Attention norms in Siegel’s The Rationality of Perception

Can we be responsible for our attention? Can attention be epistemically good or bad? Siegel tackles these under‐explored questions in “Selection Effects”, a pathbreaking chapter of The Rationality of Perception. In this chapter, Siegel develops one of the first philosophical accounts of attention norms. Her account is inferential: patterns of attention are often controlled by inferences and therefore subject to rational epistemic norms that govern any other form of inference. Although Siegel’s account is explanatorily powerful, it cannot capture a core attention norm in cognitive science: one should balance between exploratory and exploitative attention. For central cases of exploratory attention such as mind‐wandering, child‐like, and creative thinking are non‐inferential. Siegel’s view classifies them as “normative freebies” that are not subject to epistemic evaluation. We’re therefore left with a disjunctive conclusion: either Siegel’s inferentialist theory of attention norms is incomplete or cognitive scientists are wrong about the norms that govern attention.     

Saint Thomas Aquinas's Pagan Virtues?

Today's conversations in virtue ethics are enflamed with questions of “pagan virtues,” which often designate non‐Christian virtue from a Christian perspective. “Pagan virtues,” “pagan vices,” and their historied interpretations are the subject of Jennifer Herdt's book Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008). I argue that the questions and language animating Herdt's book are problematic. I offer an alternative strategy to Herdt's for reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. My results are twofold: (1) a different set of conclusions and questions regarding the moral life that lend a fresh perspective to “pagan virtues” and (2) corresponding methodological suggestions for improving Herdt's project that would, to my mind, reaffirm her normative conclusions regarding the most viable ways forward for contemporary discussions of virtue.     

TO HAVE DONE (TRULY) WITH METAPHYSICS

One cannot consider the future of continental philosophy without accounting for its specific “hermeneutic situation.” It seems to us that the state of continental philosophy today returns us to metaphysics and to the possibility of truly having done with it. Continental philosophy, in reality, does not cease to live metaphysically, because by asserting the end of metaphysics, it still continues to think according to the topos of the here‐and‐now and the beyond: that which seeks the ruin of the heavens continues to obsess over the heavens; the cult of immanence can only understand itself in opposition to the other world, therefore in constant reference to it; insufficiently radical, the critique, in the words of Karl‐Otto Apel, is but an “inverted metaphysics.” Our inversions of the for and against (the sensible vs. the intelligible, the body vs. the soul, the empirical vs. the transcendental, and more recently, the multiple vs. the one) still belong to the landscape of metaphysics. How do we imagine what comes after metaphysics? Can philosophy think according to a topos other than the one of the world above and the world below? Can it respatialize itself in a new way? Put more precisely, can we accept what science tells us about the world and about humanity in any other way than as the deposing of the other world? Can science provide us with anything other than weapons against metaphysics; in other words, can science give us anything other than metaphysics? As a response to these questions, we imagine an alternative scenario tied to the (scientifically attested) fact of our animal origin. Our animal origin can be, for philosophy and more specifically for phenomenology, the chance for a new beginning. But it can do so only on the condition that it does not follow the current method of evolutionary psychology. If it is true that we can be metaphysicians while being reductionistic, because we thus preserve the “old schema,” then evolutionary psychology is today, in virtue of its very reductionism, one of the more metaphysical currents of thought. Conversely, if phenomenology decides to face the fact of evolution and to confront its estrangement, we think that it possesses all the resources to invent a new intellectual landscape.     

Testimony as a Social Foundation of Knowledge

Testimony is the mainstay of human communication and essential for the spread of knowledge. But testimony may also spread error. Under what conditions does it yield knowledge in the person addressed? Must the recipient trust the attester? And does the attester have to know what is affirmed? A related question is what is required for the recipient to be justified in believing testimony. Is testimony‐based justification acquired in the same way as testimony‐based knowledge? This paper addresses these and other questions. It offers a theory of the role of testimony in producing knowledge and justification, a sketch of a conception of knowledge that supports this theory, a brief account of how trust of others can be squared with critical habits of mind, and an outline of some important standards for intellectual responsibility in giving and receiving testimony.     

COLLECTIVE RELIGIO‐SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSIONS ON ISLAM AND HIV/AIDS: I. BIOMEDICAL SCIENTISTS

During the 1990s, biomedical scientists and Muslim religious scholars collaborated to construe Islamic responses for the ethical questions raised by the AIDS pandemic. This is the first of a two‐part study examining this collective legal reasoning (ijtihād jamā‘ī). The main thesis is that the role of the biomedical scientists is not limited to presenting scientific information. They engaged in the human rights discourse pertinent to people living with HIV/AIDS, gave an account of the preventive strategy adopted by the World Health Organization, and offered an (Islamic) virtue‐based preventive model. Finally, these scientists tried to draft a number of Islamic legal rulings (a?kām), usually seen in Islamic jurisprudence as the exclusive business of Muslim religious scholars. This multilayered role played by the scientists reflects intriguing developments in the Islamic religio‐ethical discourse in general and in the field of Islamic jurisprudence in particular.     

The fragmentation of the religious tradition of the creation,after‐life and morality: Modernity not post‐modernity

Religion asks three central questions: ‘What becomes of us after death?’, ‘How should we lead a moral life?’, and ‘How and why were the universe, life and human beings created?’ In the past, these questions were answered together as part of a single unified narrative. From the mid‐nineteenth century onwards, the growth of modern science and of spiritualism led to a fragmentation of this religious tradition so that the questions are now often asked separately and the answers combined in unexpected ways. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of modernity, not post‐modernity. Post‐modernists have suggested that there has been a recent, new and definitive ending of modernity with a collapse of all dominant grand narratives. Religion is one of the grand narratives supposed to have suddenly unravelled and fragmented in this recent sea‐change, although post‐modernists in general have not bothered to provide the empirical evidence to demonstrate this. The detailed account of the long, slow process of religious fragmentation and the particular role of nineteenth‐century spiritualism given here shows that the post‐modernist thesis does not work for Europe's most important grand narrative—the Christian religion. We can see rather a process of slow unravelling of the origins which go back at the very least to the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of classic modernity and confidence in progress. This tendency towards fragmentation has continued at least in Europe, but religion persists; it has not experienced the mushroom rise and sudden implosion that has characterised the (until recently) fashionable, grand narratives of the secular intellectuals. We are living in modern, not post‐modern, times.     

Raising the Virtuous Bar: The Underlying Issues of Genetic Moral Enhancement

From the perspective of virtue ethics, is it possible and permissible to enhance moral behavior through gene modification? In preparation to answer this question, we must ask five questions: (1) What may we assume regarding genetic inheritance and human nature? (2) Can specific genes predispose behavior related to the moral virtues? (3) What kind of genetic enhancement would be useful for moral enhancement? (4) Should there be a distinction between somatic and germline gene modification? (5) Is genetic modification best approach to moral enhancement? This article concedes that genetic engineering has the capacity to enhance the human disposition to moral behavior, but gene editing cannot create virtue because virtues are stable, habituated dispositions, acquired over time. That being said, gene editing for purposes of enhancing moral behavior is permissible.     

‘CREATIONISM’ AND THE CONTINGENT A PRIORI

Williamson (1986) presents a troublesome example of the contingent a priori; troublesome, because it does not involve indexicals, and hence cannot be defused via the usual two‐dimensional strategies. Here I explore how the example works, via an examination of crucial belief‐forming method M, partly in response to Hawthorne (2002) and the questions there raised for ‘hyperreliable’ belief‐forming methods. I suggest that, when used to form a belief, M does its special work through creating a verifying state of affairs which guarantees the truth of the belief thus formed. This creative link can be said to account for the knowledge‐conferring status of M. But it also provides us with a way to defuse the purported example of the contingent a priori. The knowledge at issue is only a priori in virtue of this creative link, an importantly different epistemic achievement from standard cases of a priori knowledge. One important moral to be drawn is that the a priori/a posteriori distinction does not appear to be slicing the epistemological beast at its joints.     

“Patching up Virtue”

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter‐narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper‐Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term.     

The effects of length and transposed‐letter similarity in lexical decision: Evidence with beginning,intermediate, and adult readers

Do length and transposed‐letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed‐letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal–ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal–ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long words were read slower than short words) that vanished in adults. In addition, both children and young adults showed a transposed‐letter priming effect relative to the control condition. A robust transposed‐letter priming effect was also observed in non‐word reading, which strongly suggests that this effect occurs at an early prelexical level. Taken together, the results reveal that children evolve from a letter‐by‐letter reading to a direct lexical access and that the lexical decision task successfully captures the changing strategies used by beginning, intermediate, and adult readers. We examine the implications of these findings for the recent models of visual word recognition.     

Handedness shapes children's abstract concepts

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right‐handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left‐handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right‐handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left‐handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right‐handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left‐handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right‐ and left‐handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body‐specificity hypothesis ( Casasanto, 2009 ), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways.     

The paradox of evolution

In the second (and expanded) version of Origin of the Species, Darwin introduces the term “advanced progressive development” in an attempt to describe the development of the more complex species from the simpler ones. More than 100 years have passed since Darwin tried to qualify and conceptualize the directional question of evolution, and very little progress has been made regarding the subject. The appearance of the species, from the simple to the more complex, is today an empirical fact, one which is no longer dependent upon any theory, including that of Darwin. This work examines the subject of advanced development in evolution by attempting to answer a few basic questions: What parameters may be used to evaluate complexity? Can any rules or order be identified as to the development of the species? Is the mechanism of “natural selection” sufficient to explain the direction or ‘purpose’ of evolution? Can the human race be included within the “rules” of Darwin's evolutionary theory?

The purpose of this essay is to develop and represent a new conceptual framework. Through this, it will be possible to offer a principle answer to all four questions.     

Learning About Teaching from the Traditions We Teach: Reflections on an Undergraduate Buddhism Course

Abstract. Can one engage in pedagogical reflection from within the worldviews and practices of the religious traditions that one teaches? This essay explores the possibility of generating comparative models for teaching and learning via the Buddhist concepts of no‐self (anātman), skilful means (upāya‐kau?alya), and awakening (bodhi).     

The diagnostic and statistical manual: sacred text for a secular community?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the most widely used diagnostic system by mental health professionals in North America. It provides a shared language and paradigm by which practitioners view clients. Can it be argued that the DSM represents a sacred text and defines a worldview for an identifiable community of mental health professionals? In what ways is the relationship between this community and document similar to and different from the relationships that explicitly religious communities maintain with their sacred texts?     

Wisdom as an Expert Skill

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities.     

William James and the ‘willfulness’ of belief

This paper explicates and defends some of William James' more controversial claims in ‘The Will to Believe’. After showing some of the weaknesses in standard interpretations of James' position, I turn to James' Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience to spell out in more detail James' account of the nature of the attitudes of belief, doubt, and disbelief and link them to an account of the subject. In so doing, the moral force of the argument comes to the fore by casting the question ‘Can we believe at will?’ in a new light. Through a discussion of the conversion experiences of The Varieties of Religious Experience and the kinds of self‐transformations in which beliefs that once appeared dead become live (or vice versa) that appear throughout James' psychology, the moral urgency of James' position in ‘The Will to Believe’ is clarified.     

How Bad Can Good People Be?

Can a virtuous person act contrary to the virtue she possesses? Can virtues have “holes”—or blindspots—and nonetheless count as virtues? Gopal Sreenivasan defends a notion of a blindspot that is, in my view, an unstable moral category. I will argue that no trait possessing such a “hole” can qualify as a virtue. My strategy for showing this appeals to the importance of motivation to virtue, a feature of virtue to which Sreenivasan does not adequately attend. Sreenivasan’s account allows performance alone to be a reliable indicator of the possession of virtue. I argue that, at least with respect to a classical, Aristotelian conception of virtue, this assumption is mistaken: a person is said to possess a virtue only when she is properly motivated. In my view, the nature of motivation required for the possession of Aristotelian virtue does not admit of blindspots. I am not primarily interested in details about the situationist critique of virtue theory but rather the implications that blindspots have for our conception of virtue. I argue that because the practical reasoning of the virtuous requires both cognitive and motivational coherence, the motivational structure of the virtuous agent cannot accommodate blindspots. My conclusion is neither a defense of motivational internalism nor of an idealized conception of Aristotelian virtue. My aim is to show that because blindspotted virtue does not cohere well with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous agency, friends of virtue theory must choose one or the other; they cannot have both.     

Performing the imago Dei: human enhancement,artificial intelligence and optative image-bearing

If the imago Dei is not a taxonomic definition but rather something that is performed in context, what are the implications for questions of human enhancement and the development of artificial intelligence (AI)? The author considers Alistair McFadyen’s performative vision of the imago Dei, one that actively seeks humanity in concrete situations, in the context of human enhancement and AI, asking the questions, ‘Does becoming cyborg through human enhancement make us less bearers of the divine image?’ And, ‘Can AI ever be considered to be in the image of God?’ Briefly tracing the shift in perspectives on the imago Dei, before considering what a performance of the image might look like, the author proposes three performances that have significant implications for questions about what it means to be human. To be an image-bearer is not dependent upon human DNA or species membership, but on an optative performance of the imago Dei.     

Facilitation by Variation: Right-to-Left Learning of English Yes/No Questions

This study advances the hypothesis that optional structural variation in language facilitates syntactic learning (facilitation‐by‐variation). Support for this is provided by a right‐to‐left‐elaboration acquisition model for English yes/no questions (YNQs). Previous studies have focused on the acquisition of ‘‘inverted’’ YNQs, a cornerstone of nativist theories of language development. Data from five American children (1;3 to 5;1) and their parents show that children hear a range of adult questions (Coming?You coming?Are you coming?), not all inverted. These variants are ordered from structurally least complex noncanonical forms to complex canonical inverted forms. I use state‐of‐the‐art econometric techniques to estimate breakpoints in YNQ time series and show that noncanonical questions emerge early in children’s speech and facilitate acquisition of canonical ones. This incremental structure‐building process relies on an adjunction strategy that augments noncanonical questions with initial auxiliaries and subjects. Development proceeds incrementally from right to left to derive auxiliary‐initial structures.     

Heidegger and hallucination

Can Heidegger account for hallucination? I argue that while Heidegger does not develop an account of hallucination, he gives us all the resources we need to develop such an account. I first discuss a prominent argument against the very possibility of such an account. I argue that this argument is mistaken. I then discuss Heidegger's brief remarks on hallucination. In analysing a particular case study, Heidegger claims that the subject hallucinates for two reasons. First, he fails to realize the distinction between the different ways entities are present to him. For this reason, he cannot encounter a particular entity as it is present. Second, he is unable to do anything about the fact and manner of the presence of that entity. He is ‘unable to move in his world freely’, as Heidegger puts it. I show how these remarks, when taken in combination with Heidegger's broader ontology, allow us to explain the possibility of hallucination in a distinctively Heideggerian way.