosis Display (2014) by Clipson and Harris, films such as Code inconnu (2000) by Haneke, Code 46 (2003) by Winterbottom, Anon (2018) by Niccol, and recent works by Refik Anadol, I will try to outline a possible visual interpretation regarding the present and future urban image. (shrink)

This special issue focuses on the theoretical, empirical and practical integrations between embodied cognition theory and educational science. The key question is: Can EC constitute a new theoretical framework for educational science and practice? The papers of the special issue support the efforts of those interested in the role of EC in education and in the epistemological convergence of EC and educational science. They deal with a variety of relevant topics in education and offer a focus on the role of (...) the body and embodied experience in learning and educational settings. In conclusion, some further topics are suggested that will need to be investigated in the future, such as a critical evaluation of the possibility for an epistemological alliance between educational theory and embodied cognition, and the contribution that enactive cognition can provide to educational systems, organizations, institutions and policies. (shrink)

This is a survey article in which I explore some important recent work on the topic in question, Kant’s formula of the end in itself (or “formula of humanity”). I first provide an overview of the formulation, including what the formula seems roughly to be saying, and what Kant’s main argument for it seems to be. I then call the reader’s attention to a variety of questions one might have about the import of and argument for this formula, alluding to (...) some of the works in which philosophers have recently raised or tried to answer these questions. Then, for the bulk of the paper, I focus my discussion on two issues of contention: the identity of the “end in itself” that the formula refers to, and the relation between the value of the end in itself and the value of other ends. I do not attempt to argue for a particular position of my own regarding these issues. Instead, I explain a number of the more interesting or influential recent attempts to answer these questions, compare these approaches in various ways, draw implications from them, and raise concerns about some of them. I also suggest that an important link connects the question about the identity of the end in itself and the question about the relation between the value of the end in itself in relation to the value of other ends: How one answers these questions commits one to a position on the thorny issue of whether, how, and how fully, autonomy is manifested through empirical (not simply pure) practical reason. (shrink)

Paul Boghossian has pointed out a ’circularity problem’ for dispositionalist theories of meaning: as a result of the holistic character of belief fixation, one cannot identify someone’s meaning such and such with facts of the form S is disposed to utter P under conditions C, without C involving the semantic and intentional notions that such a theory was to explain. Alex Miller has recently suggested an ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’ (modelled on David Lewis’s well known version of functionlism) and has argued that (...) this version of dispositionalism escapes Boghossian’s ’circularity problem’. Miller argues, nonetheless, that another of Boghossian’s criticisms of dispositionalism, ’the infinity problem’ still applies to this ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’: C will still draw upon a potential infinity of mediating background clusters of belief. The present paper argues that the feature that ’the infinity problem’ presents as problematic is a feature of a host of familiar explanations. Our fundamental difficulty in this area is not our inability to understand how a more general model can be applied to a particular domain (the intentional understood as dispositional) but our failure to understand that general model itself (dispositional explanation). (shrink)

É com grande prazer que realizo este projeto. Não apenas por realizar um trabalho de um trabalho de amor para um amigo querido, Denis Guénoun, mas também por oferecer um presente para todos os anglófonos. Desde Sartre, não surgiu uma voz tão original no cenário francês. Guénoun escreve com autoridade em várias disciplinas, na grande tradição dos intelectuais franceses: filosofia, teatro, literatura, literatura de arte e literatura de arte; no entanto, ele escreve com a voz irreverente e poderosa irreverente (...) e poderosa necessária para chamar a atenção de especialistas em cada um desses campos. (shrink)

This chapter describes the origin of the principle of biological relativity and its development since 2012. It was first formulated by distinguishing between the causal properties of initial and boundary conditions, regarded as a formal cause, compared to the dynamics of the differential functions themselves, regarded as an efficient cause. The concept of organisational level, and of boundaries between levels and environmental factors are also central to the principle. Work on the properties of boundaries reveals two important features: the nature (...) of causation differs significantly between different levels of organisation, and the top-down and bottom-up forms must act simultaneously. These developments of the principle are used to clarify the reasons why bottom-up causation alone is inadequate in multi-level biology. (shrink)

Brentano clearly asserts, in his Vienna lectures of 1887–1888, that his descriptive psychology is an a priori or “exact” science. Since he rejects Kant's idea of a synthetic a priori, this means that the descriptive psychologist's laws are analytic. My aim in this paper is to clarify and discuss this view. I examine Brentano's epistemology in the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and then its later developments. I conclude with a difficulty inherent in Brentano's psychological approach to a priori knowledge.

We show that there are models and such that elementarily embeds into but their ultrafilter extensions and are not elementarily equivalent.

The necessary relation of philosophy and poetry in Schellingʼs philosophy is most clearly visible in the way he attributes the aesthetic function to philosophy in his work System of transcendental idealism. For Schelling, poetry is what precedes science, which, in terms of the system of science, must in its circular motion return at its completion to what it came from. What leads science to the return to poetry can be found, according to Schelling, in nature and in the way that (...) it is organised. The organisation in nature was in ancient philosophy portrayed through poetic expression in the form of stories. For Schelling, the mythological form is therefore the middle ground, which leads to the return of science to poetry. (shrink)

Reading speed matters in most real-world contexts, and it is a robust and easy aspect of reading to measure. Theories of reading should account for speed.