This paper takes up a recent challenge to mechanistic approaches to computational implementation, the view that computational implementation is best explicated within a mechanistic framework. The challenge, what has been labelled “the abstraction problem”, claims that one of MAC’s central pillars – medium independence – is deeply confused when applied to the question of computational implementation. The concern is that while it makes sense to say that computational processes are abstract (i.e. medium-independent), it makes considerably less sense to say that (...) they are also concrete processes of a mechanism. After outlining the problem and its effect on MAC, I examine a recent response from Kuokkanen and Rusanen [2018. “Making Too Many Enemies: Hutto and Myin’s Attack on Computationalism.” Philosophical Explorations 21 (2): 282–294. doi:10.1080/13869795.2018.1477980]. I argue that Kuokkanen and Rusanen’s response comes up short insofar as it makes problematic trade-offs among various desiderata we have for a theory of implementation. This leads to a general dilemma for MAC: either give up being an objective theory of implementation or concede the abstraction problem and so reintroduce triviality concerns. In response, I argue that conceiving of computations as abstracta rather than illata provides a way to avoid the proposed dilemma and articulate a notion of medium independence that addresses the abstraction problem. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the theoretical and philosophical debate on hospitality underlining the normative elements of framing migrants and refugees as individual agents in the light of hospitality theory and migration governance. It argued the critiques of the neo-Kantian hospitality approach and the EU welcome culture with regard to refugees in the EU from a philosophical perspective. The “No human being is illegal” motto is proposed to be conceived as a principle of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The (...) cosmopolitan right to visit and the universal right to reside were discussed in the context of human rights and co-responsibility. Linking the hospitality approach with migration governance enables the reconstruction of reception policies and practices, diversification of non-state actors that engage in migration governance mechanism, and polarization of political initiatives (e.g., politics of allocation and dispersal, readmission negotiations, convergence/divergence of priorities and strategic interests). The research findings highlight that the EU adopted a neo-Kantian hospitality approach that combines both “co-responsibility” and “vertical/heterarchical relations.” The EU’s “New Pact on Migration and Asylum” was considered proof of how the EU follows neo-Kantian hospitality that is manifested in dualism and contradictory approach. The study presents a typology that splits co-responsibility into individual/institutional actions and human rights/migration governance. (shrink)

This book gives an analysis of Hertz's posthumously published Principles of Mechanics in its philosophical, physical and mathematical context. In a period of heated debates about the true foundation of physical sciences, Hertz's book was conceived and highly regarded as an original and rigorous foundation for a mechanistic research program. Insisting that a law-like account of nature would require hypothetical unobservables, Hertz viewed physical theories as images of the world rather than the true design behind the phenomena. This paved the (...) way for the modern conception of a model. Rejecting the concept of force as a coherent basic notion of physics he built his mechanics on hidden masses and rigid connections, and formulated it as a new differential geometric language.Recently many philosophers have studied Hertz's image theory and historians of physics have discussed his forceless mechanics. The present book shows how these aspects, as well as the hitherto overlooked mathematical aspects, form an integrated whole which is closely connected to the mechanistic world view of the time and which is a natural continuation of Hertz's earlier research on electromagnetism. Therefore it is also a case study of the strong interactions between philosophy, physics and mathematics. Moreover, the book presents an analysis of the genesis of many of the central elements of Hertz's mechanics based on his manuscripts and drafts. Hertz's research program was cut short by the advent of relativity theory but its image theory influenced many philosophers as well as some physicists and mathematicians and its geometric form had a lasting influence on advanced expositions of mechanics. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

Mechanistic explanation is the dominant approach to explanation in the life sciences, but it has been challenged as incompatible with a conception of humans as agents whose capacity for self-direction endows them with freedom and dignity. We argue that the mechanical philosophy, properly construed, has sufficient resources to explain how such characteristics can arise in a material world. Biological mechanisms must be regarded as active, not only reactive, and as organized so as to maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Notions (...) from systems biology make key contributions, particularly Gánti’s chemoton, Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno’s basic autonomy, and Barandiaran and Moreno’s adaptive autonomous agents. The reconstrual is then extended to mental life by conceiving of cognitive mechanisms as control components in inherently active systems, as illustrated in models offered by Randall Beer and Cees van Leeuwen. (shrink)

Human reasoning is often conceived as an interplay between a more intuitive and deliberate thought process. In the last 50 years, influential fast-and-slow dual-process models that capitalize on this distinction have been used to account for numerous phenomena – from logical reasoning biases, over prosocial behavior, to moral decision making. The present paper clarifies that despite the popularity, critical assumptions are poorly conceived. My critique focuses on two interconnected foundational issues: the exclusivity and switch feature. The exclusivity feature refers to (...) the tendency to conceive intuition and deliberation as generating unique responses such that one type of response is assumed to be beyond the capability of the fast-intuitive processing mode. I review the empirical evidence in key fields and show that there is no solid ground for such exclusivity. The switch feature concerns the mechanism by which a reasoner can decide to shift between more intuitive and deliberate processing. I present an overview of leading switch accounts and show that they are conceptually problematic – precisely because they presuppose exclusivity. I build on these insights to sketch the groundwork for a more viable dual-process architecture and illustrate how it can set a new research agenda to advance the field in the coming years. (shrink)

Advocates of extended cognition argue that the boundaries of cognition span brain, body, and environment. Critics maintain that cognitive processes are confined to a boundary centered on the individual. All participants to this debate require a criterion for distinguishing what is internal to cognition from what is external. Yet none of the available proposals are completely successful. I offer a new account, the mutual manipulability account, according to which cognitive boundaries are determined by relationships of mutual manipulability between the properties (...) and activities of putative components and the overall behavior of the cognitive mechanism in which they figure. Among its main advantages, this criterion is capable of (a) distinguishing components of cognition from causal background conditions and lower-level correlates, and (b) showing how the core hypothesis of extended cognition can serve as a legitimate empirical hypothesis amenable to experimental test and confirmation. Conceiving the debate in these terms transforms the current clash over extended cognition into a substantive empirical debate resolvable on the basis of evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)

In his conceivability argument, Chalmers assumes that all properties have their causal powers contingently and causal laws are also contingent. We argue that this claim conflicts with how conceivability itself must work for the conceivability argument to be successful. If conceivability is to be an effective mechanism to determine possibility, it must work as a matter of necessity, since contingent conceivability renders conceivability fallible for an ideal reasoner and the fallible conceivability of zombies would not entail their possibility. But (...) necessary conceivability must either be governed by necessitating causal processes or by a necessitating non-causal mechanism. We argue that the latter option is untenable or mysterious; whereas, if Chalmers chooses the former and applies it only to conceivability, his solution is ad hoc, but if he accepts necessary causal powers or processes generally, the conceivability argument fails. We conclude that, as it stands, the Conceivability Argument does not establish that physicalism is false. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that successful evidence-based policy should rely on two kinds of evidence: statistical and mechanistic. The former is held to be evidence that a policy brings about the desired outcome, and the latter concerns how it does so. Although agreeing with the spirit of this proposal, we argue that the underlying conception of mechanistic evidence as evidence that is different in kind from correlational, difference-making or statistical evidence, does not correctly capture the role that information about (...) mechanisms should play in evidence-based policy. We offer an alternative account of mechanistic evidence as information concerning the causal pathway connecting the policy intervention to its outcome. Not only can this be analyzed as evidence of difference-making, it is also to be found at any level and is obtainable by a broad range of methods, both experimental and observational. Using behavioral policy as an illustration, we draw the implications of this revised understanding of mechanistic evidence for debates concerning policy extrapolation, evidence hierarchies, and evidence integration. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the nature of stem cells based on the philosophical concept of disposition. It is argued that stem cells can be conceived as dispositional objects, and adopting this attitude allows overcoming some of the controversies surrounding the nature of stemness (most notably, the state vs. entity debate) because it offers a framework that accommodates the lessons from different theories. Additionally, the account is simultaneously useful for interpreting stem cell experiments and guiding potential interventions. The account (...) shows how different levels, both molecular and emergent network-level, play the primary causal role in explaining some empirical results, and hence they suggest that the explanations can be mechanistic or topological, respectively. The realization that any of these levels may play a more prominent causal role than another allows suggesting interventions at the genetic, molecular and population levels. (shrink)

The central aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature of explanation in computational neuroscience. I argue that computational models in this domain possess explanatory force to the extent that they describe the mechanisms responsible for producing a given phenomenon—paralleling how other mechanistic models explain. Conceiving computational explanation as a species of mechanistic explanation affords an important distinction between computational models that play genuine explanatory roles and those that merely provide accurate descriptions or predictions of phenomena. It (...) also serves to clarify the pattern of model refinement and elaboration undertaken by computational neuroscientists. (shrink)

We now take for granted that despite the disproportionate contribution of females to initial growth of their progeny, there is little or no asymmetry in the contribution of males and females to the eventual character of their shared offspring. In fact, this key insight was only established towards the end of the eighteenth century by Joseph Koelreuter's pioneering plant breeding experiments. If males and females supply equal amounts of hereditary material, then the latter must double each time an embryo is (...) conceived. How then does the amount of this mysterious stuff not multiply exponentially from generation to generation? A compensatory mechanism for diluting the hereditary material must exist, one that ensures that if each parent contributes one half, each grandparent contributes a quarter, and each great grandparent merely an eighth. An important piece of the puzzle of how hereditary material is diluted at each generation has been elucidated over the past ten years. (shrink)

How does one conceive time? Measurement by means of Time Metaphors Questionnaire Attitude towards time are usually expressed by means of metaphors. This paper presents phases of construction and validation of the Time Metaphors Questionnaire. This is a method for testing conceiving of time. An exploratory factor analyses yielded seven factor scales: Friendly Time, Hostile Time, Rapid Passage of Time, Significance of the Moment, Subtle Time, Wild Time and Empty Time. Results of correlations between scales of the Time Metaphors Questionnaire (...) and with selected methods indicate, among other things, an ambivalence of psychological time and an importance of positive evaluation of current moment. (shrink)

In this chapter, I contend that conversational philosophy has benefited immensely from the particularist and universalist projects in African philosophy tradition. As a result, it has been able to overcome the lapses inherent in particularism, universalism and eclecticism/pluralism. I argue that conversational philosophy is a more robust approach than the above-mentioned approaches, which have the problems of uniqueness, aping of Western philosophy and vagueness, respectively. I claim that conversational philosophy conceives African philosophy not as a tradition peculiar to a given (...) place, nor as one that apes Western tradition, nor as an eclectic discipline enshrouded in vagueness; but as a philosophical tradition that is both selectively particular and universal in nature in which ideas are conceptualized using linguistic resources from African worldviews but with universal applicability. I conclude by demonstrating that the mechanism of conversational philosophy is one that carefully approaches discourse on African philosophy by borrowing a leaf from both the particularist vision and the universalist vision in order to establish the discipline of African philosophy as a tradition in its own right. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 25-46, January 2022. This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine (...) of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

The symposium, “How is gender relevant to comparative philosophy,” focuses on relevance of gender as an analytic and critical tool in comparative philosophical understanding and debate. Nkiru Nzegwu argues that gender as conceived by contemporary Euro-American feminism did not exist in pre-colonial Yorùbá as well as many Native American societies, and that therefore employing gender as a conceptual category in understanding the philosophies of pre-colonial Yorùbá and other non-gendered societies constitutes a profound mistake. What’s more, doing so amounts to a (...) totalizing Euro-American colonial imposition that does violence to nongendered societies that reject gender as an ontological category. Hence, gender is ill-suited as a universal comparative philosophical tool. Nzegwu’s three co-symposiasts, Mary I. Bockover, Maitrayee Chaudhuri, and María Luisa Femenías enrich and complicate this question by bringing to bear both conceptual, ethical and empirical considerations drawn from the United States, India, and Latin America respectively. (shrink)

Modeling mechanisms is central to the biological sciences – for purposes of explanation, prediction, extrapolation, and manipulation. A closer look at the philosophical literature reveals that mechanisms are predominantly modeled in a purely qualitative way. That is, mechanistic models are conceived of as representing how certain entities and activities are spatially and temporally organized so that they bring about the behavior of the mechanism in question. Although this adequately characterizes how mechanisms are represented in biology textbooks, contemporary biological research (...) practice shows the need for quantitative, probabilistic models of mechanisms, too. In this paper we argue that the formal framework of causal graph theory is well-suited to provide us with models of biological mechanisms that incorporate quantitative and probabilistic information. On the ba-sis of an example from contemporary biological practice, namely feedback regulation of fatty acid biosynthesis in Brassica napus, we show that causal graph theoretical models can account for feedback as well as for the multi-level character of mechanisms. However, we do not claim that causal graph theoretical representations of mechanisms are advantageous in all respects and should replace common qualitative models. Rather, we endorse the more balanced view that causal graph theoretical models of mechanisms are useful for some purposes, while being insufficient for others. (shrink)

Phenomenology since Husserl has always had a problematic relationship with empirical science. In its early articulations, there was Husserl's rejection of ‘the scientific attitude’, Merleau-Ponty's distancing of the scientifically-objectified self, and Heidegger's critique of modern science. These suggest an antipathy to science and to its methods of explaining the natural world. Recent developments in neuroscience have opened new opportunities for an engagement between phenomenology and cognitive science and through this, a re-thinking of science and its hidden assumptions more generally. This (...) is so partly because of the shortcomings of conventional mechanistically-conceived science in dealing with complex and dynamic phenomena such as climate change, brain plasticity, the behaviour of collectives, the dynamics of various microbiological processes, etc. But it is also due to recent phenomenological scholarship focussed on the ‘embodied’ phenomenology of Husserl's Ideen II and Merleau Ponty's later ontology of nature which have helped to extend the insights of phenomenology beyond the narrowly ‘human’ to an understanding of nature (which includes the human) more generally. Thus recontextualised, phenomenology is well placed to examine some of the assumptions that give rise to the reductionism and associated scientism which has characterised conventional science in its approach to the study of natural processes. In light of this, it might be suggested that the ‘anti-science’ of early articulations of phenomenology is more a hostility to the underlying assumptions of science as conventionally understood than to science itself e that it is scientism rather than science that is targeted. In this paper, I aim to show how a phenomenological naturalism might be seen as a necessary step towards the development of a non-reductionist and non-scientistic approach to scientific inquiry. A key to this is a reconceptualization of nature as inclusive of meanings and of mind. It is a conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, especially in his later ontology of nature, and one that is shared by American pragmatist philosopher of science, C.S. Peirce (1839e1914). For both philosophers, meaning must be understood in terms of an ontology which is relational rather than atomistic, and dynamic or processual rather than static and substance-based. For Merleau-Ponty this is an experientially-derived ontology; for Peirce it is a more conceptually-based one. In this paper, I explore this connection between these two philosophers in two stages. The first is by reference to Peirce's theory of signs or semiotics. More specifically, I look at the application of this theory to the study of biological processes as developed in Peirce-inspired biosemiotics. In the light of this, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty's account of intentional relations in nature might be articulated as semiotic relations, and can serve as a philosophical basis for a non-reductive biological science. I then turn to questions relating to the ontology of nature. I explore Merleau-Ponty's experientially-based “ontology of flesh” and Peirce's distinctive form of naturalism to show affinities at this ontological level. These affinities consist in commitments to a reality that includes possibility, meaning, temporality, and final causation e that is, an ontology which is far more inclusive than that of conventional positivistic science. Peirce's broader scientific metaphysics enables us to extend Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological naturalism beyond the biological to the physical sciences. Whilst Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature provides the experiential basis necessary for a critique of scientism, Peirce establishes the relevance of that ontology for a re-conceived empirical science. (shrink)

The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of Hume's theory of personal identity, by examining a conflict regarding the vivacity of the self in his writings about sympathy. Although the mechanism of sympathy supposes that self is the liveliest perception of thought, when we consider sympathy through the perspective of the ‘desire of company’, we find that self lacks vivacity and, without alterity, it would be in reality nothing. Our objective is to present the conflict and show that, (...) far from being a contradiction in Hume's thinking, it is consistent with how the philosopher conceives personal identity as a product of imagination, that is, a perception that, like any other, exists within the flow of perceptions. (shrink)

We propose a framework for including information‐processing bounds in rational analyses. It is an application of bounded optimality (Russell & Subramanian, 1995) to the challenges of developing theories of mechanism and behavior. The framework is based on the idea that behaviors are generated by cognitive mechanisms that are adapted to the structure of not only the environment but also the mind and brain itself. We call the framework computational rationality to emphasize the incorporation of computational mechanism into the (...) definition of rational action. Theories are specified as optimal program problems, defined by an adaptation environment, a bounded machine, and a utility function. Such theories yield different classes of explanation, depending on the extent to which they emphasize adaptation to bounds, and adaptation to some ecology that differs from the immediate local environment. We illustrate this variation with examples from three domains: visual attention in a linguistic task, manual response ordering, and reasoning. We explore the relation of this framework to existing “levels” approaches to explanation, and to other optimality‐based modeling approaches. (shrink)

Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions— focus on how governments should orient themselves toward other states in which such phenomena take place, or to the firms that are involved with such practices. But of course the question of how to regard such labour practices must also be faced by individuals, and individual consumers of the goods that are produced through these practices in particular. Consumers have become increasingly aware of their connections to complex (...) global production processes that often involve such injustice. For example, activist campaigns have exposed wrongful harm in factories producing clothes, shoes and mobile phones and farms producing coffee, tea and cocoa. These campaigns have promoted the message to ordinary people that by becoming connected to unjust labour practices through their purchasing behaviour, they acquire special additional moral responsibilities to contribute to reforming such practices, or to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing that result from them. The moral significance of the responsibilities of individual consumers has not, however, received much analytical scrutiny. Why should we believe that there are such responsibilities? And if there are such responsibilities, what are their grounds? How stringent are the responsibilities triggered by such connections? Finally, what are the implications of such responsibilities—the courses of action that they prescribe or proscribe? The activists who assert special ethical responsibilities for consumers have promoted many particular courses of action, but have seldom articulated the grounds of these responsibilities or explained why they should be taken to be stringent. And moral and political theorists have not devoted much focussed attention to this issue. For the consumer who is concerned to act in a morally permissible way, this presents a troubling practical challenge regarding the goods they may (or may not) purchase, and the moral relevance of their consumption choices more generally. While we cannot address all of these pressing questions in this chapter, we try to make some headway with them by discussing two general approaches to the question of how individuals should conceive of their responsibilities with respect to such practices, taking as our starting point the recent work of the late Iris Marion Young—the most sustained treatment of this topic by a prominent political theorist. In a series of influential articles and a posthumously published book, Young articulated an approach to conceiving of individual responsibilities to address labour injustices—the social connection model—at home and abroad. She also argued that an alternative model—the liability model—which she claimed had dominated discourse on this topic, suffered from very serious flaws. In a critical vein, we will argue that Young’s arguments against the liability model are not convincing, and that the alternative she proposes is itself vulnerable to some damaging objections. We also find, however, that the liability model would need to be extended in various ways to provide an adequate account of individual responsibility to address shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions, and we begin the task of sketching an extended framework. (shrink)

Libertarianism has, seemingly, always been in disrepute among philosophers. While throughout history philosophers have offered different reasons for their dissatisfaction with libertarianism, one worry is recurring: namely a worry about luck. To many, it seems that if our choices and actions are undetermined, then we cannot control them in a way that allows for freedom and responsibility. My fundamental aim in this paper is to place libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible libertarian theory. I begin by (...) arguing that Robert Kane's influential formulation of libertarianism actually generates an acute worry about luck, showing specifically that Kane's recipe for solving the problem of luck and his attendant conception of the location and role of indeterminism derived from it are deeply problematic. I then offer a reformulation of libertarianism ? particularly a new conception of the location and role of indeterminism ? that is capable of avoiding the problems that beset Kane's theory and that, I argue, places libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible theory. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalization is the ability to understand and foresee the behavior referring to one's own and others' mental states (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). This capacity, which is considered the most representative mechanism of social cognition, is a multifaceted set of competences liable to influence--and be influenced by--a manifold of psychosocial aspects. Studies on typical and atypical/clinical development during life showed that ToM is frequently delayed (e.g. in deafness) or impaired in many (...) clinical conditions (e.g. Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease) and, on the other hand, may not be unequivocally a positive experience. It is therefore possible to consider the existence of multiple kinds of Theory of Mind. In fact, ToM may vary along a quantitative and a qualitative continuum. As for the quantitative dimension, the continuum is constituted by the fluctuation between high and low levels of ToM ability in different clinical conditions. Along this continuum, impairment can mean "not enough" ToM (for example in Autism Spectrum Disorder) as well as "too much" ToM (for example in Schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder). The qualitative dimension--highly interrelated with the quantitative one--regards the shift between adaptive (e.g. prosocial, nice ToM) vs. unadaptive (e.g. antisocial, nasty ToM) mental states content. The issue is discussed in light of recent evidence from outstanding researchers working on typical and atypical/clinical populations along the life-span. Findings from the fields of psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience enrich the research topic argumentation"--Page 2. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Sinicized Asia, justice, conceptualized and institutionalized in its current form on a Western mold is part of a singular and ancient Confucian legal tradition.In this paper, it will be argued that Confucians initially articulated the concept of justice in relation to their own explanation of the world and their ideal, which distinguishes and rewards men’s actions according to their merits and social condition.It will be shown that Confucius’s thinking is primarily political and suggests ways of harmoniously organizing and reforming (...) society in which justice is conceived both as a principle of government, a principle of social conduct and one of the essential virtues, or a ‘moral sense’ that everyone must possess, while, in practice, Confucian justice will put forward the imperatives of retributive justice. This, despite its philosophical aversion for sanctions and for what upsets harmony. (shrink)

Using the Godel incompleteness result for leverage, Roger Penrose has argued that the mechanism for consciousness involves quantum gravitational phenomena, acting through microtubules in neurons. We show that this hypothesis is implausible. First the Godel result does not imply that human thought is in fact non-algorithmic. Second, whether or not non-algorithmic quantum gravitational phenomena actually exist, and if they did how that could conceivably implicate microtubules, and if microtubules were involved, how that could conceivably implicate consciousness, is entirely speculative. (...) Third, cytoplasmic ions such as calcium and sodium are almost certainly present in the microtubule pore, barring the quantum-mechanical effects Penrose envisages. Finally, physiological evidence indicates that consciousness does not directly depend on microtubule properties in any case, rendering doubtful any theory according to which consciousness is generated in the microtubules. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: There is an abundance of scholarship on John Dewey. Dewey's writings are vast, so scholars try to find the crux that connects their many themes into a distinctive vision for philosophy and life. Many claim that the democratic way of life is the center of Dewey's philosophical vision. Others claim that Dewey's response to Darwin was the impetus for a philosophical experimentalism that could envision a better life (...) by responding to the needs in an age of modern industry. Some claim that the crux is a dynamic and non-mechanistic naturalism that Dewey develops to critically undo the dualisms of tradition, most especially the distinction between nature and culture. There has even been an effort to interpret each of these themes within Dewey's theory about the conditions for aesthetics in life, the life of art within an experience, and an experience of life as art. Arguably, no strategy is more preferable than another because each is plausible. Each plausibly selects a crux that connects the many themes across an array of writings, since Dewey's philosophy is multimodal by design and shuns reductionism for pluralism. Even amidst plurality, through many modes of activity and existence, each of these themes and all of Dewey's writings have a concern for meaning in life and how life is a process of meaning-making. And yet, meaning, for Dewey, is irreducible to verbal or written language and is made by more than propositions, but extends beyond the divide of nature and culture to potentially encompass all of life and life's processes. This expansive conception of meaning has more in common with semiotics, especially those of Charles Sanders Peirce, than any philosophy of language. And yet almost no scholar has sought to semiotically interpret Dewey's philosophy as a whole. Perhaps, though, Dewey's multimodal and pluralistic vision for philosophy and life also has a semiotic crux that intersects with the others in ways that are fundamentally important. There are scholars who have dealt with semiotic themes or insights with implications for semiotics in Dewey's writings. None have sought to semiotically interpret Dewey's philosophy as a whole, or, as a consequence, to chronologically survey Dewey's writings to determine if there is a conceivably Deweyan approach to semiotics that might contrast with or contribute to the more dominant approaches. There is a reason scholars may not have sought a Deweyan approach to semiotics. Dewey did not have an explicit theory of semiotics. There is no attempt to devise a doctrine of signs in Dewey's writings. Never did Dewey try to classify the fundamental types of sign, analyze the relations of signification by which they differ, or methodically explain how the logic of signification works. This contrasts sharply with Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce has an explicit theory of semiotics that divides the fundamental types of sign into icons, indices, and symbols by their distinct relations of signification that are at work in the logic of inference by the categories. During his second year at Johns Hopkins, Dewey was actually Peirce's student in a class on logic. This already suggests the possibility of influence. Dewey's writings around 1883 even espouse the central thesis of Peirce's semiotics. All signs, however else their significations may differ, are triadic relations for both Peirce and Dewey. Whether and how far Peirce's logic was an influence on Dewey at Johns... (shrink)

In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that, ironically enough, this metaphysical assumption is implicitly shared by all the above mentioned alternatives to Emergentism. The current article concludes that the notion of organization by itself is not enough, and that ontological emergence can only be justified by assuming a relational ontological perspective that, in opposition both to atomism and holism, defends that the existence-conditions, the identity and the causal behavior of any emergent systemic property can only be conceived, and explained, as constructed by and through specific networks of qualitatively transformative relational processes that occur between the system’s components and between the system and its environment. Additionally, I try to explain how one can make sense of the idea that an emergent phenomenon is both dependent on, and autonomous from, its emergence base. (shrink)

A (would-be) sophisticated answer to the question of the title might be, ‘The question is senseless. We should not conceive of time at all. We should just get on with our ordinary lives, asking and answering the usual questions, such as “What Time is it?”, “How long will it take?”, and so on, which we understand perfectly well. St. Augustine understood such questions, phrased in Latin, as well as we do. He should have been content with that, instead of bothering (...) his head with the misbegotten metaphysical question, “What is time?”’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In her paper “On the Nature of Judgment”, published in 1919 in Mind, Dorothy Wrinch aimed at understanding how Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgement might be made to work. In this paper we will focus on Wrinch’s claim that on the theory it is impossible, as it should be, to judge nonsense. After having presented the prima facie objection to the theory created by nonsense and what we can take her solution to such a problem to imply, we (...) will show how Wrinch can resist the two main objections that have been moved to such a solution, whether as explicitly attributed to Wrinch or discussed without mentioning her. The conclusion will be, contrary to what one might be tempted to think, that even if there might be reasons to take the multiple relation theory as doomed, Wrinch was the first to show us that nonsense is not one of those reasons. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to investigate into the peculiarities of the reflection of sense as the main idea of modern European philosophy. This idea refers to self-consciousness, about which modern empirical philosophy speaks in the language of reflection (J. Locke), and rationalism - in the language of Cogito (R. Descartes). For Kant, Cogito is a transcendental condition for the formation of concepts, and therefore reflection should be transcendental. According to Husserl, the main task of phenomenological reflection was to (...) obtain essences of processes, to build things from the acts of Cogito. In Husserl's words, reflection "carries the world as a meaningful sense". Such a sense (smysl) becomes a problem escaping both from analysis and interpretation. Its peculiarity lies in the deontological status of sense: the phrase "a sense should be" connects the sense with a realm of duty, and duty provides a correlation between Ego and integrity of the world, language and culture. Reflection of sense (smysl) becomes the process of comprehension, the mechanism of formation of the whole set of meanings in the culture. (shrink)

The metaphysical root of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represents a departure from a pervasive philosophical assumption found originally in Plato's Meno. This departure is directly inspired by a critique of the Meno found in the works by Soren Kierkegaard written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. ;The central implication of Kierkegaard's influence for Tractatus interpretation is that thought---or thinking---referred to in the Tractatus of necessity extends beyond the limits of language. ;There are at present two competing interpretative readings of the Tractatus (...) in the literature. One reading---referred to as the "Standard" reading since it is propounded by almost all notable Wittgenstein scholars, e.g., Pears, Hacker, McGuinness, Anscombe, Rhees, Malcohn---has it that the "mystical" sections of the Tractatus must be, to some degree, taken seriously. The other reading---a "New" reading advocated most prominently by Winch, Diamond, and Conant---argues that the Standard reading is self-contradictory in that it maintains that the limits of language and those of thought are the same while it simultaneously maintains that there is a sort of Mystical residue left over even after the Tractatus has been "thrown away". The New reading sees Wittgenstein's point as being precisely that there is no such left-over residue and that we must accept this. ;Both readings are however incorrect in regard to Wittgenstein's view of limits in the Tractatus. While the New reading takes somewhat seriously the influence of Kierkegaard on the Tractatus, it asserts that a Kierkegaardian influence bolsters the New reading's view of the mystical as well as its view that language and thought share the same limits in the Tractatus. The opposite is in fact the case. Das Mystische corresponds to Kierkegaard's "absolutely unknown" that language---but not thought---runs up against as a limit. Wittgenstein himself alludes to this correspondence in conversation with members of the Vienna Circle in 1929. As such, if the influence of Kierkegaard is to be seen in its proper light, the problem is not with the Standard reading of Das Mystische, but rather with the view that the limits of thought and language in the Tractatus are the same. For Kierkegaard, unless thought extends beyond the limit of language there is no conceivable nexus for the subject or the divine. This is precisely his critique of Plato's Meno in Fragments. That this view is also the bedrock of the Tractatus' metaphysics is what the present thesis argues is the proper "Kierkegaardian reading" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (shrink)

“How is society possible?” posed by Georg Simmel has been one of the fundamental problems in sociology. Although various attempts have been made to solve it, I conceive that “society” in the problem remains to be articulated. Simmel provides us with two concepts of society—“society as interaction” and “society as unity”—to be distinguished. Some research traditions in sociology have been concerned with the former, others have dealt with the latter. On the other hand, Simmel maintains continuity between them. In this (...) sense, his concept of “society” has “ambiguous” characteristics. It seems to me that in the ambiguous style Simmel had intended to reveal the secret of “society,” but in the end could not have got to it. In my opinion, in order to unveil the secret, it is required that, drawing on Schutzian phenomenologically oriented sociology, sociologists or social scientists make a differentiation between the society which is realized or brought about by partners with no need of an observer, “the social,” and the society which an observer recognizes by use of the concept. In this article, from a Schutzian point of view, I wish to articulate “society” and to indicate four phases of “society.” These investigations lead to a reformulation of the problem of “how is society possible?” and sociology (or the social sciences) which makes possible the deeper understanding of society. (shrink)

N‐type inactivation of potassium channels is controlled by cytosolic loops that are intrinsically disordered. Recent experiments have shown that the mechanism of N‐type inactivation through disordered regions can be stereospecific and vary depending on the channel type. Variations in mechanism occur despite shared coarse grain features such as the length and amino acid compositions of the cytosolic disordered regions. We have adapted a phenomenological model designed to explain how specificity in molecular recognition is achieved through disordered regions. We (...) propose that the channel‐specific observations for N‐type inactivation represent distinct mechanistic choices for achieving function through conformational selection versus induced fit. It follows that the dominant mechanism for binding and specificity can be modulated through subtle changes in the amino acid sequences of disordered regions, which is interesting given that specificity in function is realized in the absence of autonomous folding. (shrink)

How can thought experiments lead to new empirical knowledge if they do not make use of empirical information? This puzzle has been widely discussed in the philosophy of science. It arises in conceptual metaphor research as well and is especially important for the clarification of its empirical foundations. The aim of the paper is to suggest a possible solution to the puzzle of thought experiments in conceptual metaphor research. The solution rests on the application of a novel metatheoretical framework that (...) conceives of linguistic theorizing as a process of plausible argumentation. The central idea of the solution is that through the dynamic feedback mechanism of the cyclic, prismatic and retrospective re-evaluation of information, thought experiments in conceptual metaphor research may indirectly supply the process of plausible argumentation with empirical knowledge. (shrink)

Opponents of the new mechanistic account of scientific explanation argue that the new mechanists are committed to a ‘More Details Are Better’ claim: adding details about the mechanism always improves an explanation. Due to this commitment, the mechanistic account cannot be descriptively adequate as actual scientific explanations usually leave out details about the mechanism. In reply to this objection, defenders of the new mechanistic account have highlighted that only adding relevant mechanistic details improves an explanation and that relevance (...) is to be determined relative to the phenomenon-to-be-explained. Craver and Kaplan (B J Philos Sci 71:287–319, 2020) provide a thorough reply along these lines specifying that the phenomena at issue are contrasts. In this paper, we will discuss Craver and Kaplan’s reply. We will argue that it needs to be modified in order to avoid three problems, i.e., what we will call the Odd Ontology Problem, the Multiplication of Mechanisms Problem, and the Ontic Completeness Problem. However, even this modification is confronted with two challenges: First, it remains unclear how explanatory relevance is to be determined for contrastive explananda within the mechanistic framework. Second, it remains to be shown as to how the new mechanistic account can avoid what we will call the ‘Vertical More Details are Better’ objection. We will provide answers to both challenges. (shrink)

Opponents of the new mechanistic account of scientific explanation argue that the new mechanists are committed to a ‘More Details Are Better’ claim: adding details about the mechanism always improves an explanation. Due to this commitment, the mechanistic account cannot be descriptively adequate as actual scientific explanations usually leave out details about the mechanism. In reply to this objection, defenders of the new mechanistic account have highlighted that only adding relevant mechanistic details improves an explanation and that relevance (...) is to be determined relative to the phenomenon-to-be-explained. Craver and Kaplan (B J Philos Sci 71:287–319, 2020) provide a thorough reply along these lines specifying that the phenomena at issue are contrasts. In this paper, we will discuss Craver and Kaplan’s reply. We will argue that it needs to be modified in order to avoid three problems, i.e., what we will call the Odd Ontology Problem, the Multiplication of Mechanisms Problem, and the Ontic Completeness Problem. However, even this modification is confronted with two challenges: First, it remains unclear how explanatory relevance is to be determined for contrastive explananda within the mechanistic framework. Second, it remains to be shown as to how the new mechanistic account can avoid what we will call the ‘Vertical More Details are Better’ objection. We will provide answers to both challenges. (shrink)

A new theory of the mind, the predictive processing model, is ascendant in recent work in cognitive science. According to this theory, all the mind ever fundamentally does is make hypotheses about the environment, generate prediction-errors by comparing its predictions with its sensory data, and use these prediction-errors to update its representation of the world. The theory of motivation and action to which the predictive processing model is committed has been the subject of lively debate in the literature. However, the (...) upshots of the predictive processing model for the theory of practical reason have received relatively scant attention. Here I investigate how proponents of predictive processing should conceive of practical reason. The predictive processing model has it that the practical attitudes – desires and intentions etc. – reduce to certain theoretical attitudes – in particular, to beliefs and predictions. I argue that this psychological reduction precipitates a broader normative reduction, in which practical reasoning reduces to a kind of theoretical reasoning about what you will do, and in which practical normativity turns out to really be a species of epistemic normativity. In other words, that practical reason reduces to theoretical reason. If I am correct, the predictive processing model of the mind is committed to – what I am dubbing – a ‘radical cognitivism about practical reason’. (shrink)

Anonymous gamete donation continues to be practised in most jurisdictions around the world, but this practice has come under increased scrutiny. Thus, several countries now mandate that donors be identifiable to their genetic offspring. Critics contend that anonymous gamete donation harms the interests of donor-conceived individuals and that protection of these interests calls for legal prohibition of anonymous donations. Among the vital interests that critics claim are thwarted by anonymous donation are an interest in having a strong family relationship, health (...) interests, and an interest in forming a healthy identity. This article discusses each of these interests and examines what they could involve. The legislation in two countries is considered: Spain, which mandates anonymous gamete donation, and the UK, which prohibits such practice, to assess how these different legislations might or might not protect these vital interests. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not committed to determinism; there were some physicists who argued for fundamental indeterminism, but most were committed to determinism in some sense. However, for them, determinism was often not (...) a provable feature of physical theory, but rather an a priori principle or a methodological presupposition. Determinism was strongly connected with principles of causality and continuity and the principle of sufficient reason; this thesis examines the relevance of these principles in the history of physics. Moreover, the history of determinism in this period shows that there were essential changes in the relation between mathematics and physics: whereas in the eighteenth century, there were metaphysical arguments which lent support to differential calculus, by the early twentieth century the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus led to concerns about its applicability in physics. The thesis consists of six papers. In the first paper, "On the origins and foundations of Laplacian determinism", I argue that Laplace, who is usually pointed out as the first major proponent of scientific determinism, did not derive his statement of determinism directly from the laws of mechanics; rather, his determinism has a background in eighteenth century Leibnizian metaphysics, and is ultimately based on the law of continuity and the principle of sufficient reason. These principles also provided a basis for the idea that one can find laws of nature in the form of differential equations which uniquely determine natural processes. In "The Norton dome and the nineteenth century foundations of determinism", I argue that an example of indeterminism in classical physics which has attracted attention in philosophy of physics in recent years, namely the Norton come, was already discussed during the nineteenth century. However, the significance which this type of indeterminism had back then is very different from the significance which the Norton dome currently has in philosophy of physics. This is explained by the fact that determinism was conceived of in an essentially different way: in particular, the nineteenth century authors who wrote about this type of indeterminism regarded determinism as an a priori principle rather than as a property of the equations of physics. In "Vital instability: life and free will in physics and physiology, 1860-1880", I show how Maxwell, Cournot, Stewart and Boussinesq used the possibility of unstable or indeterministic mechanical systems to argue that the will or a vital principle can intervene in organic processes without violating the laws of physics, so that a strictly dualist account of life and the mind is possible. Moreover, I show that their ideas can be understood as a reaction to the law of conservation of energy and to the way it was used in physiology to exclude vital and mental causes. In "The nineteenth century conflict between mechanism and irreversibility", I show that in the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread conflict between the aim of reducing physical processes to mechanics and the recognition that certain processes are irreversible. Whereas the so-called reversibility objection is known as an objection that was made to the kinetic theory of gases, it in fact appeared in a wide range of arguments, and was susceptible to very different interpretations. It was only when the project of reducing all of physics to mechanics lost favor, in the late nineteenth century, that the reversibility objection came to be used as an argument against mechanism and against the kinetic theory of gases. In "Continuity in nature and in mathematics: Boltzmann and Poincaré", I show that the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the nineteenth century led to concerns about its applicability in physics: through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity and was instead based on mathematical continuity conditions, and for Boltzmann and Poincaré, the applicability of differential calculus in physics depended on whether these continuity conditions could be given a foundation in intuition or experience. In the final paper, "Determinism around 1900", I briefly discuss the implications of the developments described in the previous two papers for the history of determinism in physics, through a discussion of determinism in Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann. I show that neither of them regards determinism as a property of the laws of mechanics; rather, for them, determinism is a precondition for science, which can be verified to the extent that science is successful. (shrink)

The paper addresses an exegetical puzzle that is raised by Kant's distinction between opining (Meinen), believing (Glauben), and knowing (Wissen). In presenting his moral arguments, Kant often points out that belief, as he conceives of it, has a unique feature: it requires non-epistemic justification. Yet Kant's official formulation of the tripartite distinction runs counter to this claim. It describes Belief in terms of a set of two features, each of which also pertains to either opinion or knowledge. My aim in (...) this paper is to propose a novel interpretation of Kant’s distinction which dissolves this exegetical puzzle. (shrink)

Rumination is a process of uncontrolled, narrowly focused negative thinking that is often self-referential, and that is a hallmark of depression. Despite its importance, little is known about its cognitive mechanisms. Rumination can be thought of as a specific, constrained form of mind-wandering. Here, we introduce a cognitive model of rumination that we developed on the basis of our existing model of mind-wandering. The rumination model implements the hypothesis that rumination is caused by maladaptive habits of thought. These habits of (...) thought are modeled by adjusting the number of memory chunks and their associative structure, which changes the sequence of memories that are retrieved during mind-wandering, such that during rumination the same set of negative memories is retrieved repeatedly. The implementation of habits of thought was guided by empirical data from an experience sampling study in healthy and depressed participants. On the basis of this empirically derived memory structure, our model naturally predicts the declines in cognitive task performance that are typically observed in depressed patients. This study demonstrates how we can use cognitive models to better understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying rumination and depression. (shrink)

In his recent article, “Everything is Conceivable: A Note on an Unused Axiom in Spinoza's Ethics”, Justin Vlasits carefully analyzes parallels between the first four propositions of the Ethics and Spinoza’s correspondence with Henry Oldenburg to argue that Spinoza intended to appeal to E1A2 in E1P4dem of the Ethics. In this short response, I identify a problem with Vlasits’ analysis. Vlasits insists that the scope of E1A2 is not determined by what is conceivable, and I show that this (...) creates a logical lacuna within his reconstructions of Spinoza’s arguments for the claim that “outside the intellect there is nothing except substances and their affections”. However, I show that on the conceivables interpretation of E1A2 that Vlasits' rejects, Spinoza’s argument for this claim goes through. While my analysis undermines Vlasits' attempt to identify the role of E1A2 in the Ethics, it sheds substantial light on this axiom, and shows how conceivability and being are intertwined in Spinoza’s thought. (shrink)

Berkeley’s capacity to conceive of mind-independent bodies was corrupted by his theory of representation. He thought that representation of things outside the mind depended on resemblance. Since ideas can resemble nothing than ideas, and all ideas are mind dependent, he concluded that we couldn’t form ideas of mind-independent bodies. More generally, he thought that we had no inner resembling proxies for mind-independent bodies, and so we couldn’t even form a notion of such things. Because conception is a suggestible faculty, Berkeley’s (...) arguments actually made it the case that he himself couldn’t conceive of mind-independent bodies. (shrink)

This paper investigates how Merleau-Ponty and Simondon conceived the theory of information and, in particular, assessed its validity as an instrument of analysis in multiple fields of knowledge. Specifically, the comparison will analyze the relationship between organism and environment, which is central both to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For both authors, the analysis of processes of interaction between organism and environment is characterized by the search for a type of causality that distinguishes itself from (...) mechanism, which reduces these interactions to a sum of independent parts occasionally tied by a causally determined relation. However, while Merleau-Ponty views the categories introduced by the theory of information as a mere reconstruction of the mechanistic perspective, Simondon revises these categories to overcome mechanism and move towards the construction of a model of experience based on relation. (shrink)

The evidence for a positive, direct link between the representation of women on boards of directors and financial performance is tenuous. Given the importance of the gender diversity–financial performance debate, researchers are left to examine how, if at all, the two are linked. The present study takes the position that the link is indirect. Specifically, following stakeholder theory, an argument is made that women on boards’ attunement to stakeholder interests leads them to influence firms’ prosocial actions, which results in higher (...) levels of corporate social responsibility. In turn, following the extant literature, CSR is expected to be positively linked to financial performance. Relying on a sample of Australia’s largest publicly traded firms, the results demonstrate that women on boards are linked to CSR and that CSR is linked to financial performance. However, in the mediation test, CSR appears to fully mediate the link between women on boards and financial performance. The results are discussed along with limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. First paragraph: Ernst von Glasersfeld sets out to explain how familiar patterns arise in private experience – and how they are extracted or “recognized” as such. These patterns are recursive, which imposes significance on them, and are, in the course of time, collected into a “bulk of experience.” I think a convinced constructivist can – if hesitantly – accept his rendering, even though it is one (...) that lacks the stringency one expects from a supposedly natural scientist . However, the crucial point is that this paper does not address the convinced constructivist but rather the opposite camps, and I doubt he succeeds in convincing them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Proponents of mechanistic explanation have recently suggested that all explanation in the cognitive sciences is mechanistic, even functional explanation. This last claim is surprising, for functional explanation has traditionally been conceived as autonomous from the structural details that mechanistic explanations emphasize. I argue that functional explanation remains autonomous from mechanistic explanation, but not for reasons commonly associated with the phenomenon of multiple realizability. 1Introduction 2Mechanistic Explanation: A Quick Primer 3Functional Explanation: An Example 4Autonomy as Lack of Constraint 5The Price (...) of Autonomy 6Another Argument against Autonomy 7Conclusion: Autonomy and Multiple Realization. (shrink)

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the law functions as society’s immune system by regulating conflicts that threaten the certainty of expectation structures. In this article, we argue that law itself has become a target of new social immune mechanisms. Since the 1980s, welfare states have increasingly seen their own structures as a threat. Today, the ideal is a public sector consisting of organizations that constantly emerge anew by selecting the structures that fit each specific moment, case, and citizen. To protect (...) public sector organizations against their own structures, ‘potentialization’ now functions as a social autoimmune mechanism by initiating a constant search for new openings and possibilities. This critique of structures includes a critique of legal structures like rights. Looking at the Danish law of early retirement as our empirical case, this paper analyzes, how the tension between law and ‘potentialization’ is built into the law itself. While the law gives citizens certain rights to early retirement, it simultaneously ‘protects’ against the same rights by potentializing citizens. ‘Potentialization’ here functions as a mechanism that protects the operations of a system against its legal structures. It functions by ‘un-relating’ those operations from the structures. This means that when citizens claim their right to pensions, the social workers can reject them on the grounds of a right to a future that is not foreclosed and ‘parked’ on a pension. The paper’s contribution is to show how potentialization works by dissolving even fundamental legal expectations. This profoundly transforms the relationship between the citizen and the public sector. (shrink)

I will argue that mechanism is not sufficient to capture representation, thus cognition. More generally, mechanism is not sufficient to capture normativity of any sort. I will also outline a model of emergent normativity, representational normativity in particular, and show how it transcends these limitations of mechanism. To begin, I will address some illustrative attempts to model representation within mechanistically naturalistic frameworks, first rather generally, and then in the cases of the models of Fodor and Millikan.