The basing relation is a relation that obtains between a belief and the evidence or reason for which it is held. It is a highly controversial question in epistemology how such a relation should be characterized. Almost all epistemologists believe that causation must play a role in articulating the notion of the basing relation. The causal account however faces the serious problem of the deviant causal chains. In this paper, I will be particularly looking at the philosophers’ appeal to the (...) notion of disposition as a way of excluding deviant chains. Having argued against such accounts, it will be suggested that, since the obtaining of the basing relation is what distinguishes propositional from doxastic justification, we may have a better grasp of this notion if we could clearly see how those two species of justification are related to one another. Drawing on earlier work, a dispositional account of propositional and doxastic justification is subsequently defended. It will be argued that such a view has the resources to resolve the problem of causal deviance, thus, providing an acceptable account of the notion of the basing relation. (shrink)

According to the thesis of epistemic conservatism it would be unreasonable to change one's beliefs in the absence of any good reasons. Although it is claimed that epistemic conservatism has informed and resolved a number of positions and problems in epistemology, it is difficult to identify a single representative view of the thesis. This has resulted in advancing a series of disparate and largely unconnected arguments to establish conservatism. In this paper, I begin by casting doubt on the claim of (...) widespread and genuine applications of the conservative policy. I then distinguish between three main varieties of epistemic conservatism, namely, differential, perseverance and generation conservatism Having evaluated various arguments that have been offered or may be considered on behalf of the conservative thesis, I close by concluding that those versions of the thesis that survive critical scrutiny fail to live up to the aspirations of the thesis as a substantive canon of rationality, that to the extent that principles of conservatism are epistemically promising, they are not plausible. While to the extent that they are plausible, they are not of much epistemic interest. (shrink)

This book sheds new light on the history of the philosophically crucial notion of intentionality, which accounts for one of the most distinctive aspects of our mental life: the fact that our thoughts are about objects. Intentionality is often described as a certain kind of relation. Focusing on Franz Brentano, who introduced the notion into contemporary philosophy, and on the Aristotelian tradition, which was Brentano’s main source of inspiration, the book reveals a rich history of debate on precisely the relational (...) nature of intentionality. It shows that Brentano and the Aristotelian authors from which he drew not only addressed the question whether intentionality is a relation, but also devoted extensive discussions to what kind of relation it is, if any. The book aims to show that Brentano distinguishes the intentional relation from two other relations with which it might be confused, namely, causality and reference, which also hold between thoughts and their objects. Intentionality accounts for the aboutness of a thought; causality, by contrast, explains how the thought is generated, and reference, understood as a sort of similarity, occurs when the object towards which the thought is directed exists. Brentano claims to find some anticipation of his views in Aristotle. This book argues that, whether or not Brentano’s interpretation of Aristotle is correct, his claim is true of the Aristotelian tradition as a whole, since followers of Aristotle more or less explicitly made some or all of Brentano’s distinctions. This is demonstrated through examination of some major figures of the Aristotelian tradition (broadly understood), including Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Neoplatonic commentators, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Francisco Suárez. This book combines a longue durée approach – focusing on the long-term evolution of philosophical concepts rather than restricting itself to a specific author or period – with systematic analysis in the history of philosophy. By studying Brentano and the Aristotelian authors with theoretical sensitivity, it also aims to contribute to our understanding of intentionality and cognate features of the mind. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

This article explores the effects of our technological way of war, for the first time driving toward total combatant immunity, on the psyche of combatants and the ethos of a warrior. It is a plea for the preservation of a warrior spirit, or at least a warrior class, that views war in a philosophical and personal manner. The article posits that without a sense of the tragic, without a personal test of will and skill often at great individual risk, we (...) can find no real meaning in war. It argues that the warrior dimension of immunity in warfare has somehow altered our experience of war, yet the effects of this ‘virtual war’ are still ambiguous – we do not yet know whether executing warfare through long-distance video desensitizes the ‘remote warrior’ or enhances his/her experience of killing. We do not yet know how combatants ‘commuting’ to war from home and being transported 7000 miles into battle through this ‘miracle’ of technology will handle the consequences of what the nation is asking them to do. We kn.. (shrink)

This paper will present an analysis of the relational aspect of Brentano’s last theory of intentionality. My main thesis is that Brentano, at the end of his life, considered relations (relatives) without existent terms to be genuine relations (relatives). Thus, intentionality is a non-reducible real relation (the thinking subject is a non-reducible real relative) regardless of whether or not the object exists. I will use unpublished texts from the Brentanian Nachlass to support my argument.

This book explores the concept of epistemic justification and our understanding of the problem of skepticism. Providing critical examination of key responses to the skeptical challenge, Hamid Vahid presents a theory which is shown to work alongside the internalism/externalism issue and the thesis of semantic externalism, with a deontological conception of justification at its core.

Beliefs can be evaluated from a number of perspectives. Epistemic evaluation involves epistemic standards and appropriate epistemic goals. On a truthconducive account of epistemic justification, a justified belief is one that serves the goal of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Beliefs are also prompted by nonepistemic reasons. This raises the question of whether, say, the pragmatic benefits of a belief are able to rationalize it. In this paper, after criticizing certain responses to this question, I shall argue that, as far (...) as beliefs are concerned, justification has an essentially epistemic character. This conclusion is then qualified by considering the conditions under which pragmatic consequences of a belief can be epistemically relevant. (shrink)

In their paper titled “Gender and philosophical intuition,” Buckwalter and Stich argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men's intuitions, so the authors claim, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument goes, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the (...) paper is to appear in the second edition of Experimental Philosophy edited by Knobe and Nichols , which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter and Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using several different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures.. (shrink)

Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we (...) observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex , and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex . The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain. (shrink)

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a critical role in the green economy due to their significant environmental footprint. Because more than 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religion, most SME top-executives are likely to identify with a religion that would influence their decision-making. Despite these recent advances, prior studies have focused on SMEs’ external drivers and did not consider the role of internal drivers, such as the characteristics of SMEs’ top-executives, in influencing green marketing strategy. We aim (...) to address this gap by focusing on religious identification as a key driver of green marketing by SMEs. Specifically, we examine the effects of top-executives’ religious identification on strategic green marketing orientation (SGMO), and how such effects are moderated by political ideology. Using respondents comprised of CEO and/or owner-managers of SMEs in the US, the results show empirical evidence supporting the importance of religious identification in influencing green marketing decisions. Moreover, we found that the effects of religious identification on SGMO are more pronounced among top-executives with Conservative ideology. (shrink)

In recent years a new discussion on the nature of philosophical expertise has emerged: whether philosophers possess a special kind of expertise, what such expertise would entail, how to measure it, and related concerns. The aim of the present article is to clarify certain related points across these debates in the hope of paving a clearer path forward, by addressing the following. (1) The expertise defense, which seems central to many discussions on methodology and expertise, has been misconstrued at times. (...) (2) Questions of expertise and methodology could be separated more clearly. (3) The study of expertise may be important in its own right; however, there may be good reasons to give priority to methodological concerns. (4) Finally, when viewed in light of methodological concerns, a new project emerges when engaging with recent contributions to the expertise debate. The present article attempts a brief outline of this project. (shrink)

Carl Stumpf, in his Spinozastudien, presents the Aristotelico-Scholastic thesis of the “parallelism” between mental acts and contents, i.e., the thesis that “the essential differences and divisions of the acts run in parallel to those of the contents, since they are determined in their specificity by the latter.” In his paper, Stumpf also distinguishes between passive and active accounts of intellection in the history of philosophy. Now, Stumpf, in his own theory of intentionality, has rather an active account of intellection: he (...) holds that the contents of abstract presentations and judgments are “products” of these acts. Stumpf does not explicitly give a historical precedent for his position. In this note, I would like to discuss Stumpf’s historical narrative concerning the active accounts of intellection, as well as to complete this narrative with information about some prior philosophical positions resembling Stumpf’s own views on psychic products. (shrink)

On some versions of evidentialism, only evidential reasons can be normatively relevant to belief. An opposed philosophical view denies this. Unfortunately, the debate between these contrasting views quickly ends in a stalemate because while evidentialists typically point to the difficulty of believing for practical reasons, pragmatists respond by citing cases where people seem to hold beliefs in the absence of evidence. Recently, however, some pragmatists have adopted a new strategy that seeks to combine the evidentialist insight that only evidence can (...) cause belief with the pragmatist claim that practical considerations can be motivating reasons for belief. By assimilating the pragmatist cases that are said to implement the new strategy to those involving deviant causal chains, this paper will argue that the strategy is undermined by the problem of the basing relation. Finally, a positive account of the epistemic significance of practical considerations will be suggested that stops short of seeing them as reasons for belief. (shrink)

Belief is generally thought to be the primary cognitive state representing the world as being a certain way, regulating our behavior and guiding us around the world. It is thus regarded as being constitutively linked with the truth of its content. This feature of belief has been famously captured in the thesis that believing is a purposive state aiming at truth. It has however proved to be notoriously difficult to explain what the thesis really involves. In this paper, I begin (...) by critically examining a number of recent attempts to unpack the metaphor. I shall then proceed to highlight an error that seems to cripple most of these attempts. This involves the confusion between, what I call, doxastic and epistemic goals. Finally, having offered my own positive account of the aim-of-belief thesis, I shall underline its deflationary nature by distinguishing between aiming at truth and hitting that target (truth). I end by comparing the account with certain prominent inflationary theories of the nature of belief. (shrink)

This paper analyses the ontological status of the ‘intellected thing’ (res intellecta) in Hervaeus Natalis. For Hervaeus an intellected thing is not a thing in the outer world, but something radically different, namely an internal, mind-dependent entity, something having a peculiar mode of being, ‘esse obiective’. While Hervaeus often says that the act of intellection is directed upon real things, this does not mean that the act is directed upon things existing actually outside the mind. Hervaeus argues that the act (...) of intellection is directed upon things existing ‘aptitudinally’ outside the mind, not actually outside the mind. A thing existing aptitudinally outside the mind is a mind-dependent entity, something having esse obiective. In order to establish this point, I will explain how the property ‘being intellected’ (esse intellectum) should be interpreted in Hervaeus’ philosophy. This property is a peculiar type of relation, namely a relation of reason that gives a peculiar ontological status to its bearer. To neglect the distinction between actually outside and aptitudinally outside could falsely lead one to ascribe to Hervaeus a theory of intellection where the mental act is directed upon mind-independent entities. (shrink)

This paper examines the account of ordinary language semantics developed by Franz Brentano and his pupil Anton Marty. Long before the interest in ordinary language in the analytic tradition, Brentanian philosophers were exploring our everyday use of words, as opposed to the scientific use of language. Brentano and Marty were especially interested in the semantics of (common) names in ordinary language. They claimed that these names are vague, and that this is due to the structure of the concepts that constitute (...) their meaning: concepts expressed by such names are themselves vague, based on typicality, and have more or less similar items within their extension. After presenting the views of Brentano and Marty, this paper compares them to later accounts of meaning and concepts, notably Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances and the prototype theory of concepts, and emphasizes the originality of the Brentanian position. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wolff’s rejection of Leibnizian monads is rooted in a disagreement concerning the general notion of substance. Briefly, whereas Leibniz defines substance in terms of activity, Wolff retains a broadly scholastic and Cartesian conception of substance as that which per se subsists and sustains accidents. One consequence of this difference is that it leads Wolff to interpret Leibniz’s concept of a constantly striving force as denoting a feature of substance separate from its static powers, and not as (...) their replacement. For Wolff, powers are essential possibilities of acting in subjects suited for independent existence. Force is a further ingredient that provides a reason for the contingent operation of powers. Unlike Leibniz, Wolff conceives force narrowly as a principle of actuality, which he calls the “nature” of substance, as distinct from its principle of possibility, or essence. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall examine William Alston's influential view that the cognitive element in religious faith should be identified with ‘acceptance’ rather than ‘belief’. Although I am sympathetic to Alston's reluctance to regard belief as essential to faith, I shall argue that one can redescribe the cases that Alston invokes in support of his claim in terms of the standard notion of degrees‐of‐belief without loss. It will be further argued that, given Alston's constraints, his notion of acceptance, if not (...) identical to belief, is at least a species of belief. (shrink)

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...) which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception. (shrink)

Developmental processes in complex animals are directed by a hardwired genomic regulatory code, the ultimate function of which is to set up a progression of transcriptional regulatory states in space and time. The code specifies the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that underlie all major developmental events. Models of GRNs are required for analysis, for experimental manipulation and, most fundamentally, for comprehension of how GRNs work. To model GRNs requires knowledge of both their overall structure, which depends upon linkage amongst regulatory (...) genes, and the modular building blocks of which GRNs are heirarchically constructed. The building blocks consist of basic transcriptional control processes executed by one or a few functionally linked genes. We show how the functions of several such building blocks can be considered in mathematical terms, and discuss resolution of GRNs by both “top down” and “bottom up” approaches. BioEssays 24:1118–1129, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

An important question in epistemology concerns how the two species of justification, propositional and doxastic justification, are related to one another. According to the received view, basing one’s belief p on the grounds that provide propositional justification to believe p is sufficient for the belief to be doxastically justified. In a recent paper, however, John Turri has suggested that we should reverse the direction of explanation. In this paper, I propose to see the debate in a new light by suggesting (...) that the best way to understand the relationship between these species of justification is by viewing propositional justification as an dispositional property that a subject can have with doxastic justification as its manifestation. I show how the debate in metaphysics over the question of how disposition statements should be analyzed runs parallel to the epistemological debate, and bring some of the results in the dispositions debate to bear on the epistemological question. I end by offering some tentative remarks regarding the order of priority of these two species of justification. (shrink)

This article argues that Clauberg defends the theory of concurrentism concerning the relationship between divine and secondary causality. It does so by examining Clauberg's theory of corporeal causation in light of his doctrines of cause in general and of corporeal substance. Clauberg's work represents one of the first attempts to reconcile Cartesian physics with the traditional doctrine in theology, according to which both God and created substances are true and immediate causes of all natural effects, in opposition to the occasionalist (...) trend which would soon develop in the Cartesian school as well as to the conservationist alternative of Durand de Saint-Pourçain. -/- Cet article soutient que Clauberg défend la théorie du concurrentisme sur la relation entre la causalité divine et la causalité seconde. Il le fait en examinant la théorie de la causalité corporelle de Clauberg à la lumière de ses doctrines de la cause en général et de la substance corporelle. L'œuvre de Clauberg représente l’une des premières tentatives de réconcilier la physique cartésienne avec la doctrine théologique traditionelle, selon laquelle Dieu et les substances créées sont des causes vrais et immédiates de tout effet naturel, en opposition au courant occasionnaliste qui se développera bientôt dans l'école cartésienne ainsi qu'à l'alternative conservationniste de Durand de Saint-Pourçain. (shrink)

Anton Marty (Schwyz, 1847–Prague, 1914) contributed significantly to some of the central themes of Austrian philosophy. This collection contributes to assessing the specificity of his theses in relation with other Austrian philosophers. Although strongly inspired by his master, Franz Brentano, Marty developed his own theory of intentionality, understood as a sui generis relation of similarity. Moreover, he established a comprehensive philosophy of language, or "semasiology", based on descriptive psychology, and in which the utterer’s meaning plays a central role, anticipating Grice’s (...) pragmatic semantics. The present volume, including sixteen articles by scholars in the field of the history of Austrian philosophy and in contemporary philosophy, aims at exposing some of Marty’s most important contributions in philosophy of mind and language, but also in other fields of research such as ontology and metaphysics. As archive material, the volume contains the edition of a correspondence between Marty and Hans Cornelius on similarity. This book will interest scholars in the fields of the history of philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, historians of phenomenology, and, more broadly, contemporary theoretical philosophers. (shrink)

Any theory of epistemic justification must address the question of what its aim is and why we value it. The almost general consensus among epistemologists is that there is an intimate link between justification and truth. However, the standard formu- lation of this connection (as the truth-directed goal of maximizing true belief and minimizing false belief) has been increasingly challenged in recent times on the ground that it leaves no room for justified false beliefs and unjustified true beliefs. In this (...) paper, I shall argue for a diachronic version of the truth-directed goal in the face of the objections raised against it. To provide further support for this conclusion, I criticize Foley’s synchronic account of the truth-directed goal by showing how it is undermined by certain consequences of his egocentric theory of epistemic rationality. (shrink)

On linguistic studies of Malay language; collection of articles.

Global changes in capital, power, technology and the media have caused massive shifts in how we define home and community, leaving redrawn territories and globalized contexts. This interdisciplinary study of the media brings together essays by accomplished critics to discuss the way film, television, music, and computer and electronic media are shaping identities and cultures in an increasingly globalized world. Ranging from intensely personal to highly theoretical, the contributors explore our complex negotiation of "home" and homeland" in a postmodern world. (...) Contributors: Homi Bhabha, Thomas Elsaesser, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Teshome H. Gabriel, George Lipsitz, Margaret Morse, David Morley, John Peters, Patricia Seed, Ella Shohat, and Vivian Sobchack. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the proximities between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Starting with some remarks on Husserl’s theory of the Lebenswelt and the echoes it finds among analytic philosophers partisans of the common sense, the paper focuses on some specific constituents of the Lebenswelt, namely «secondary qualities». More precisely, the paper points out the parallels between the theories of secondary qualities of Husserl and of P. F. Strawson, a major defender of the common sense. Both (...) Strawson and Husserl attribute an «objectivity», in the sense of «intersubjectivity», to secondary qualities. Besides, both these authors consider that the perception of primary qualities requires the perception of secondary qualities. This leads Strawson and Husserl to ask to what extent physics itself may epistemologically depend on the perception of secondary qualities. (shrink)

Despite the increasing sophistication of the arguments used by the proponents of the internalist and externalist accounts of justification, the dispute shows no sign of abating. This paper aims at providing an explanation for the current stalemate by showing how the controversy relates to an older debate between the idealists and realists. The two disputes, it will be argued, are fuelled by the same concerns and motivations to an extent that the internalism/externalism controversy may be regarded as the epistemization of (...) the latter debate. The question is no longer whether to be is to be perceived , but whether to be a justifying ground is to be perceived . After noting how different strengths of idealism find their analogue in internalism, I shall further reinforce the claims just made by showing how the problems usually associated with the opposite sides of idealism/realism dispute find an echo in the internalism/externalism controversy. (shrink)

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that the (...) dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the question of the nature of the epistemic liaison between experience and belief. The problem, often known as the problem of nondoxastic justification, is to see how a causal transition between experience and belief could assume a normative dimension, that is, how perceptual experience serves to justify beliefs about the world. Currently a number of theories have been proposed to resolve this problem. The article considers a particular solution offered by Tyler Burge which, among other (...) things, introduces a new type of positive epistemic status or warrant, namely, entitlement. It contends that Burge's notion of entitlement cannot be of any help in resolving the problem of nondoxastic justification. Burge's account is compared and contrasted with other, similar, approaches to the problem of nondoxastic justification. (shrink)

It is widely believed that what distinguishes between a justifiable and a justified belief is the obtaining of an epistemic relation, the basing relation, whose nature and character has long been a controversial issue in epistemology. There are currently two major approaches to the problem of the basing relation, namely, the causal and doxastic theories. In this paper, after a brief survey of the field, I examine Alston's recent account of the basing relation, as input to psychologically realized functions, arguing (...) that his way of identifying the functions in question presupposes what it seeks to establish as it merely replaces one kind of indeterminacy with another . To avoid this problem, I suggest a version of Alston's account within a broadly Davidsonian framework. (shrink)

Truth and the aim of belief -- Belief, interpretation, and Moore's paradox -- Belief, sensitivity, and safety -- Basic beliefs and the problem of non-doxastic justification -- Experience as reason for beliefs -- The problem of the basing relation -- Basic beliefs, easy knowledge, and the problem of warrant transfer -- Belief, justification, and fallibility -- Knowledge of our beliefs and privileged access.