David Lewis [1988; 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the 'Desire-as-Belief Thesis'. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis's. We explore ways of being anti-Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory and on Lewis's negative results. We (...) then introduce what we call the indexicality loophole: if the goodness of a proposition is indexical, partly a function of an agent's mental state, then the negative results have no purchase. Thus we propose a variant of Desire-as-Belief that exploits this loophole. We argue that a number of meta-ethical positions are committed to just such indexicality. Indeed, we show that with one central sort of evaluative belief--the belief that an option is right--the indexicality loophole can be exploited in various interesting ways. Moreover, on some accounts, 'good' is indexical in the same way. Thus, it seems that the anti-Humean can dodge the negative results. (shrink)

Argues i) that part of what it is to understand what is being asked, when we ask whether something is good, is being able to distinguish stopping points in a series of "Why?" questions, and ii) that this ability explains how we can reason from observable facts to conclusions about value.

In this work, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking to offers major new accounts of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people.

A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized “mineness” or “subjective presence” : 565–573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the (...) world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization. (shrink)

The script focusFollowsMouse.user.js provides a very simple implementation of "click-free" web browsing: it defines a mouseover method for every HTML link, input, select and text area which calls the focus() method on that control. (Click on the link to install it as a Greasemonkey script.).

Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age offers a concise exposition of key ideas - contingency, otherness, freedom, vulnerability and mutuality - that inform the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, especially concerning the dynamics of religious belief and religious denial in what he calls a "a secular age." The book integrates discussion of Immanuel Kant and Susan Neiman in particular and seeks to show how Taylor's work can be fruitfully engaged by theologians.

The case of pain asymbolia is a case study that provides evidence of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between bodily experience, affective experience, and self-awareness. On one account pain asymbolia is the result of an affective deficit. Sensory signals of bodily damage are not associated with characteristic negative affect. Cochrane endorses this account as part of his version of a “conceptual act” theory of affective experience. In contrast, I propose an active inference account of affect in general and pain asymbolia (...) in particular. In the active inference framework the self is inferred as the endogenous cause of bodily and affective experience in the process of organismic regulation. This preserves Cochranes ambition to ground affect in bodily regulation but avoids the problem for affective deficit accounts of asymbolia that cannot do justice to the neural correlates. (shrink)

Cognitive neuropsychiatry (CN) is the explanation of psychiatric disorder by the methods of cognitive neuropsychology. Within CN there are, broadly speaking, two approaches to delusion. The first uses a one-stage model, in which delusions are explained as rationalizations of anomalous experiences via reasoning strategies that are not, in themselves, abnormal. Two-stage models invoke additional hypotheses about abnormalities of reasoning. In this paper, I examine what appears to be a very strong argument, developed within CN, in favor of a two-stage explanation (...) of the difference in content between the Capgras and Cotard delusions. That explanation treats them as alternative rationalizations of essentially the same phenomenology. I show, however, that once we distinguish the phenomenology (and the neuroetiology), a one-stage model is adequate. In the final section I make some more general remarks on the one- and two-stage models. (shrink)

Evolutionary Psychology is based on the idea that the mind is a set of special purpose thinking devices or modules whose domain-specific structure is an adaptation to ancestral environments. The modular view of the mind is an uncontroversial description of the periphery of the mind, the input-output sensorimotor and affective subsystems. The novelty of EP is the claim that higher order cognitive processes also exhibit a modular structure. Autism is a primary case study here, interpreted as a developmental failure of (...) a module devoted to social intelligence or Theory of Mind. In this article I reappraise the arguments for innate modularity of TOM and argue that they fail. TOM ability is a consequence of domain general development scaffolded by early, innately specified, sensorimotor abilities. The alleged Modularity of TOM results from interpreting the outcome of developmental failures characteristic of autism at too high a level of cognitive abstraction. (shrink)

In "Constitutional Goods" Alan Brudner presents novel conception of justice that will inform the content of the ideal liberal constitution. The content of this novel conception of justice is constituted by what Brudner describes as an inclusive conception of liberalism, and its justification is grounded on an account of public reason that is presented in opposition to that of John Rawls. I argue that we should reject both the content and justification of Brudner's conception ofjustice. Brudner is unable to construct (...) an inclusive conception of liberalism from elements of libertarianism, egalitarianism, and communitarianism, and his account of public reason lacks the properties of fairness and reciprocity that differentiate a reasonable agreement from a modus vivendi. This paper therefore defends a Rawlsian political conception ofjustice and justification from Brudner's criticisms and proposed alternatives. (shrink)

Newton and Einstein each in his way showed us the following: an epistemologically responsible physicist adopts the most measured understanding possible of spacetime structure. The proper way to infer a doctrine of spacetime is by a kind of measuring inference -- a deduction from phenomena. Thus it was (I argue) by an out-and-out deduction from the phenomena of inertiality (as colligated by the three laws of motion) that Newton delineated the conceptual presuppositions concerning spacetime structure that are needed before we (...) can actually think coherently about these phenomena. And Einstein (I argue) very much recapitulated this argument pattern, twice over in fact, recolligating the phenomena first so as to add something from the laws of electromagnetism, and then so as to add everything about gravitation, into what he understood by inertiality. Notably, to deduce one’s theoretical conclusions from phenomena is both more cautious and more cogent than to "infer to the best explanation". And in the context of the development of a doctrine of spacetime, deductions from phenomena lay before us formal rather than causal understanding. Deductions from phenomena tell us, in this context, not what things or what causes there are, but rather what our concepts should be like. The more measured the inference is, however, the more definitively it tells us this. For these reasons the most measured understanding of spacetime lies on a line between conventionalism and realism, between relationalism and absolutism, and indeed (as I demonstrate) between empiricism and rationalism. Spacetime is understood as neither merely immanent in material goings-on, nor truly transcendent of them either. In order to explain this understanding as adequately as I can and in order to remark its excellences most fully, I consider some respects in which the tertium quid between metaphysical realism and strict empiricism about spacetime is wise in the sense of practical wisdom. The wisest understanding of spacetime illustrates, I argue, an original and fundamental connection that epistemology has with ethics. (shrink)

Opponents of Humean skepticism about practical reason do not normally exploit his idea that beliefs can only serve the aims we have. Many have used that idea to argue in favour of Humean skepticism. Others have denied that it supports Humean skepticism. I argue that we need to use this idea. It is only by embracing the so-called Humean Theory of Motivation that we can truly see where Hume went wrong.

Use left and right arrow keys to move the gun left and right. You reduce a number by shooting it with its prime factors. Each time a prime factor hits a number, the number is divided by that factor. If the number is a prime number you can shoot it with a special "P" ("P" for "prime") missile which reduces it directly to 1. To fire a 2, 3, 5 or 7, just type the corresponding key on the keyboard. To (...) fire 11, 13, 17 or 19, type the first letter of the number (in lower case), i.e. "e" for 11, "t" for 13, "s" for 17 and "n" for 19. Type "p" (lower case) to fire the "P" missile. In all cases a number is "dead" when it is reduced to 1. If a number hits you, then you're dead. (shrink)