We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

A systematic overview and assessment of different empirical and philosophical aspects of attention.

Empirical work and philosophical analysis have led to widespread acceptance that vision for action, served by the cortical dorsal stream, is unconscious. I argue that the empirical argument for this claim is unsound. That argument relies on subjects’ introspective reports. Yet on biological grounds, in light of the theory of primate cortical vision, introspection has no access to dorsal stream mediated visual states. It is thus wrongly assumed that introspective reports speak to absent phenomenology in the dorsal stream. In light (...) of this, I consider a different conception of consciousness’s relation to agency in terms of access. While theoretical reasons suggest that the inaccessibility of the dorsal stream to conceptual report is evidence that it is unconscious, this position begs important questions. I propose a broader notion of access in respect of the guidance of intentional agency and not, narrowly, conceptual report (Note: this paper contradicts my earlier paper, "The Case for Zombie Agency"). (shrink)

Recent work on the mechanisms underlying auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) has been heavily informed by self-monitoring accounts that postulate defects in an internal monitoring mechanism as the basis of AVH. A more neglected alternative is an account focusing on defects in auditory processing, namely a spontaneous activation account of auditory activity underlying AVH. Science is often aided by putting theories in competition. Accordingly, a discussion that systematically contrasts the two models of AVH can generate sharper questions that will lead to (...) new avenues of investigation. In this paper, we provide such a theoretical discussion of the two models, drawing strong contrasts between them. We identify a set of challenges for the self-monitoring account and argue that the spontaneous activation account has much in favor of it and should be the default account. Our theoretical overview leads to new questions and issues regarding the explanation of AVH as a subjective phenomenon and its neural basis. Accordingly, we suggest a set of experimental strategies to dissect the underlying mechanisms of AVH in light of the two competing models. (shrink)

Wayne Davis presents a highly original approach to the foundations of semantics, showing how the so-called "expression" theory of meaning can handle names and other problematic cases of nondescriptive meaning. The fact that thoughts have parts ("ideas" or "concepts") is fundamental: Davis argues that like other unstructured words, names mean what they do because they are conventionally used to express atomic or basic ideas. In the process he shows that many pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, from twin earth arguments (...) to the necessity of identity, are unfounded. (shrink)

According to act theories, propositions are structured cognitive act‐types. Act theories appear to make propositions inherently representational and truth‐evaluable, and to provide solutions to familiar problems with alternative theories, including Frege’s and Russell’s problems, and the third‐realm and unity problems. Act theories have critical problems of their own, though: acts as opposed to their objects are not truth evaluable, not structured in the right way, not expressed by sentences, and not the objects of propositional attitudes. I show how identifying propositions (...) with other cognitive event‐types, namely thoughts, has the perceived virtues of act theories without the defects. (shrink)

Carruthers offers a refreshing piece of “substantive philosophy.” Going beyond the limitations of pure analysis, he adopts a methodology which is one part analysis, one part empirical data, and a heavy dose of inference to the best explanation. The overarching goal is to advance the commonsense—yet unfashionable—thesis that natural language is the primary medium of thought, and to defend the related cognitive conception of NL. In particular, Carruthers argues that imaginative phonological representations of “inner speech” are constitutive of conscious thoughts, (...) and that thinking involves operations on such symbols. While there is still a role for mentalese cognition, such thinking is always unconscious, and probably of limited innate conceptual resources. The weak thesis is that, of natural necessity, all conscious propositional thought requires NL. The strong thesis is that, of natural necessity, distinctively human thoughts can only be tokened in natural language—hence even much of our unconscious thinking occurs in English. (shrink)

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulean agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulean and the Quattrocento. In (...) making it we display some hidden complexity in human aesthetic responses to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices. (shrink)

The exercise of judgement is an aspect of human endeavour from our most mundane acts to our most momentous decisions. In this book Wayne Martin develops a historical survey of theoretical approaches to judgement, focusing on treatments of judgement in psychology, logic, phenomenology and painting. He traces attempts to develop theories of judgement in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, experimental neuropsychology and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant (...) but largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgement with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgement are not only equally important but fundamentally interlinked in any complete understanding of judgement. His book will interest a wide range of readers in history of philosophy, philosophy of the mind and psychology. (shrink)

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia, who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incorporated in Butterfill & Sinigaglia’s account, and I seek to develop a theoretical picture that will allow us to explain the structure of the interface presented by this evidence. The (...) central idea is that neural plasticity incorporates metarepresentational rules for constructing representational systems and linking them. The structure of the cognition-motor interface is constructed flexibly during development and skill learning based on information processing demands. (shrink)

We respond to Moseley and Wilkinson's defense of inner speech models of AVH.

I present a new proof of the likelihood principle that avoids two responses to a well-known proof due to Birnbaum ([1962]). I also respond to arguments that Birnbaum’s proof is fallacious, which if correct could be adapted to this new proof. On the other hand, I urge caution in interpreting proofs of the likelihood principle as arguments against the use of frequentist statistical methods. 1 Introduction2 The New Proof3 How the New Proof Addresses Proposals to Restrict Birnbaum’s Premises4 A Response (...) to Arguments that the Proofs Are Fallacious5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The difficulty in finding well‐matched kidneys for transplantation into black Americans is compounded by the disproportionately low rate of black donation. A program of directed donation that privileged black‐to‐black transplant could ease the chronic shortage of organs.

Whilst religion may have been of relevance in the quest for material prosperity and economic advancement in the 16th century, it seems not to have such importance today. The declining rate of organised religion and the growth of secularism around the world progressively lead many to believe that if there is any truth particularly relevant for this century, it is no longer found in religion. In this paper, we argue that global leadership deficiencies and corruption are not the root causes (...) for the economic development challenges currently faced in Southern Africa and the rest of the world. They are simply the result of the root cause, which we maintain is a decline in moral and spiritual values in society, and unless national governments make some meaningful progress in these realms, this generation is headed for serious economic trouble. (shrink)

Abstract:The distinction between brute luck and option luck is fundamental for luck egalitarianism. Many luck egalitarians write as if it could be used to specify which outcomes people should be held responsible for. In this paper, I argue that the distinction can’t be used this way. In fact, luck egalitarians tend to rely instead on rough intuitive judgements about individual responsibility. This makes their view vulnerable to what’s known as theneutrality objection. I show that attempts to avoid this objection are (...) unsuccessful. I conclude that until it provides a better account of attributing responsibility, luck egalitarianism remains incomplete. (shrink)

Some empirical findings seem to show that people value health benefits differently depending on the age of the beneficiary. Health economists and philosophers have offered justifications for these preferences on grounds of both efficiency and equity. In this paper, I examine the most prominent examples of both sorts of justification: the defence of age-weighting in the WHO's global burden of disease studies and the fair innings argument. I argue that neither sort of justification has been worked out in satisfactory form: (...) age should not be taken into account in the framework of the burden of disease measure, and on the most promising formulations of the fair innings argument, it turns out to be merely an indicator of some other factor. I conclude by describing the role of age in theories of justice of healthcare resource allocation. (shrink)

This dissertation is a critical examination of dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions. Dialetheism's proponents argue that adopting the view will allow us to solve hitherto unsolved problems, including the well-known logical paradoxes. ;Dialetheism faces three kinds of challenge. Challenges of the first kind put in doubt the intrinsic coherence of dialetheism. It can be claimed, for example, that it is incoherent for a claim to be both true and false; that claims known to be false cannot be (...) accepted; that claims known to be false cannot be rationally accepted; and that dialetheism entails the falsity of some of its own theoretical claims. The second kind of challenge concerns the use of paraconsistent logics, which dialetheists must adopt on pain of accepting the truth of every proposition. I examine a number of paraconsistent logics, and conclude that either they come at an unacceptably high price or they do not support the dialetheist project. ;I devote most attention to the third kind of challenge, according to which dialetheism fails to provide the promised solutions to the paradoxes and other previously intractable problems, and so we lose the major motivation for the theory. Proponents claim that dialetheism allows for the solution of numerous problems, particularly in metaphysics, law, and logic. In the case of metaphysics, it is claimed that dialetheism allows us to deal with puzzles involving change, vagueness, and motion. However, I argue that the proposed solution does not eliminate the old metaphysical problems, and in fact gives rise to new ones. In the case of law, it is claimed that dialetheism can allow us to deal with legal contradiction. I argue there are more plausible means of solving such conflicts. The strongest case for dialetheism is that it allows us to solve logical and semantic paradoxes of self-reference, some of which have endured for well over two thousand years. I construct a paradox that the dialetheist cannot accommodate, and which shows that dialetheism never provided a solution to the paradoxes at all, even in their more familiar forms. (shrink)

This book emphasizes the compatibility of Aristotelianism, Austrian economics, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism, arguing that particular ideas from these areas can be integrated as a potential paradigm of human flourishing and happiness in a free society. It constructs an understanding from various disciplines into a clear, consistent, and systematic whole.

Russell ([2022]. “Fancy Loose Talk About Knowledge.” Inquiry 65: 789–820.) defends a novel form of skeptical invariantism, according to which knowledge ascriptions are hardly ever true because they are so demanding, but nonetheless are ordinarily used loosely to communicate truths, where the felicity of loose talk is relative to the context of assessment as well as the context of use. I argue that while there is very good reason to believe that ‘know’ is a demanding term commonly used loosely, we (...) need not and should not conclude that loose use is assessment relative or that knowledge ascriptions are hardly ever true. (shrink)

These original essays reconceive the place of religion for critical thought following the recent ‘turn to religion’ in Continental philosophy, framing new issues for exploration, including questions of justice, anxiety, and evil; the sublime, and of the soul haunting genetics; how reason may be reshaped by new religious movements and by ritual and experience. Contributors: Pamela Sue Anderson, Gary Banham, Bettina Bergo, John Caputo, Clayton Crockett, Jonathan Ellsworth, Philip Goodchild, Matthew Halteman, Wayne Hudson, Grace Jantzen, Donna Jowett, Greg (...) Sadler, Graham Ward, and Edith Wyschogrod. (shrink)

Cost effectiveness analysis is a tool for evaluating the aggregate benefits of medical treatments, health care services, and public health programs. Its opponents often claim that its use leads to unfair discrimination against people with disabilities. My aim in this paper is to clarify the conditions under which this might be so. I present some ways in which the use of cost effectiveness analysis can lead to discrimination and suggest why these forms of discrimination may be unfair. I also discuss (...) some proposals for avoiding discrimination without rejecting cost effectiveness analysis altogether. I argue that none of these proposals is ultimately convincing. I describe a different approach to the problem and conclude by answering the question in the title. (shrink)

This dissertation is a critical examination of dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions. Dialetheism's proponents argue that adopting the view will allow us to solve hitherto unsolved problems, including the well-known logical paradoxes. ;Dialetheism faces three kinds of challenge. Challenges of the first kind put in doubt the intrinsic coherence of dialetheism. It can be claimed, for example, that it is incoherent for a claim to be both true and false; that claims known to be false cannot be (...) accepted; that claims known to be false cannot be rationally accepted; and that dialetheism entails the falsity of some of its own theoretical claims. The second kind of challenge concerns the use of paraconsistent logics, which dialetheists must adopt on pain of accepting the truth of every proposition. I examine a number of paraconsistent logics, and conclude that either they come at an unacceptably high price or they do not support the dialetheist project. ;I devote most attention to the third kind of challenge, according to which dialetheism fails to provide the promised solutions to the paradoxes and other previously intractable problems, and so we lose the major motivation for the theory. Proponents claim that dialetheism allows for the solution of numerous problems, particularly in metaphysics, law, and logic. In the case of metaphysics, it is claimed that dialetheism allows us to deal with puzzles involving change, vagueness, and motion. However, I argue that the proposed solution does not eliminate the old metaphysical problems, and in fact gives rise to new ones. In the case of law, it is claimed that dialetheism can allow us to deal with legal contradiction. I argue there are more plausible means of solving such conflicts. The strongest case for dialetheism is that it allows us to solve logical and semantic paradoxes of self-reference, some of which have endured for well over two thousand years. I construct a paradox that the dialetheist cannot accommodate, and which shows that dialetheism never provided a solution to the paradoxes at all, even in their more familiar forms. (shrink)

This paper responds to Philipona & O’Regan (2006), which attempts to account for certain color phenomena by appeal to singularities in the space of “accessible information” in the light striking the retina. Three points are discussed. First, it is unclear what the empirical significance/import is of the mathematical analysis of the data regarding the accessible information in the light. Second, the singularity index employed in the study is both mathematically and empirically faulty. Third, the connection drawn between their findings and (...) some data from the World Color Survey is lacking in quantitative analysis in places where it is needed. The difficulties raised prevent Philipona & O’Regan’s conclusions from being accepted. (shrink)

The precautionary approach has been widely considered reasonable for many issues in environmental policy, including climate change. It has also been recognized, however, that standard formulations of the precautionary principle suffer from many difficulties. An influential strategy to avoid these difficulties is to formulate a narrow version of the principle on the basis of the maximin rule. Rawls proposed that following the maximin rule can be rational under certain conditions. Defenders of this strategy argue that these conditions are approximated when (...) it comes to issues like climate change. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the Rawlsian conditions do not establish the unique rationality of the maximin rule, hence the precautionary principle cannot be defended on its basis. When the Rawlsian conditions are approximated, other principles can also lead to reasonable choices. In particular, a prioritarian principle can capture the precautionary approach and serve a useful role in climate change policy. I develop this proposal in the second part. (shrink)

In this brilliant assessment of the relation between poststructuralism and feminism to current religious thought, philosopher of religion Carol Wayne White convincingly demonstrates that postmodernist continental and feminist philosophies—far from being antithetical to religious concerns—in fact enrich our understanding of religion and its relevance to debates about contemporary culture. By triangulating these three unique perspectives on culture she expands prevailing views of cultural criticism and opens up the discussion to new creative solutions that arise from the intersecting interests of (...) poststructuralist, feminist, and religious studies. Dividing her work into three major sections, White first summarizes the major developments in postmodern and feminist thought in a lucid and refreshingly jargon-free exposition. Next she focuses on two major thinkers in poststructuralist religious scholarship—Sharon Welch and Mark C. Taylor—showing how their work incorporates, on the one hand, Foucault's political critique of power and, on the other, Derrida's textual deconstruction. Finally, she looks at feminist critiques of culture with special emphasis on feminists' contributions to the study of religion. She concludes by highlighting the important role of religious valuing in providing an impetus to action and pragmatic social change. Religion can and should move us beyond the stalemate of postmodern critiques with their often-nihilistic undertones and fruitless academic posturing. Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion succeeds in elucidating what it means to think and act religiously in the postmodern era. (shrink)

This paper begins with a simple illustration of the choice between individual and population strategies in population health policy. It describes the traditional approach on which the choice is to be made on the relative merits of the two strategies in each case. It continues by identifying two factors—our knowledge of the consequences of the epidemiological transition and the prevalence of responsibility-sensitive theories of distributive justice—that may distort our moral intuitions when we deliberate about the choice of appropriate risk-management strategies (...) in population health. It argues that the confluence of these two factors may lead us to place too much emphasis on personal responsibility in health policy. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present a novel argument against prioritarianism. The argument takes its starting point from empirical surveys on people's preferences in health care resource allocation problems. In this article, I first question whether the empirical findings support their argument, and then I make some general points about the use of ‘empirical ethics’ in ethical theory.

Frequentist statistical methods continue to predominate in many areas of science despite prominent calls for "statistical reform." They do so in part because their main rivals, Bayesian methods, appeal to prior probability distributions that arguably lack an objective justification in typical cases. Some methodologists find a third approach called likelihoodism attractive because it avoids important objections to frequentism without appealing to prior probabilities. However, likelihoodist methods do not provide guidance for belief or action, but only assessments of data as evidence. (...) I argue that there is no good way to use those assessments to guide beliefs or actions without appealing to prior probabilities, and that as a result likelihoodism is not a viable alternative to frequentism and Bayesianism for statistical reform efforts in science. (shrink)

Time-delayed coincidence Mössbauer experiments, in which the spread in energy may be either greater or less than the natural linewidth, are discussed. This discussion leads to the conclusion that in the uncertainty relation ΔE Δt ≥ $\begin{array}{*{20}c} / \\ h \\ \end{array} /2$ , Δt should be interpreted as the duration time of the measurement and not as the lifetime of the state. Further analysis shows that confinement of photons to the region of space between emitter and absorber should cause (...) a frequency spread much larger than actually observed. This leads to the conclusion that to think of photons as being created at one point in space, traveling with the velocity of light to another point, then being absorbed or destroyed, is incorrect. (shrink)

Nick Huggett and Robert Weingard (1994) have recently proposed a novel approach to interpreting field theories in physics, one which makes central use of the fact that a field generally has an infinite number of degrees of freedom in any finite region of space it occupies. Their characterization, they argue, (i) reproduces our intuitive categorizations of fields in the classical domain and thereby (ii) provides a basis for arguing that the quantum field is a field. Furthermore, (iii) it accomplishes these (...) tasks better than does a well-known rival approach due to Paul Teller (1990, 1995). This paper contends that all three of these claims are mistaken, and suggests that Huggett and Weingard have not shown how counting degrees of freedom provides any insight into the interpretation or the formal properties of field theories in physics. (shrink)

Abstract MacFarlane distinguishes “context sensitivity” from “indexicality,” and argues that “nonindexical contextualism” has significant advantages over the standard indexical form. MacFarlane’s substantive thesis is that the extension of an expression may depend on an epistemic standard variable even though its content does not. Focusing on ‘knows,’ I will argue against the possibility of extension dependence without content dependence when factors such as meaning, time, and world are held constant, and show that MacFarlane’s nonindexical contextualism provides no advantages over indexical contextualism. (...) The discussion will shed light on the definition of indexicals as well as the meaning of ‘knows,’ and highlight important constraints on the way meaning can be represented in semantics. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9831-1 Authors Wayne A. Davis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Knowledge of residual perturbations in the orbit of Uranus in the early 1840s did not lead to the refutation of Newton's law of gravitation but instead to the discovery of Neptune in 1846. Karl Popper asserts that this case is atypical of science and that the law of gravitation was at least prima facie falsified by these perturbations. I argue that these assertions are the product of a false, a priori methodological position I call, 'Weak Popperian Falsificationism'. Further, on the (...) evidence the law was not prima facie false and was not generally considered so by astronomers at the time. Many of Popper's commentators presuppose WPF and their views on this case and its implications for scientific rationality and method suffer from this same defect. (shrink)

It is well known that, according to some, philosophical reflection on zombies (i.e., bodies without minds) poses a problem for physicalism. But what about ghosts, i.e., minds without bodies? Does philosophical reflection on them pose a problem for physicalism? Descartes, of course, thought so, and lately rumours have been surfacing that has was right after all, that ghosts pose a problem for both a priori and a posteriori physicalism, and for any kind of physicalism in between. This paper argues that (...) physicalists have nothing to fear from ghosts, since the central consideration employed to motivate ghostly arguments against physicalism--viz., that ghosts are conceivable--is false: ghosts aren't conceivable. (shrink)

This paper argues that Pascal's formulation of his famous wager argument licenses an inference about God's nature that ultimately vitiates the claim that wagering for God is in one's rational self-interest. In particular, it is argued that if we accept Pascal's premises, then we can infer that the god for whom Pascal encourages us to wager is irrational. But if God is irrational, then the prudentially rational course of action is to refrain from wagering for him.

Leading scholars critically assess the pioneering environmental philosophy of J. Baird Callicott.

There is a strong intuition that for a change to occur, there must be a moment at which the change is taking place. It will be demonstrated that there are no such moments of change, since no state the changing thing could be in at any moment would suffice to make that moment a moment of change. A moment in which the changing thing is simply in the state changed from or the state changed to cannot be the moment of (...) change, since these states are respectively before and after the change; moreover, to select one of these moments over the other as the moment of change would be arbitrary. A moment in which the changing thing is neither in the state changed from nor in the state changed to cannot be the moment of change, since there are changes for which it is impossible for something to be in neither state. Finally, the moment of change cannot be a moment in which the changing thing is in both the state changed from and the state changed to, as suggested by Graham Priest and others. Even if, like proponents of this view, we are willing to accept the contradictions that the account entails, it is demonstrated that on such a model, every change would require an infinite number of other changes, every change would take an infinite amount of time, and some changes would occur without occurring at any time. Further, the model is grossly counterintuitive, with the exact nature of the counterintuitive element depending on what model of time and space one endorses. Finally, it is demonstrated that this model is incompatible with the Leibniz Continuity Condition. (shrink)

Quality of life research aims to develop and apply indices for the measurement of human welfare. It is an increasingly important field within the social sciences and its results are an important resource for policy making and evaluation. This paper explores the conceptual background of quality of life research. It focuses on its single most important issue: the controversy between the use of ``objective social indicators'' and the use of people's ``subjective evaluations'' as proxies for welfare. Most quality of life (...) researchers today argue that people's own evaluations have an indispensable role in quality of life measurement. I argue that their position must be defended on philosophical grounds, because their use of evaluations commits them to some particular theories of welfare. I explore the connections between theories of welfare in philosophy and the use of evaluations in quality of life research. I conclude that even though evaluations may have a role in particular applications, they are unlikely to have a role in all applications. (shrink)