Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), Fodor and McLaughlin (1990) and McLaughlin (1993) challenge connectionists to explain systematicity without simply implementing a classical architecture. In this paper I argue that what makes the challenge difficult for connectionists to meet has less to do with what is to be explained than with what is to count as an explanation. Fodor et al. are prepared to admit as explanatory, accounts of a sort that only classical models can provide. If connectionists are to (...) meet the challenge, they are going to have to insist on the propriety of changing what counts as an explanation of systematicity. Once that is done, there would seem to be as yet no reason to suppose that connectionists are unable to explain systematicity. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

This book provides a comprehensive and critical account of Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy. Robert J. Dostal shows that at the heart of Gadamer's enterprise is the thesis that "being that can be understood is language.".

In late September 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on Population, which left him with “a theory by which to work.”115 Yet he waited some twenty years to publish his discovery in the Origin of Species. Those interested in the fine grain of Darwin's development have been curious about this delay. One recent explanation has his hand stayed by fear of reaction to the materialist implications of linking man with animals. “Darwin sensed,” according to Howard Gruber, “that some would object to (...) seeing rudiments of human mentality in animals, while others would recoil at the idea of remnants of animality in man.”116 With this link closed, Darwin hung the materialist chain around his own neck, where it rested most uncomfortably. Stephen Gould, supporting Gruber's argument, finds evidence for this reconstruction in Darwin's M and N notebooks, whichinclude many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind-however complex and powerful-is simply a product of brain.117The proferred hypothesis suggests, then, that Darwin was acutely sensible of the social consequences of equating men with animals and therefore mind with brian, and that he thus shied from publically revealing his views until the intellectual climate became more tolerant.The history I have examined makes this hypothesis implausible. Even if Darwin warily explored the implications of his emerging theory in his notebooks, his subsequent study of Fleming, Wells, Brougham, and Kirby should have quieted any trepidation. If these natural theologians did not flinch at seeing human reason prefigured in the mind of a worm, should Darwin have? Moreover, he recognized in his M notebook that the thesis of evolutionary continuity between men and animals did not require an explicit avowal of his conviction that brain was the agent of thought.118 And in any case, his materialism was of a rather benign sort; at least he so expressed it in an annotation in Abercrombie's Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1838): “By materialism I mean, merely the intimate connection of thought with form of brain — like kind of attraction with nature of element.”119 This belief would have held little terror for British intellectuals, who were quite familiar — some even comfortable-with Locke's anti-Cartesian argument that there was nothing contradictory in supposing God could make matter to think.120 Finally, even if the intellectual atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Britain were inhospitable to Darwin's brand of materialism, there is little reason to believe he breathed a different air at mid-century while preparing his manuscript.That Darwin should not have feared suspicions of materialism, of course, does not mean that he did not. But I think there were other, more persistent sources of anxiety that kept him from rushing to publish: namely, the several conceptual obstacles he had to overcome if his theory of evolution by natural selection were to be made scientifically acceptable. Prominent among these were the problems surrounding his changing notions of instinct.The inertia of his older ideas about instinct at first made it hard for Darwin to gauge how far the theory of natural selection might be applied to behavior. By the early 1840s he finally felt ready to meet the challenge of the natural theologians by providing a naturalistic explanation for the wonderful instincts of animals. In his “Essays” of 1842 and 1844 one sort of instinct is, however, not considered-that of neuter insects. Yet Darwin seems to have appreciated the difficulties such instincts entailed at least by 1843, when he read Kirby and Spence. He simply required time to work out a solution to a problem he initially perceived as “fatal to my whole theory.” Even while writing the “Species Book” in the summer of 1857, he was still juggling several possible solutions compatible with natural selection. It was only a short time before he actually turned to work on the Origin of Species that he appears to have settled on a single explanation for the difficulties posed by the instincts of worker bees and ants. The force of his theory of community selection snapped the last critical support of the creationist hypothesis and, conveniently enough, also fractured the generalized Lamarckian account of the evolution of behavior. These results were worth waiting for. (shrink)

This article considers whether and how there can be for Aristotle a genuine science of ‘pure’ psychology, of the soul as such, which amounts to considering whether Aristotle’s model of science in the Posterior Analytics is applicable to the de Anima.

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit, pull in opposite directions. To this problem, we propose a solution that strikes a balance between simplicity and goodness-of-fit. Using Bayes’ theorem we argue that the notion of prior probability represents a measurement of simplicity of a theory, whereas the notion of likelihood represents the theory’s goodness-of-fit. We justify the use of prior probability and show how to calculate the likelihood of a family of curves. We diagnose the relationship (...) between simplicity of a theory and its predictive accuracy. (shrink)

In Darwinian Heresies, which was originally published in 2004, prominent historians and philosophers of science trace the history of evolutionary thought, and challenge many of the assumptions that have built up over the years. Covering a wide range of issues starting in the eighteenth century, Darwinian Heresies brings us through the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin, and then through the twentieth century to the present. It is suggested that Darwin's true roots lie in Germany, not his native England, (...) that Russian evolutionism is more significant than many are prepared to allow, and that the true influence on twentieth-century evolution biology was not Charles Darwin at all, but his often-despised contemporary, Herbert Spencer. The collection was intended to interest, to excite, to infuriate, and to stimulate further work. (shrink)

The relationship between construal and redundancy has not been previously explored empirically. Russian aspect allows speakers to construe situations as either Perfective or Imperfective, but it is not clear to what extent aspect is determined by context and therefore redundant. We investigate the relationship between redundancy and open construal by surveying 501 native Russian speakers who rated the acceptability of both Perfective and Imperfective verb forms in complete extensive authentic contexts. We find that aspect is largely redundant in 81% of (...) uses, and in 17% of contexts aspect is relatively open to construal. We contend that anchoring in redundant contexts likely facilitates the independence of construal in contexts with less redundancy. However further research is needed to discover what makes contexts redundant since known cues for aspect are absent in the majority of such contexts. Native speakers are fairly consistent in giving the original aspect high ratings, but less consistent in rating the non-original aspect, indicating potential problems in testing the reactions of speakers to non-authentic data. (shrink)

Trump’s election renewed discussion about the Electoral College, mostly centered on its disparity with the popular vote. Yet much commentary about the Electoral College neglects its original purpose grounded in the Founders’ concern to provide for indirect election to many important offices. The Founders’ project entailed determining the people’s aptitude to elect the types of individuals desirable for high office, in an attempt to harmonize their dual commitments to political right and political legitimacy. The Electoral College’s function was soon frustrated (...) by the rise of political parties, yet parties came to serve at least part of that function, with party leaders standing as a moderating force between the people and the presidency. However, the 2016 elections suggest that parties no longer play this intermediary role effectively. Examining the steps that led to this result, we seek to provide a reminder of the enduring thesis that the dangers inherent in republicanism require creative republican remedies. (shrink)

We discuss two kinds of quotation, namely indirect quotation and pure quotation. With respect to each, we have both a negative and a positive plaint. The negative plaint is that the strict Davidsonian treatment of indirect and pure quotation cannot be correct. The positive plaint is an alternative account of how quotation of these two sorts works. /// Discutimos dos tipos de citas, a saber, citas indirectas y citas puras. Hacemos dos planteamientos, uno positivo y otro negativo, con respecto a (...) cada una. El negativo es que el tratamiento estrictamente davidsoniano de las citas indirectas y puras no puede ser correcto. El positivo consiste en dar una explicatión alternativa de cómo funcionan estos dos tipos de citas. (shrink)

The CLASH model proposed in the target article is plausible but less than parsimonious. I suggest that statistical analysis probably would find slower life history strategy, greater focus on the future, and greater self-control to be highly correlated and perhaps unifactorial, because they are all manifestations of a single underlying variable, namely, intelligence. I suggest how intelligence as a state variable plausibly could explain the differences observed by the authors.

The study of human intelligence features many points of consensus, but there are also many different perspectives. In this unique book Robert J. Sternberg invites the nineteen most highly cited psychological scientists in the leading textbooks on human intelligence to share their research programs and findings. Each chapter answers a standardized set of questions on the measurement, investigation, and development of intelligence - and the outcome represents a wide range of substantive and methodological emphases including psychometric, cognitive, expertise-based, developmental, (...) neuropsychological, genetic, cultural, systems, and group-difference approaches. This is an exciting and valuable course book for upper-level students to learn from the originators of the key contemporary ideas in intelligence research about how they think about their work and about the field. (shrink)

Reproduced from Robert J.C. Young, Torn Halves. Pages: 256. ISBN: 0-7190-477-3 ; 0-7190-4776-5. Price: 14.99 ; 40.00.

William James' lecture on "The Will to Believe" has kindled spirited controversy. In this reappraisal of that controversy, Father O'Connell contributes some : that James' argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Pascal and Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our "over-beliefs" ; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our "passional nature" as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief. --From publisher's description.

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

Communication in a collaborative problem-solving activity plays a pivotal role in the success of the collaboration in both academia and the workplace. Computer-supported collaboration makes it possible to collect large-scale communication data to investigate the process at a finer granularity. In this paper, we introduce a conditional transition profile (CTP) to characterize aspects of each team member's communication. Based on the data from a large-scale empirical study, we found that participants in the same team tend to show similar CTP compared (...) to participants from different teams. We also found that team members who showed more “negotiation” after the partner “shared” information tended to show more improvement after the collaboration while those who continued sharing ideas while their partners were negotiating tended to improve less. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an examination of Dretske's important article “Conclusive Reasons.” Dretske's key move is to offer a subjunctive analysis of his notion of a conclusive reason: “R is a conclusive reason for P if and only if R would not be the case unless P were the case.” It seems, however, that a counterexample produced by Martin shows that while this biconditional holds left to right, it does not hold right to left. Dretske uses his analysis conclusive reasons (...) to deny the principle of epistemic closure under known implication. He then uses this result in a response to skepticism. Reasons are given for rejecting his argument against epistemic closure. Nozick offers essentially the same subjunctive analysis that Dretske did, wrapped in possible‐world semantics. It is rejected on similar grounds. (shrink)

The atomism of quantum physics has foundations more than twenty-five centuries old. Atomism is a philosophy, deductive and metaphysical. John Locke and David Hume suppressed the full philosophy of atomism in their presentations, but this book aims to restore and critique atomism's philosophical foundations, which will change the way we view the modern world.

In their provocative 1988 paper, Fodor and Pylyshyn issued a formidable challenge to connectionists, i.e. to provide a non‐classical explanation of the empirical phenomenon of systematicity in cognitive agents. Since the appearance of F&P's challenge, a number of connectionist systems have emerged which prima facie meet this challenge. However, Fodor and McLaughlin (1990) advance an argument, based upon a general principle of nomological necessity, to show that one of these systems (Smolensky's) could not satisfy the Fodor‐Pylyshyn challenge. Yet, if (...) Fodor and McLaughlin's analysis is correct, it is doubtful whether any existing connectionist system would fare better than Smolensky's. In the view of Fodor and McLaughlin, humans and classical architectures display systematicity as a matter of nomological necessity (necessity by virtue of natural law), but connectionist architectures do not. However, I argue that the Fodor‐Pylyshyn‐McLaughlin appeal to nomological necessity is untenable. There is a sense in which neither classical nor connectionist architectures possess nomological (or‘nomic’) necessity. However, the sense in which classical architectures do possess nomic necessity applies equally well to at least some connectionist architectures. Representational constituents can have causal efficacy within both classical and connectionist architectures. (shrink)

Review of Manipulated Agents: A Window into Moral Responsibility. By Alfred R. Mele .

This work, first published in 1985, offers a general interpretation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Most Hume scholarship has either neglected or downplayed an important aspect of Hume's position - his scepticism. This book puts that right, examining in close detail the sceptical arguments in Hume's philosophy.

Human persons can act with libertarian freedom in heaven according to one prominent view, because they have freely acquired perfect virtue in their pre-heavenly lives such that acting rightly in heaven is volitionally necessary. But since the character of human persons is not perfect at death, how is their character perfected? On the unilateral model, God alone completes the perfection of their character, and, on the cooperative model, God continues to work with them in purgatory to perfect their own character. (...) I argue that although both models can make sense of all human persons enjoying free will in heaven on various assumptions, the cooperative model allows all human persons in heaven to enjoy a greater degree of freedom. This consideration about the degree of heavenly freedom provides a reason for God to implement the cooperative model. (shrink)

The seventeen seminal essays by Robert J. Gordon collected here, including three previously unpublished works, offer sharply etched views on the principal topics of macroeconomics - growth, inflation, and unemployment. The author re-examines their salient points in a uniquely creative, accessible introduction that serves on its own as an introduction to modern macroeconomics. Each of the four parts into which the essays are grouped also offers a new introduction. The papers in Part I explore different key aspects of the (...) history, theory, and measurement of productivity growth. The essays in Part II investigate the sources of business cycles and productivity fluctuations. Those in Part III cover the effects of supply shocks in macroeconomics. The final group presents empirical studies of the dynamics of inflation in the United States. The foreword by Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow comments on the abiding importance of these essays drawn from 1968 to the present. (shrink)

The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous (...) claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck. (shrink)

The weeks-long rioting and the destruction of property were more than just a hyper reaction to apparent racial discrimination in 2020. We might interpret this anti-social and criminal behavior as having its origin with an envy and resentment over things material. We were warned about this misuse of our freedom more than forty years ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finding our way back from a materialist-saturated vision of the good life depends on taking up a Christian humanism which was championed by (...) Pope Saint John Paul II. We see that Christian humanism expressed vividly in family life. (shrink)

Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and (...) those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck. (shrink)