Quasi-set theory $\cal Q$ allows us to cope with certain collections of objects where the usual notion of identity is not applicable, in the sense that $x = x$ is not a formula, if $x$ is an arbitrary term. $\cal Q$ was partially motivated by the problem of non-individuality in quantum mechanics. In this paper I discuss the range of explanatory power of $\cal Q$ for quantum phenomena which demand some notion of indistinguishability among quantum objects. My main focus is (...) on the double-slit experiment, a major physical phenomenon which was never modeled from a quasi-set-theoretic point of view. The double-slit experiment strongly motivates the concept of degrees of indistinguishability within a field-theoretic approach, and that notion is simply missing in $\cal Q$. Nevertheless, other physical situations may eventually demand a revision on quasi-set theory axioms, if someone intends to use it in the quantum realm for the purpose of a clear discussion about non-individuality. I use this opportunity to suggest another way to cope with identity in quantum theories. (shrink)

The structure of natural languages is usually studied from three major different but interconnected points of view: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. If we consider that the main purpose of natural languages is communication, we should consider another dimension for languages, which deals with the influence of internal states of communicating individuals on meanings. Such a dimension we refer to as internalism. Within this context, internalism cannot be confused with psycholinguistics, in the same way pragmatics cannot be confused with sociolinguistics. In (...) particular, we argue, language is tied to its systematic use. This view leads us to a non-realist perspective on linguistics. We analyze the role of natural languages into dialogues, by comparing our proposal to the dialogical approach to logic, which considers a dialogue as a game. Within our approach, there is no way to guarantee that two parties involved in a dialogue are playing the same game, due to unavoidable differences in their respective internal states. Another contribution of this paper is to argue that semantics plays a more fundamental role than syntax in the cognitive acquisition of languages. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel account of the contents of memory. By drawing on insights from the philosophy of perception, I propose a hybrid account of the contents of memory designed to preserve important aspects of representationalist and relationalist views. The hybrid view I propose also contributes to two ongoing debates in philosophy of memory. First, I argue that, in opposition to eternalist views, the hybrid view offers a less metaphysically-charged solution to the co-temporality problem. Second, I show how the (...) hybrid view conceives of the relationship between episodic memory and other forms of episodic thinking. I conclude by considering some disanalogies between perception and memory and by replying to objections. I argue that, despite there being important differences between memory and perception, those differences do not harm my project. (shrink)

The debate over the objects of episodic memory has for some time been stalled, with few alternatives to familiar forms of direct and indirect realism being advanced. This paper moves the debate forward by building on insights from the recent psychological literature on memory as a form of episodic hypothetical thought (or mental time travel) and the recent philosophical literature on relationalist and representationalist approaches to perception. The former suggests that an adequate account of the objects of episodic memory will (...) have to be a special case of an account of the objects of episodic hypothetical thought more generally. The latter suggests that an adequate account of the objects of episodic hypothetical thought will have to combine features of direct realism and representationalism. We develop a novel pragmatist-inspired account of the objects of episodic hypothetical thought that has the requisite features. (shrink)

The (dis)continuism debate—the debate over whether remembering is a form of imagining—is a prominent one in contemporary philosophy of memory. In recent work, Langland-Hassan (2021) has argued that this debate is best understood as a dispute over whether remembering is a form of constructive imagining. In this paper, I argue that remembering is not a form of constructive imagining because constructive processes in remembering and imagining are constrained, and hence controlled, in different ways at the level of consciousness. More specifically, (...) I argue that remembering and imagining differ in terms of the interventions we can make on the constructive processes as they unfold. If this is correct, then a form of discontinuism is vindicated: remembering and imagining are, on this view, processes of different kinds. (shrink)

O que é o lembrar? Quando podemos dizer que um sujeito lembra um evento do passado? Essas são duas questões centrais na filosofia da memória, uma área que vem experimentando uma rápida expansão nos últimos anos. Por quase meio século, a teoria causal da memória, inicialmente proposta por Martin e Deutscher, dominou o debate sobre como devemos responder às duas questões iniciais. Mais recentemente, no entanto, a teoria causal se tornou alvo de duras críticas, o que motivou os filósofos da (...) memória a desenvolverem duas novas teorias sobre o lembrar: a teoria simulacionista e a teoria funcionalista. Neste artigo, exploramos essas teorias em mais detalhes com o objetivo de tornar mais claro quais são seus comprometimentos, assim como suas vantagens e desvantagens. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between a prominent version of the relational view of memory and recent work on forms of unsuccessful remembering or memory errors. I argue that unsuccessful remembering poses an important challenge for the relational view. Unsuccessful remembering can be divided into two kinds: misremembering and confabulating. I discuss each of these cases in light of a recent relational account, according to which remembering is characterized by an experiential relation to past events, and I argue that experiential (...) relations do not adequately distinguish between remembering and unsuccessful remembering. This is because there are, on the one hand, cases of remembering that do not instantiate the relevant experiential relations, and, on the other hand, cases of confabulation and misremembering that do instantiate the relevant experiential relations. I conclude by suggesting that any successful relationalist attempt to explain remembering needs to come to grips with unsuccessful remembering. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of perception that reconciles representationalism and relationalism by relying on pragmatist ideas. I call it the pragmatic view of perception. I argue that fully reconciling representationalism and relationalism requires, first, providing a theory in which how we perceive the world involves representations; second, preserving the idea that perception is constitutively shaped by its objects; and third, offering a direct realist account of perception. This constitutes what I call the Hybrid Triad. I discuss how Charles Peirce’s (...) theory of perception can provide a framework for such a view and I devote the rest of the paper to developing my own pragmatic and Peircean theory of perception. In particular, I argue that considering perception as a continuous temporal process, which essentially involves interaction with the environment, allows us to do justice to the Hybrid Triad. I motivate this view by discussing how a pragmatic theory of perception would deal with issues such as the distinction between veridical and non-veridical experiences and the nature of perceptual objects. (shrink)

The 12 chapters cover 6 questions: I. What is the relationship between memory and imagination? II. Do memory traces have content? III. What is the nature of mnemonic confabulation? IV. What is the function of episodic memory? V. Do non-human animals have episodic memory? VI. Does episodic memory give us knowledge of the past?

The idea that episodic memory is memory of particulars is prominent in philosophy. The particularity of remembering, as I will call it, has been taken for granted in most recent theorizing on the subject. This is because the classical causal theory of memory, which has been extremely influential in philosophy, is said to provide a straightforward account of particularity. But the causal theory has been criticized recently, in particular due to its inability to make sense of the constructive character of (...) remembering. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to account for the constructive character of remembering have failed to account for its particularity. This is either because they depart in important senses from the classical causal theory’s account of mnemonic causation or because they give up on mnemonic causation altogether. I then proceed to consider the question of whether we should go back to the classical causal theory of memory to account for particularity. I argue that, despite the widespread idea that the classical causal theory offers a straightforward account of particularity, there are good reasons to reject it. The upshot is that philosophers of memory should consider alternative accounts of particularity that do not revolve around mnemonic causation. (shrink)

I briefly discuss the epistemological role of quasi-set theory in mathematics and theoretical physics. Quasi-set theory is a first order theory, based on Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with Urelemente. Nevertheless, quasi-set theory allows us to cope with certain collections of objects where the usual notion of identity is not applicable, in the sense that $x = x$ is not a formula, if $x$ is an arbitrary term. Basically, quasi-set theory offers us some sort of logical apparatus for questioning the need for (...) identity in some branches of mathematics and theoretical physics. I also use this opportunity to discuss a misunderstanding about quasi-sets due mainly to Nicholas J. J. Smith, who argues, in a general way, that sense cannot be made of vague identity. (shrink)

Wetenschappelijke bezinning op de betekenis van de ethiek van de humanistische psycholoog (1900-1980) o.a. door vergelijking met de ethiek van Marx en de existentiefilosofie.

Originally understood as memory for the “what”, the “when”, and the “where” of experienced past events, episodic memory has, in recent years, been redefined as a form of past-oriented mental time travel. Following a brief review of empirical research on memory as mental time travel, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, which explore the theoretical implications of that research.

The current dispute between causalists and simulationists in philosophy of memory has led to opposing attempts to characterize the relationship between memory and imagination. In a recent overview of this debate, Perrin and Michaelian have suggested that the dispute over the continuity between memory and imagination boils down to the question of whether a causal connection to a past event is necessary for remembering. By developing an argument based on an analogy to perception, I argue that this dispute should instead (...) be viewed as a dispute about the nature of the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining. The focus on attitudes, rather than on causal connections, suggests a new way of conceiving of the relationship between memory and imagination that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of memory. (shrink)

The questions of whether episodic memory is a propositional attitude, and of whether it has propositional content, are central to discussions about how memory represents the world, what mental states should count as memories, and what kind of beings are capable of remembering. Despite its importance to such topics, these questions have not been addressed explicitly in the recent literature in philosophy of memory. In one of the very few pieces dealing with the topic, Fernández (2006) provides a positive answer (...) to the initial questions by arguing that the propositional attitude view of memory, as I will call it, provides a simple account of how memory possesses truth-conditions. A similar suggestion is made by Byrne (2010) when he proposes that perception and episodic memory have the same kind of content, differing only in degree. Against the propositional attitude view, I will argue that episodic memory does not have propositional content, and therefore, that it is not a propositional attitude. My project here is, therefore, mainly critical. I will show that, if empirical work is to inform our philosophical theories of memory in any way, we have good reasons to deny, or at least to be skeptical, of the prospects of the propositional attitude view of episodic memory. (shrink)

It is easy to show that in many natural axiomatic formulations of physical and even mathematical theories, there are many superfluous concepts usually assumed as primitive. This happens mainly when these theories are formulated in the language of standard set theories, such as Zermelo–Fraenkel’s. In 1925, John von Neumann created a set theory where sets are definable by means of functions. We provide a reformulation of von Neumann’s set theory and show that it can be used to formulate physical and (...) mathematical theories with a lower number of primitive concepts very naturally. Our basic proposal is to offer a new kind of set-theoretic language that offers advantages with respect to the standard approaches, since it doesn’t introduce dispensable primitive concepts. We show how the proposal works by considering significant physical theories, such as non-relativistic classical particle mechanics and classical field theories, as well as a well-known mathematical theory, namely, group theory. This is a first step of a research program we intend to pursue. (shrink)

We present an axiomatic framework for semantics that can be applied to natural and formal languages. Our main goal is to suggest a very simple mathematical model that describes fundamental cognitive aspects of the human brain and that can still be applied to artificial intelligence. One of our main results is a theorem that allows us to infer syntactical properties of a language out of its corresponding semantics. The role of pragmatics in semantics in our mathematical framework is also discussed.

This paper aims to examine the place of the dramatic in the Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, through a comparative approach between this work and two others : Les Concepts fondamentaux de poétique and Les Deux cent mille situations dramatiques, in order to consider another possible order for the sequence of the structures proposed by Gilbert Durand, although the author declared in a note that he did not choose to follow « the ontogenetic plane of the emergence of dominant reflexes (...) ». (shrink)

Alethism is the view that successful remembering only requires an accurate representation of a past event. It opposes the truth-and-authenticity view, according to which successful remembering requires both an accurate representation of a past event and an accurate representation of a past experience of that event. Alethism is able to handle problematic cases faced by the truth-and-authenticity view, but it faces an important challenge of its own: If successful remembering only requires accurately representing past events, then how is it possible (...) that our memories are also experienced as originating in past experiences of those events? I call this the puzzle of alethic memory. I argue that alethism can be reconciled with the claim that memories are experienced as originating in past experiences of those events—what I call the experience of first-handedness—if we conceive of the phenomenology of remembering in metacognitive terms. According to the metacognitive approach that I favor, the phenomenology of remembering is partly explained by what memory represents and partly explained by the existence of a metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations. I argue that accounting for the feeling of first-handedness in terms of the metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations allows us to solve the puzzle of alethic memory. (shrink)

The idea that episodic memory is a form of mental time travel has played an important role in the development of memory research in the last couple decades. Despite its growing importance in psychology, philosophers have only begun to develop an interest in philosophical questions pertaining to the relationship between memory and mental time travel. Thus, this paper proposes a more systematic discussion of the relationship between memory and mental time travel from the point of view of philosophy. I start (...) by discussing some of the motivations to take memory to be a form of mental time travel. I call the resulting view of memory the mental time travel view. I then proceed to consider important philosophical questions pertaining to memory and develop them in the context of the mental time travel view. I conclude by suggesting that the intersection of the philosophy of memory and research on mental time travel not only provides new perspectives to think about traditional philosophical questions, but also new questions that have not been explored before. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Justin D’Ambrosio (2020) has offered an empirical argument in support of a negative solution to the puzzle of Macbeth’s dagger—namely, the question of whether, in the famous scene from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth sees a dagger in front of him. D’Ambrosio’s strategy consists in showing that “seeing” is not an existence-neutral verb; that is, that the way it is used in ordinary language is not neutral with respect to whether its complement exists. In this paper, we offer (...) an empirical argument in favor of an existence-neutral reading of “seeing”. In particular, we argue that existence-neutral readings are readily available to language users. We thus call into question D’Ambrosio’s argument for the claim that Macbeth does not see a dagger. According to our positive solution, Macbeth sees a dagger, even though there is not a dagger in front of him. (shrink)

The viability of a naïve realist theory of memory was a lively debate for philosophers of mind in the first half of the twentieth century. More recently, though, naïve realism has been largely abandoned as a non-starter in the memory literature, with representationalism being the standard view held by philosophers of memory. But rather than being carefully argued, the dismissal of naïve realism is an assumption that sits at the back of much recent theorizing in the philosophy of memory. In (...) this paper, we identify three reasons why philosophers of memory have felt compelled to outright reject naïve realism. We argue that none of those reasons are successful. Thus, far from being a non-starter, we argue that naïve realism is a theoretical perspective that needs to be given serious consideration in current philosophy of memory debates. (shrink)

The major aim of this paper is to present some reflections about the political domain and the common good that may be helpful in answering the following issue: How can religions contribute to the common good? The problematic background of this paper can be summarized by the so-called Dilemma of Böckenförde, which presents the difficulties secular states have in creating social capital, and by the Habermasian notion of a “post-secular society,” an expression used by the German philosopher to summarize the (...) curious situations of Western secularized states, where religions continue to play important public roles. I will first discuss the notion of “neutralization” with the support of Carl Schmitt. Then I will present Chantal Mouffe’s doctrine of “agonistic pluralism” and her partial legitimization of the presence of religions in the political domain. Finally, I will criticize Mouffe’s approach with the help of Alasdair MacIntyre’s phenomenology of social practices in order to stress the importance of public religions in contemporary liberal societies. (shrink)

We recently showed that it is possible to deal withcollections of indistinguishable elementary particles (in thecontext of quantum mechanics) in a set-theoretical framework, byusing hidden variables. We propose in the presentpaper another axiomatics for collections of indiscernibleswithout hidden variables, where hidden predicates are implicitlyassumed. We also discuss the possibility of a quasi-settheoretical picture for quantum theory. Quasi-set theory, basedon Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, was developed for dealing withcollections of indistinguishable, but, not identical objects.

My goal in this paper is to argue that some cases of autobiographical remembering can be, and sometimes are, experienced aesthetically. Building on a Deweyan approach to the nature of aesthetic experiences, I show how Dewey conceived of aesthetic experiences as having a cumulative and progressive structure—I call experiences with such structure Deweyan experiences—and how that structure is replicated in some cases of autobiographical remembering in virtue of their having narrative structure. I also discuss the relationship between remembering and other (...) forms of narrative thinking and argue that not only it is easier for remembering to be experienced aesthetically, but also that only remembering can have the cumulative and progressive structure that characterizes Deweyan experiences. I conclude by showing how the Deweyan approach allows us to conceive of the aesthetic value of remembering in terms of the pleasurable or hedonic character of Deweyan experiences. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)