This chapter uses Strategic Reliabilism to resolve two debates about whether certain experimental findings demonstrate deep and systematic failures of human reasoning. It illustrates one of the main benefits of the current approach to epistemology: it can be used to adjudicate disputes that arise in psychology that are, at bottom, normative epistemological disputes about the nature of good reasoning.

We introduce a new sheaf-theoretic construction called the ideal completion of a category and investigate its logical properties. We show that it satisfies the axioms for a category of classes in the sense of Joyal and Moerdijk [17], so that the tools of algebraic set theory can be applied to produce models of various elementary set theories. These results are then used to prove the conservativity of different set theories over various classical and constructive type theories.

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century. Mind (...) Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture. (shrink)

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network (...) of schemas 'in the head' with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology and religion to provide an integrated schema-theoretic view of human knowledge. The authors still find scope for lively debate, particularly in their discussion of free will and of the reality of God. The book integrates an accessible exposition of background information with a cumulative marshalling of evidence to address fundamental questions concerning human action in the world and the nature of ultimate reality. (shrink)

We don’t know ourselves, we knowledgeable people – we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there’s good reason for that. We’ve never tried to find out who we are – how could it happen that...

I American Philosophy as a Form of Modern Philosophy The essence of modern philosophy is the expression of an image of human existence and of its major ...

In Science of the Soul in Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders, Michael A. Rapoport provides a philological and interpretive guide for critically reading and interpreting Ibn Sina's (Avicenna, d. 1037) most challenging and influential text. Rapoport argues that chapters VII-X of the Pointers present scientific explanations for phenomena related to the human soul - from intellection to divination, magic, and marvels - within the framework of Ibn Sina's Metaphysics of the Rational Soul. This book dispels widespread notions that the (...) Pointers represents Ibn Sina's mystical or Sufi philosophy and therefore stands apart from the rest of his corpus. (shrink)

Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology. Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve their reasoning by relying (...) on Statistical Prediction Rules. They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

Editor's Comment: One of the functions of the journal is to develop an awareness of its own history. These papers are online-only papers that discuss the first ten years of the journal going back to 1969. Every so often the journal publishes synoptic articles that take a broad approach to the beginning of the Society and the journal to treat major themes and topics. As one can clearly see EPAT published many of the luminaries that helped to shape the discipline.

Here, we argue that any neurobiological theory based on an experience/function division cannot be empirically confirmed or falsified and is thus outside the scope of science. A ‘perfect experiment’ illustrates this point, highlighting the unbreachable boundaries of the scientific study of consciousness. We describe a more nuanced notion of cognitive access that captures personal experience without positing the existence of inaccessible conscious states. Finally, we discuss the criteria necessary for forming and testing a falsifiable theory of consciousness.

In Meaning and Appreciation, Michael Weinstein traces the history of the failure of historical meaning, showing how the disappearance of collective purpose has ...

Catastrophe Theory was developed in an attempt to provide a form of Mathematics particularly apt for applications in the biological sciences. It was claimed that while it could be applied in the more conventional physical way, it could also be applied in a new metaphysical way, derived from the Structuralism of Saussure in Linguistics and Lévi-Strauss in Anthropology.Since those early beginnings there have been many attempts to apply Catastrophe Theory to Biology, but these hopes cannot be said to have been (...) fully realised. (shrink)

Discussion of divine providence was traditionally grounded in the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, until the impact of nominalism which narrowed the theological focus upon the absolute power and freedom of the divine will. An exemplary approach for discussing providence which predates nominalism and which has surprising contemporary relevance is the one developed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. It is exemplary both for how it discusses providence and for what is says about it. Methodologically, Aquinas explains providence (...) in two contexts, one theological, the other cosmological, in order to avoid misconstruing the reality of one term because of the dynamics pertinent to the other. Substantively, this understanding of providence rests upon the theological foundation of the Creator’s wisdom and benevolence, which in the world find expression as a comprehensive order oriented towards emergent goodness. Through this order God is provident by the genuine and contingent causal actions of creatures, a natural and non‐deterministic means that makes it highly compatible with modern science. (shrink)

Responding to comments by Ben Fine in relation to the concept of the degree of separation among workers, this article argues that Fine (a) confuses Marx’s levels of analysis and thus cannot distinguish between necessity and contingency; (b) fails to grasp the problematic character of Marx’s discussion of relative surplus-value once we remove the assumption of a given standard of necessity; and (c) accordingly remains trapped (like so many others) in a ‘Ricardian Box’ that Marx himself was able to escape.