A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia (...) is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment. (shrink)

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional (...) consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

-/- Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves (...) as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such. -/- A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves. (shrink)

The literature has shown that different types of moral dilemmas elicit discrepant decision patterns. The present research investigated the role of uncertainty in contributing to these decision patterns. Two studies were conducted to examine participants' choices in commonly used dilemmas. Study 1 showed that participants’ perceived outcome probabilities were significantly associated with their moral choices, and that these associations were independent from the dilemma type. Study 2 revealed that participants had significantly less preference for killing the individual when the outcome (...) probabilities were stated using the modal verb ‘will’ than when they were stated using the numerical phrasing of ‘100%’. Our findings illustrate a discord between experimenter and participant in the interpretation of task instructions. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in communication studies and in healthcare writ large, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on discussion concerning disability in those fields.] Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. (...) Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end. (shrink)

It has become customary to locate the origins of modern measurement theory in the works of Helmholtz and Hölder. If by ‘modern measurement theory’ is meant the representational theory, then this may not be an accurate assessment. Both Helmholtz and Hölder present theories of measurement which are closely related to the classical conception of measurement. Indeed, Hölder can be interpreted as bringing this conception to fulfilment in a synthesis of Euclid, Newton, and Dedekind. The first explicitly representational theory appears to (...) have been Russell's. He rejected the traditional concept of quantity and its connection to number, making the use of number in quantitative science problematical. He solved the problem via representationalism. (shrink)

How does one committed to the claims of Christ and a biblical story of redemption live Christianly and navigate the competing worldviews encountered in everyday medical practice? Adopting the practical conceptual framework promoted by Reformed Christian philosopher and theologian Albert Wolters, we argue for an all-encompassing biblical understanding of God’s cosmic redemption plan for the entire creation order in contrast to a more typical sacred/secular duality. We then apply the concepts of structure and direction, drawn from a pretheological understanding of (...) human life drawn from the Scripture, to a semi-fictional case study in discerning Christian faithfulness in everyday mundane aspects of medicine. Our subsequent analysis seeks to render an interpretation of what it means to live life consistent with that worldview when confronted with challenges like those presented in the case. (shrink)

I discuss Watsuji’s characterization of aidagara or “betweenness”. First, I develop a phenomenological reading of aidagara. I argue that the notion can help illuminate aspects of our embodied subjectivity and its interrelation with the world and others. Along the way, I also indicate how the notion can be fruitfully supplemented by different sources of empirical research. Second, I put aidagara to work in the context of psychopathology. I show how disruptions of aidagara in schizophrenia not only affirm the foundational role (...) it plays in organizing our experience of self and world in everyday life. Additionally, I suggest the notion can, in this context of application, potentially enhance our understanding of and empathy for those living with schizophrenic disorders. (shrink)

Recently a number of scientists have proposed substantial changes to the practice of climate modeling, though they disagree over what those changes should be. We provide an overview and critical examination of three leading proposals: the unified approach, the hierarchy approach and the pluralist approach. The unified approach calls for an accelerated development of high-resolution models within a seamless prediction framework. The hierarchy approach calls for more attention to the development and systematic study of hierarchies of related models, with the (...) aim of advancing understanding. The pluralist approach calls for greater diversity in modeling efforts, including, on some of its variants, more attention to empirical modeling. After identifying some of the scientific and institutional challenges faced by these proposals, we consider their expected gains and costs, relative to a business-as-usual modeling scenario.We find the proposals to be complementary, having valuable synergies. But since resource limitations make it unlikely that all three will be pursued, we offer some reflections on more limited changes in climate modeling that seem well within reach and that can be expected to yield substantial benefits. (shrink)

Phylogenetic trees are meant to represent the genealogical history of life and apparently derive their justification from the existence of the tree of life and the fact that evolutionary processes are treelike. However, there are a number of problems for these assumptions. Here it is argued that once we understand the important role that phylogenetic trees play as models that contain idealizations, we can accept these criticisms and deny the reality of the tree while justifying the continued use of trees (...) in phylogenetic theory and preserving nearly all of what defenders of trees have called the “importance of tree thinking.”. (shrink)

Many phylogenetic systematists have criticized the Biological Species Concept (BSC) because it distorts evolutionary history. While defenses against this particular criticism have been attempted, I argue that these responses are unsuccessful. In addition, I argue that the source of this problem leads to previously unappreciated, and deeper, fatal objections. These objections to the BSC also straightforwardly apply to other species concepts that are not defined by genealogical history. What is missing from many previous discussions is the fact that the Tree (...) of Life, which represents phylogenetic history, is independent of our choice of species concept. Some species concepts are consistent with species having unique positions on the Tree while others, including the BSC, are not. Since representing history is of primary importance in evolutionary biology, these problems lead to the conclusion that the BSC, along with many other species concepts, are unacceptable. If species are to be taxa used in phylogenetic inferences, we need a history-based species concept. (shrink)

Understanding the individual-level factors associated with sustainable behaviour in the workplace is important to advance corporate ethics and sustainability efforts. In two studies, we simultaneously assess the role of core values and personality traits in relation to a broad set of sustainability actions, both beneficial and harmful. Results from a student sample and then a national sample confirm that values and personality are distinct constructs that incrementally and differentially predict economic, social, and environmental outcomes. We successfully replicate previous findings pertaining (...) to values and find that, controlling for values, the personality dimension of Honesty–Humility is the strongest negative predictor of harmful actions. Our analyses highlight the unique characteristics of values and personality and their distinct implications for ethical and sustainable management practice. By assessing values and personality together, we also contribute to more general efforts within psychology to develop an integrative view of the person. (shrink)

Prospective ascription of responsibility is hypothetical, commonly noting or setting conditions for critical judgment or liability if some event occurs or fails to occur, thus determining vulnerability to retrospective judgments. Prospective liabilities can be classified by source, by type or degree (if any) of accompanying control, and by structure or stages.But not all prospective responsibility can be understood in terms of liability. Actual or de facto control over X and/or responsibility for Y (persons, animals, inanimate things, etc.), though they may (...) involve prospective liabilities, may not be responsibilities to any person in particular. Such responsibilities may be called responsibilities in rem and distinguished from those assignable to persons (responsibilities in personam).Though prospective responsibility judgments often provide the most important grounds for retrospective judgments, if the concern is with the meaning of responsibility judgments, retrospective responsibility judgments are more basic. For, while we can understand retrospective judgments even though we know nothing of prospective ones, the opposite is not true. (shrink)

We analyze the expressivity, succinctness, and complexity of a family of languages based on weighted propositional formulas for the representation of utility functions. The central idea underlying this form of preference modeling is to associate numerical weights with goals specified in terms of propositional formulas, and to compute the utility value of an alternative as the sum of the weights of the goals it satisfies. We define a large number of representation languages based on this idea, each characterized by a (...) set of restrictions on the syntax of formulas and the range of weights. Our aims are threefold. First, for each language we try to identify the class of utility functions it can express. Second, when different languages can express the same class of utility functions, one may allow for a more succinct representation than another. Therefore, we analyze the relative succinctness of languages. Third, for each language we study the computational complexity of the problem of finding the most preferred alternative given a utility function expressed in that language. (shrink)

It was the spring of 2020 when the email came to our inboxes—a memo from our Institutional Review Board informing us that we were approved to begin conducting our pragmatic clinical trial with a wa...

A natural starting place for developing a phylogenetic species concept is to examine monophyletic groups of organisms. Proponents of “the” Phylogenetic Species Concept fall into one of two camps. The first camp denies that species even could be monophyletic and groups organisms using character traits. The second groups organisms using common ancestry and requires that species must be monophyletic. I argue that neither view is entirely correct. While monophyletic groups of organisms exist, they should not be equated with species. Instead, (...) species must meet the more restrictive criterion of being genealogically exclusive groups where the members are more closely related to each other than to anything outside the group. I carefully spell out different versions of what this might mean and arrive at a working definition of exclusivity that forms groups that can function within phylogenetic theory. I conclude by arguing that while a phylogenetic species concept must use exclusivity as a grouping criterion, a variety of ranking criteria are consistent with the requirement that species can be placed on phylogenetic trees. (shrink)

Divided Staffs, Divided Selves offers a case-centered approach to the teaching of health care ethics to a wide range of students and clinicians. The book provides both clinical case material and a method for engaging in a dialogue regarding difficult decisions in the mental health care field that have potentially tragic choices. The essays that introduce the volume place the ethical problems of treating mentally ill people in the context of the health care ethics movement and traditions of ethical decision (...) making. The individual cases are real, derived from actual clinical and consultative experiences. (shrink)

Health care institutions, including Roman Catholic institutions, are in a time of crisis. This crisis may provide an important opportunity to reinvigorate Roman Catholic health care. The current health care crisis offers Roman Catholic health care institutions a special opportunity to rethink their fundamental commitments and to plan for the future. The author argues that what Catholic health care institutions must first do is articulate the nature of their identity and their commitments. By a renewed commitment to the praxis of (...) health care on their own distinctive terms, Roman Catholic health care institutions may reestablish a vision of human nature and human service in an increasingly secular society. Health care could then reclaim its place as a powerful setting for the expression of Roman Catholic faith, life and witness. (shrink)

Since its enactment, the Affordable Care Act has faced numerous legal challenges. Many of these lawsuits have focused on implementation of the law and the limits of executive power. Opponents challenged the ACA under the Obama Administration while supporters have turned to the courts to prevent the Trump Administration from undermining the law. In the meantime, Congress remains gridlocked over the ACA and many other critical health policy issues, leaving the executive branch to adopt its preferred policy approach and ultimately (...) leading to lawsuits. This article briefly discusses the history of litigation over the ACA and some reasons why this litigation has been so enduring. The article then identifies other areas of health policy that are or could be future targets for litigation. Finally, the article comments on the potential impact of the courts on future health reform efforts. (shrink)

A growing body of recent work in informal logic investigates the process of argumentation. Among other things, this work focuses on the ways in which individuals attempt to understand written or verbalised arguments in light of the fact that these are often presented in forms that are incomplete and unmarked. One of its aims is to develop general procedures for natural language argument recognition and reconstruction. Our aim here is to draw on this growing body of knowledge in informal logic (...) in order to take preliminary steps towards developing an architecture for computer systems that are able to recognise and reconstruct natural language arguments. This architecture aims to structure research of an applied and computational nature that strives to implement linguistic systems of various sorts, and to analyse problems in a way that both yields manageable and relatively independent components and also highlights how implementations can interact with existing resources from natural language processing. (shrink)

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’, has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at (...) first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of freeing up time and space within the social realm; the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; political equality; emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism. (shrink)

Bluhm and Cabrera advance that Sadler’s ‘Archimedean point’ is an example of integration of sub-perspectives by an overall self, as such a self who may be reconciled and understood to be caused by DBS systems. Although this suggests great avenues to explore, we stress that the Archimedean viewpoint is strictly bound to a metaphorical domain. We argue that what is needed to help (prospective) DBS patients is not a metaphorical viewpoint, but a scientific viewpoint, rooted in empirical evidence.

Common ancestry is one of the pillars of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Today, the Tree of Life, which represents how all life is genealogically related, is often thought of as an essential component in the foundations of biological systematics and so therefore of evolutionary theory – and perhaps all of biology itself. It is an iconic representation in biology and even penetrates into popular culture.

Abstract : In this paper, it is argued that Leibniz’s view that necessity is grounded in the availability of a demonstration is incorrect and furthermore, can be shown to be so by using Leibniz’s own examples of infinite analyses. First, I show that modern mathematical logic makes clear that Leibniz’s "infinite analysis" view of contingency is incorrect. It is then argued that Leibniz's own examples of incommensurable lines and convergent series undermine, rather than bolster his view by providing examples of (...) necessary mathematical truths that are not demonstrable. Finally, it is argued that a more modern view on convergent series would, in certain respects, help support some claims he makes about the necessity of mathematical truths, but would still not yield a viable theory of necessity due to remaining problems with other logical, mathematical, and modal claims. (shrink)

This chapter discusses nine ways to bias open‐source artificial general intelligence (AGI) toward friendliness. There is no way to guarantee that advanced AGI, once created and released into the world, will behave according to human ethical standards. The primary objective of the chapter is to suggest some potential ways to do so. First it discusses an engineer the capability to acquire integrated ethical knowledge, and provides rich ethical interaction and instruction, respecting developmental stages. The chapter creates stable, hierarchy‐dominated goal systems, (...) and ensures that the early stages of recursive self‐improvement occur relatively slowly and with rich human involvement. It tightly links AGI with the Global Brain, and focuses on foster deep, consensus‐building interactions and commensurability between divergent viewpoints. The chapter creates a mutually supportive community of AGIs, and encourages measured co‐advancement of AGI software and AGI ethics theory. Finally it develops advanced AGI sooner. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

Book reviewed in this article: Public Duties: The Moral Obligations of Government Officials. Edited by Joel L. Fleishman, Lance Liebman, and Mark H. Moore.

Escrito em 1963, três anos depois do seminário sobre A ética da psicanálise, o texto de Jaques Lacan, Kant com Sade, possibilita férteis discussões a respeito da prática analítica. Quais os limites desta prática? Qual é a razão que a sustenta? A prática analítica é um saber, uma ética ou uma terapêutica? Quais os pressupostos que orientam a sua ação? É evidente que não dispomos de condições necessárias e suficientes para respondermos a tais perguntas no limite de um artigo, tampouco (...) temos a pretensão de fazê-lo. Entretanto, as tomaremos como bússola em busca de pistas sobre a prática analítica lacaniana e o solo em que repousa até a década de 1960. A partir do texto Kant com Sade e do Seminário VII, A ética da psicanálise, ambos escritos por Lacan, buscaremos as semelhanças e diferenças irreconciliáveis entre a lei moral kantiana, a vontade de gozo sadeana e a ética psicanalítica, apontando que é a partir das consequências práticas, efetuadas pelo Marquês de Sade, da aplicação de uma razão pura, tal qual proposta por Kant, que Lacan buscará um novo horizonte para a prática analítica não mais baseada no desejo puro. Nesse sentido, tanto o filósofo alemão Immanuel Kant quanto o escritor francês Marquês de Sade, contemporâneos dos ares da modernidade, expõem um princípio universal pelo qual a ação é valorada. Princípio cuja execução evidencia sua dimensão ética, política e, com Lacan, clínica. Nessa pista, faremos uma discussão a propósito da perversão e da melancolia como limites à prática analítica. (shrink)

Mind Association 2017Elliott Sober’s first book, Simplicity, defends the view that the simplicity of a theory or hypothesis is a measure of its informativeness – roughly, simpler theories require less new information to be added to them to answer relevant questions of interest. While this measure of simplicity is question-relative, it is still what you might call a global view of simplicity – simplicity means the same thing across different scientific problems and it is always an epistemic virtue. Ockham’s Razor (...) is just good scientific reasoning. Sober’s 1988 book Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference argues against this global conception of simplicity and replaces it with a local one. Here, in one context parsimony means one thing while in another context it may mean something different. Similarly, whether the more parsimonious hypothesis is to be preferred is also a local matter; it... (shrink)

During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of (...) scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states. Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II. Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders. This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science. (shrink)

An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, (...) and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations. (shrink)

Isaac explores how influential thinkers in the mid-twentieth century understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. He places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas, particularly the institutional milieu of Harvard University.

By titling his paper “Slowing the Slide Down the Slippery Slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman, an esteemed medical ethicist, uses a rhetoric...