A SCIENTIFIC BUDDHISM?

This essay endorses the argument of Donald Lopez's Buddhism and Science and shows how the general thesis of the book is consonant with other historical work on the “discovery” of Buddhism and on the emergence of Western conceptions of religion. It asks whether one of the key claims of Buddhism and Science—that Buddhism pays a price for its flirtation with the modern sciences—might be applicable to science‐and‐religion discussions more generally.     

A Classical Prejudice?

In this paper, I reassess Floridi’s solution to the Bar-Hillel–Carnap paradox (the information yield of inconsistent propositions is maximal) by questioning the orthodox view that contradictions cannot be true. The main part of the paper is devoted to showing that the veridicality thesis (semantic information has to be true) is compatible with dialetheism (there are true contradictions) and that, unless we accept the additional non-falsity thesis (information cannot be false), there is no reason to presuppose that there is no such thing like contradictory information.     

Is Everything A World?

This paper discusses “inclusionism” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as\ John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realism; and finally that it suffers from an as-yet unsolved difficulty, the problem of the unmarried husbands. This problem also shows that Stephen Yablo’s analysis of “intrinsic” is inadequate. Thanks to Philip Bricker, Ross Cameron, Daniel Nolan, John Divers, Kit Fine, Kris McDaniel, Augustin Rayo, Steve Yablo, to participants in the Arche modality seminar, University of St Andrews, and to the delegates of the APA Pacific Division Conference 2005.     

A Puzzle for Particulars?

In this paper we examine a puzzle recently posed by Aaron Preston for the traditional realist assay of property (quality) instances. Consider Socrates (a red round spot) and red₁—Socrates’ redness. For the traditional realist, both of these entities are concrete particulars. Further, both involve redness being `tied to’ the same bare individuator. But then it appears that red₁ is duplicated in its ‘thicker’ particular (Socrates), so that it can’t be predicated of Socrates without redundancy. According to Preston, this suggests that a concrete particular and its property instances aren’t genuinely related. We argue that Preston’s proffered solution here—to treat property instances as “mental constructs”—is fraught with difficulty. We then go on to show how, by fine-tuning the nature of bare particulars, treating them as abstract modes of things rather than concrete particulars, the traditional realist can neatly evade Preston’s puzzle.

HAS PSYCHOLOGY A FUTURE?

I consider that psychologists have a duty to explore their own field, to create hypotheses about the behavior of animals, especially human, and to test these and look for possible causal relationships at the level of acting, thinking, perceiving humans m their environmental context Our agenda should be at this level, not one that depends on waiting for reductionist theories at some other level, be it neural, genetic, nuclear, or especially artificial To go about this work, a developmental approach, in a systems setting—the organism-environment system—holds great promise and has the dignity of successful precedents in other sciences
All of behavior—perceiving, acting, problem solving, communicating with others—should be our province The hallmarks of human behavior can and should be studied in all of these areas It IS their development that offers a road to understanding We should continue to look for theories of considerable generality, however elegant a model may be in a tiny realm If we tot find universal laws, we may still come up with unifying principles
Not so long ago, in another keynote address, George Miller told us that It was time to "give psychology away" (Miller, 1969) I am afraid that that is exactly what we are doing, though n the sense that Miller intended Let us keep psychology, recapture the old excitement, looking for the causes in behavior itself, and not giving up on the grand unified theory     

A dilemma for internalism?

Internalism about epistemic justification (henceforth, ‘internalism’) says that a belief B is epistemically justified for S only if S is aware of some good-making feature of B, some feature that makes for B’s having positive epistemic status: e.g., evidence for B. Externalists with respect to epistemic justification (‘externalists’) deny this awareness requirement. Michael Bergmann has recently put this dilemma against internalism: awareness admits of a strong and a weak construal; given the strong construal, internalism is subject to debilitating regress troubles; given the weak construal, internalism is unmotivated; either way, internalism is in serious trouble. I argue for two claims in this article. First, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unmotivated: he’s given no good reason for accepting one of its crucial premises. And second, Bergmann’s dilemma argument is unsound: the crucial premise in question is false.     

A Dao of Technology?

Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledge—superficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal—alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit.