Elements of Mind provides a unique introduction to the main problems and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Author Tim Crane opposes those currently popular conceptions of the mind that divide mental phenomena into two very different kinds (the intentional and the qualitative) and proposes instead a challenging and unified theory of all the phenomena of mind. In light of this theory, Crane engages students with the central problems of the philosophy of mind--the mind-body problem, the problem of intentionality (or (...) mental representation), the problem of consciousness, and the problem of perception--and attempts to find solutions to these problems. A fresh and engaging exploration of the main issues in the philosophy of mind, Elements of Mind is easily accessible to students with no background in the subject. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between labelled and nested calculi for propositional intuitionistic logic, first-order intuitionistic logic with non-constant domains and first-order intuitionistic logic with constant domains. It is shown that Fitting’s nested calculi naturally arise from their corresponding labelled calculi—for each of the aforementioned logics—via the elimination of structural rules in labelled derivations. The translational correspondence between the two types of systems is leveraged to show that the nested calculi inherit proof-theoretic properties from their associated labelled calculi, such as (...) completeness, invertibility of rules and cut admissibility. Since labelled calculi are easily obtained via a logic’s semantics, the method presented in this paper can be seen as one whereby refined versions of labelled calculi (containing nested calculi as fragments) with favourable properties are derived directly from a logic’s semantics. (shrink)

In an analysis of the role of emotion in self-deception is presented. It is argued that instances of emotional self-deception unproblematically meet Mele's jointly sufficient criteria. It is further proposed that a consideration of different forms of mental representation allows the possibility of instances of self-deception in which contradictory beliefs (in the form p and ~p) are held simultaneously with full awareness.

One of the tasks that recent philosophy of psychiatry has taken upon itself is to extend the range of understanding to some of those aspects of psychopathology that Jaspers deemed beyond its limits. Given the fundamental difficulties of offering a literal interpretation of the contents of primary delusions, a number of alternative strategies have been put forward including regarding them as abnormal versions of framework propositions described by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. But although framework propositions share some of the apparent (...) epistemic features of primary delusions, their role in partially constituting the sense of inquiry rules out their role in helping to understand delusions. (shrink)

Medicine involves specific practical expertise as well as more general context-independent medical knowledge. This raises the question, what is the nature of the expertise involved? Is there a model of clinical judgement or understanding that can accommodate both elements? This paper begins with a summary of a published account of the kinds of situation-specific skill found in anaesthesia. It authors claim that such skills are often neglected because of a prejudice in favour of the ‘technical rationality’ exemplified in evidence-based medicine (...) but they do not themselves offer a general account of the relation of practical expertise and general medical knowledge. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides one model of the relation of general knowledge to situation-specific skilled coping. He claims that the former logically depends on the latter and provides two arguments, which I articulate in the second section, for this. But he mars those arguments by building in the further assumption that such situation-specific responses must be understood as concept-free and thus mindless. That assumption is held in place by three arguments all of which I criticize in the next section to give a unified account of clinical judgement as both practical and conceptually structured and thus justified in the face of a prejudice in favour of ‘technical rationality’. (shrink)

In Paradoxes of Delusion, Sass aims to use passages from Wittgenstein to characterize the feeling of “mute particularity” that forms a part of delusional atmosphere. I argue that Wittgenstein’s discussion provides no helpful positive account. But his remarks on more everyday cases of the uncanny and the feeling of unreality might seem to promise a better approach via the expressive use of words in secondary sense. I argue that this also is a false hope but that, interestingly, there can be (...) no interesting or substantial explanation of this failure. (shrink)

The discipline of affective neuroscience is concerned with the underlying neural substrates of emotion and mood. This review presents an historical overview of the pioneering work in affective neuroscience of James and Lange, Cannon and Bard, and Hess, Papez, and MacLean before summarizing the current state of research on the brain regions identified by these seminal researchers. We also discuss the more recent strides made in the field of affective neuroscience. A final section considers different hypothetical organizations of affective neuroanatomy (...) and highlights future directions for the discipline. (shrink)

Recent models of cognition in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder predict that trauma-related, but not neutral, processing should be differentially affected in these patients, compared to trauma-exposed controls. This study compared a group of 50 patients with PTSD related to the war in Bosnia and a group of 50 controls without PTSD but exposed to trauma from the war, using the DRM method to induce false memories for war-related and neutral critical lures. While the groups were equally susceptible to neutral critical lures, (...) the PTSD group mistakenly recalled more war-related lures. Both false and correct recall were related more to depression than to self-rated trauma. Implications for accounts of false memories in terms of source-monitoring are discussed. (shrink)

Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation. This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. (...) Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates: What are roles and what is their normative import? To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general? Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine? How does practical reason function in relation to roles? Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life. (shrink)

There has been considerable recent philo- sophical work on the nature of mental illness. Two..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Symptom:Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic CriticismTim Dean (bio)This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Žižek's work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that it (...) qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Žižek articulates Lacan with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As Žižek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan claimed that Marx invented the symptom [SO 11]—an observation that Žižek has been keen to exploit from the very beginning of his work.Žižek's combining psychoanalysis with Marxism in novel ways has helped make Lacan more palatable to contemporary critical sensibilities by politicizing psychoanalysis, demonstrating how it offers less an account of the individual than of society and culture. In Žižek's hands psychoanalytic theory appears less vulnerable to the standard criticisms that it is ahistorical and apolitical. While a number of critiques of Žižek have reiterated these common objections, nevertheless his politicizing of psychoanalysis has been particularly important during a period that witnessed the rise of new historicism, the institutionalization of cultural studies, and the escalating importance of "the political" as a sign—perhaps the sign—of humanities professors' seriousness.1 Žižek's work has gone a long way toward making Lacan seem indispensable to cultural studies, just as Juliet Mitchell's and Jacqueline Rose's work a decade earlier made Lacan seem indispensable to theoretically rigorous feminism. At a moment when the poststructuralist variant of Lacanian theory was being displaced by historicist modes of thought, Žižek emerged on the scene to revivify psychoanalysis and make it exciting again. Thus his work's appeal has an historical basis quite apart from Žižek's own personal charisma and his remarkable productivity. It is his politicizing of psychoanalysis, as much as his [End Page 21] rendering Lacan newly accessible, that has made Žižek popular. I want to argue, however, that his style of politicizing psychoanalysis carries a significant ethical cost, one that follows partly as a consequence of Žižek's failure to work through his theoretical relation to Althusser, from whom he derives the practice of symptomatic reading while claiming to displace the latter's version of psychoanalytic Marxism. Thus I shall be arguing for a significant distinction between a political and an ethical psychoanalysis, suggesting that we have been cultivating the former at the expense of the latter.Spaghetti PsychoanalysisThe notion of the symptom is central to Žižek's thinking about politics and culture. Although in his work and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom carries a range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing trope of Žižek's oeuvre. Following Lacan, who continued to modify the concept of the symptom throughout his career, Žižek argues that just about anything can be understood as symptomatic:[I]n the final years of Lacan's teaching we find a kind of universalization of the symptom: almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom, so that finally even woman is determined as the symptom of man. We can even say that "symptom" is Lacan's final answer to the eternal philosophical question "Why is there something instead of nothing?"—this "something" which "is... (shrink)

The notion of capacity implicit in the Mental Capacity Act is subject to a tension between two claims. On the one hand, capacity is assessed relative to a particular decision. It is the capacity to make one kind of judgement, specifically, rather than another. So one can have capacity in one area and not have it in another. On the other hand, capacity is supposed to be independent of the ‘wisdom’ or otherwise of the decision made. (‘A person is not (...) to be treated as unable to make a decision merely because he makes an unwise decision.’ Department of Constitutional Affairs 2005, section 1). One may have capacity even if the decision one arrives at is seen as unwise by one’s doctor. In this short note, I explore this .. (shrink)

The World Psychiatric Association has emphasised the importance of idiographic understanding as a distinct component of comprehensive assessment but in introductions to the idea it is often assimilated to the notion of narrative judgement. This paper aims to distinguish between supposed idiographic and narrative judgement. Taking the former to mean a kind of individualised judgement, I argue that it has no place in psychiatry in part because it threatens psychiatric validity. Narrative judgement, by contrast, is a genuinely distinct complement to (...) criteriological diagnosis but it is, nevertheless, a special kind of general judgement and thus can possess validity. To argue this I first examine the origin of the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic in Windelband’s 1894 rectorial address. I argue that none of three ways of understanding that distinction is tenable. Windelband’s description of historical methods, as a practical example, does not articulate a genuine form of understanding. A metaphysical distinction between particulars and general kinds is guilty of subscribing to the Myth of the Given. A distinction based on an abstraction of essentially combined aspects of empirical judgement cannot underpin a distinct empirical method. Furthermore, idiographic elements understood as individualised judgements threaten the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. In the final part I briefly describe some aspects of the logic of narrative judgements and argue that in the call for comprehensive diagnosis, narrative rather than idiographic elements have an important role. Importantly, however, whilst directed towards individual subjects, narratives are framed in intrinsically general concepts and thus can aspire to validity. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Peter Goldie's theory of emotional thoughts and feelings, offered in his recent book The Emotions and subsequent articles. Goldie argues that emotional thoughts cannot be assimilated to belief or judgment, together with some added-on phenomenological component, and on this point I agree with him. However, he also argues that emotionally-laden thoughts, thoughts had, as he puts it, ‘with feeling,' in part differ from unemotional thoughts in their content. The thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous' when thought (...) with an emotional feeling of fear differs in its content from the thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous' when thought without actually feeling fear. I argue that Goldie offers no good reason to think that the difference between emotional and unemotional thoughts is found in their contents. In fact, the analogies Goldie presents to help make his case actually suggest that the contribution feelings make to the distinctive role played by emotional thoughts consists solely in their influencing the way we think emotional thoughts. However, this position is consistent with Goldie's broader point: that theories which treat emotional feelings as phenomenological afterthoughts should be rejected. (shrink)

Bilim ve felsefe, gerçekliğin doğasını anlamlandırma araştırması olarak betimlenebilir. Hatta bazen bu iki alan karşı karşıya getirilerek, bilimin başarısının felsefenin geçerliliğini baltaladığını öne sürerler. Ancak aranılan türden bir anlayış veya açıklama ile ilgilenmek farklı bir tablo sunar: Uygulandığı şekliyle çağdaş fizik bazen dünyanın net bir fiziksel açıklamasını sağlamakta başarısız olur. Einstein, Schrödinger ve John Bell tarafından ifade edilen standart kuantum teorisine yönelik memnuniyetsizliğin temelinde bu yatmaktadır. Bir örnek olarak, Schrödinger’in ünlü kedi örneğinin yakından incelenmesi fizikçilerin genellikle onun asıl amacını kaçırdığını (...) göstermektedir. Felsefi bir eğilimin katkıda bulunabileceği şey, alternatif fizik değil, matematiksel bir biçimcilikten fiziksel bir resim çıkarmak için gerekli olan argümana gösterilen özendir. (shrink)

KEYWORDS: Validity, reliability, values, taxonomy, clas- sification, McDowell.

This review focuses on the theory of emotion outlined in Chapter 3 of Rolls's The brain and emotion. It is proposed that Rolls's emphasis on a relatively simple neurobiologically derived emotion scheme does not allow him to present a comprehensive account of emotion. Consequently, high-level cognitive processes, such as appraisal, end up being retained in the theory despite Rolls's skepticism about their utility. An argument is put forward that the concept of appraisal in the emotion literature is more than semantic (...) convention and actually allows us to talk about multiple functional-level routes to the generation of emotion – a characteristic of the latest generation of theories in the cognition-emotion literature. (shrink)

This chapter sets out an account of tacit knowledge as conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge. It sets this out against two claims from Michael Polanyi which conjoin the idea that we know more than we can tell with the suggestion that knowledge is practical. Any account of tacit knowledge which attempts to respond to Polanyi’s first claim faces a twofold test of adequacy. It must be tacit and it must be knowledge. To count as knowledge some content must be (...) known but that puts pressure on its tacit status. What stops such a content being put into words? I reject Polanyi’s attempt to answer this based on a distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. And I reject Harry Collins’ process-based approach that looks more to ontology than epistemology or reference more than sense. By equating tacit knowledge with conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge or know-how, I show the respect in which it remains tacit. Although it can be expressed in demonstrations, and is related to concepts, it cannot be expressed in words alone. (shrink)

The paper begins by asking, in the context of McDowell's Mind and World, what guides empirical judgement. It then critically examines David Bell's account of the role of aesthetic judgement, or experience, in Kant and Wittgenstein, in shedding light on empirical judgement. Bell's suggestion that a Wittgensteinian account of aesthetic experience can guide the application of empirical concepts is criticised: neither the discussion of aesthetic judgement nor aesthetic experience helps underpin empirical judgement. But attention to the parallel between Wittgenstein's discussion (...) of understanding rules and the question of how empirical concepts can be applied to particulars suggests how to dissolve the felt need for an answer. This in turn helps shed light on McDowell's conceptualist account of experience. (shrink)

It seems obvious that one of the harms that dementia does is to undermine the person’s identity. One reason for thinking this is that personal identity has long been associated with continuity of a subjective perspective on the world held together by memory that that memory is severely curtailed in dementia. Hence dementia seems to threaten an individual’s identity as a particular person, gradually undermining it. But the necessity of the connection has been criticised by a number of philosophers and (...) healthcare professionals who subscribe to a narrative account of personal identity. If personal identity is constituted through a personal narrative rather than, for example, a memory connection, then while the capacity to author a self-narrative also seems to be threatened by dementia, that need not undermine personal identity providing that the narrative that constitutes identity can be co-constructed. In this paper I set out the danger of any such view, explore its motivations and provide a minimal account of the role of narrative in dementia making use of the Wittgensteinian notion of secondary sense. (shrink)

Person Centred Medicine is a substantial and contentious view of healthcare that carries both ontological and epistemological presuppositions. This chapter examines two key aspects: that the person is a central, basic irreducible element in ontology and that person-level knowledge is both important and possible. Some reasons for holding both of these are sketched.

This paper sets to answering the question of how Lacan’s 1959-60 Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis[1], with its recurring critique of the Platonic idea of a moral Sovereign Good, might contribute to and improve our understanding of the Nietzschean project to diagnose the moral metaphysics instigated by Plato in philosophy, and by Christianity in religion, as a history of untruth and nihilism––opposed to life––in preparation for its overcoming. I explore the possibility that Lacan’s Ethics might make such a contribution (...) by i) its tripartite ontology of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary serving as an additional frame of reference for examining the nature of the Good and our configurations of desire beneath it; and ii) by its more detailed elaboration of the archaic, polymorphous perversity at the instinctual base of the drives, what Lacan in his Ethics will call das Ding, the somewhat diabolical Freudian Thing. I also attempt to indicate how Nietzsche’s own ethics might make a contribution to those of the Lacanian, for the purposes of further combating what I will take to be the contemporary neurosis and nihilism of a ‘life’ against life––as indicated today for instance by such phenomena as the physical destruction of the environment, along with us as amongst its earthly inhabitants. (shrink)

_Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics._.

In “semantic vagueness in Psychiatric Nosology,” Nicholas Tilmes offers a conditional claim for further consideration. The conditional is that “if psychiatric vagueness exists, there is reason to think that some cases of it are at least partially semantic.” From this, some conclusions worth investigating follow. In this brief commentary I will set out a question Tilmes introduces by, like him, drawing on a paper by Miriam Schoenfield, which also examines vagueness as semantic, epistemic or ontic though she draws a contrasting (...) conclusion for her subject matter: moral judgment. Highlighting a supposed contrast between semantic and ontic vagueness will also highlight an issue for... (shrink)

I believe that Wright’s constructivist account of intention is funda- mentally flawed [Wright 1984, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1992]. To understand why it fails it is necessary first to locate the account in its broader strategic context. That context is Wright’s response to Wittgenstein’s account of rule following. When so located the diagnosis of the account’s failure is clear. Wright’s account of intention is a species of the interpretative approach to mental content which is explicitly rejected by (...) Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The harmful dysfunction account of disorder separates an explicitly normative or evaluative notion of harm from the idea of dysfunction which is subject to a reductionist naturalistic account. Dysfunction is analysed as a failure of function which is itself reduced via evolutionary biology. In this paper, I question this latter aspect of the account. Light can be shed on the prospect of reducing the apparently normative notion of dysfunction by comparing it with two distinct reductionist projects in the philosophy of (...) content which stand to each other as do the contrasting options in the euthyphro dilemma. A more modest project takes for granted the structure of normative relations between concepts and attempts to solve an engineering problem of how human thought can fit that structure. A more ambitious project aims to explain that structure itself in naturalistic terms. The ambitious project, however, is undermined by an argument from Wittgenstein. I argue that the harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder has to be interpreted as isomorphous with the latter project and is thus subject to the same objection. (shrink)

The two main psychiatric taxonomies set out codifications of psychiatric diagnoses via lists of symptoms with the aim of maximizing the reliability of diagnostic judgements. This approach has been criticized, however, for failing to capture the precise connection between diagnostic judgements and symptoms as detected by skilled clinicians. Assuming that this criticism is correct, this chapter offers two related accounts of why this might be so. First, skilled diagnostic judgement may be an exercise of tacit knowledge: a practical skill the (...) exercise of which requires the presence of the patient. Second, the conception of criteria implicit in the DSM and ICD is based on a mistaken view of how what people say and do connects to their mental states. On an alternative account, in an overall gestalt diagnostic judgement the various criteria are abstractions from a whole that directly expresses the underlying psychopathological state of patients or clients. (shrink)

Psychiatry’s inchoate wish for a paradigm shift and the biopsychosocial model of mental illness’ critically examines the much discussed goal of a paradigm shift in psychiatric taxonomy. The chapter first highlights some illustrative calls for such a change and then sets these against the Kuhnian account of science from which the idea is taken, highlighting the connection to incommensurability. Relative to a distinction drawn from Winch, between putative sciences where the self-understanding of subjects plays no role and those where it (...) is fundamental, psychiatry falls into the latter kind. This suggests that the wish for a paradigm shift in psychiatry is either incoherent or a wish for a radical but unpredictable overhaul of a significant aspect of our self-understanding as subjects and agents. The biopsychosocial model of mental illness is thus a helpful reminder of the cost of a paradigm shift in psychiatry. (shrink)

This paper examines the account offered by Bolton and Hill (1996) of how reasons can be causes, and thus how symptoms of mental disorders can be both caused and carry meaning. The central problem is to reconcile the causal and rationalizing powers of content-laden mental states. I draw out these two aspects by putting them in the context of recent work in analytical philosophy, including Davidson's token identity theory and his account of mental disorder. The latter, however, can be used (...) to emphasize in a novel way what is becoming a familiar charge: that Davidson does not show how mental content, as opposed to the physical bearers of that content, can itself play a causal role. (edited). (shrink)

In response to concerns about the subsuming of individuals under essential general psychiatric diagnostic categories, there have been calls for an idiographic component in person specific diagnostic formulations. The distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic was introduced by Windelband as his contribution to the Methodenstreit. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is unclear what the distinction is supposed to comprise. In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on the motivation for the distinction by looking at a number of (...) recent approaches to healthcare that share a concern with a focus on individuals. Despite this shared element in their motivation, I argue that none help to articulate the nature of the idiographic itself. This chapter broadens the central claim of my chapter in the 2019 Yearbook of Idiographic Science, here drawing on a clue from Windelband’s student Rickert to argue that there is a role for the idiographic in healthcare though not as a form of judgement, understanding or intelligibility but rather a specific singular interest in an individual. It is this that also underpins developments in healthcare related to the individual or person. (shrink)