The Many Faces of Psychoontology

Psychoontology is a philosophical theory of the cognizing subject and various related matters. In this article. I present two approaches to the discipline—the first proposed by Jerzy Perzanowski, the second by Jesse Prinz and Yoram Hazony. I then undertake to bring these into unity using certain ideas from Husserl and Frege. Applying the functor qua, psychoontology can be described as a discipline concerned with: (a) the cognizing subject qua being—this leads to the question: what kind of being is the subject (is it an object?, simple or complex?, a process?) and what makes him/her/it possible; (b) being qua cognized, this leads to the question: under what conditions can we access the world? Since the notion of being qua cognized might seem peculiar, I present its context and discuss it in detail in the last section.     

Danto's rejection of immanent causation

This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A further suggestion is that there is a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition, depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood, but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhood (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature-model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersonal recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood.     

Meaning, motivation, and mind: Some conditions and consequences for the flexibility and intersubjectivity of cognitive processes

This essay takes up the concerns of Vygotsky using the categories of Peirce; and it uses these concerns and categories to re-map some of the terrain explored by analytic philosophy and cognitive science. In particular, the central concern is the flexibility of cognitive processes, as created by the interplay of tool and symbol, and as constituting of the relation between organism and environment. The central categories are object, sign and interpretant (qua meaning or ‘symbol’) and agent, means and ends (qua motivation or ‘tool’). And the terrain to be re-mapped is intentionality, or the nature of mental states and speech acts (qua ‘Mind’). Finally, this essay has a particular expository strategy: to capture the fundamental features of such cognitive processes, as objects, by using a relatively generative system of diagrammatic signs. All this, then, is a way of tackling human-specific modes of agency-loosely understood as the flexibility and intersubjectivity of cognitive processes unerlying means-ends reasoning.     

Health of Organisms and Health of Persons: An Embedded Instrumentalist Approach

In a time when we as a society are in the process of deciding what our basic rights to health care are, it is critically important for us to have a full and complete understanding of what constitutes health. We argue for an analysis of health according to which certain states are healthy not in themselves but because they allow an individual to reach actual goals. Recognizing that the goals of an individual considered from the point of view of biology and the goals of the same individual considered as an agent in the world might be different, we introduce a distinction between the health of an individual qua organism and the health of an individual qua person. We then argue that this distinction characterizes the evaluations made by patients and healthcare providers better than the widely discussed distinction between disease and illness.     

Curves in Gödel-Space: Towards a Structuralist Ontology of Mathematical Signs

I propose an account of the metaphysics of the expressions of a mathematical language which brings together the structuralist construal of a mathematical object as a place in a structure, the semantic notion of indexicality and Kit Fine’s ontological theory of qua objects. By contrasting this indexical qua objects account with several other accounts of the metaphysics of mathematical expressions, I show that it does justice both to the abstractness that mathematical expressions have because they are mathematical objects and to the element of concreteness that they have because they are also used as signs. In a concluding section, I comment on the pragmatic element that has entered ontology by way of the notion of indexicality and use it to give an answer to a question Stewart Shapiro has recently posed about the status of meta-mathematics in the structuralist philosophy of mathematics.     

Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian's Rape of Europa

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument—that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic—demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.     

Safety,Risk Acceptability,and Morality

The primary aim of this article is to develop and defend a conceptual analysis of safety. The article begins by considering two previous analyses of safety in terms of risk acceptability. It is argued that these analyses fail because the notion of risk acceptability is more subjective than safety, as risk acceptability takes into account potential benefits in a way that safety does not. A distinction is then made between two different kinds of safety-safety qua cause and safety qua recipient-and both are defined in terms of the probability of a loss of value, though the relationship between safety and the probability of loss varies in each case. It is then shown that although this analysis is less subjective than the previously considered analyses, subjectivity can still enter into judgments of safety via the notions of probability and value. In the final section of this article, it is argued that the difference between safety and risk acceptability is important because it corresponds in significant ways to the difference between consequentialist and deontological moral viewpoints.     

Two concepts of adaptation: Darwin's and psychology's

The paper takes issue with the traditional view of Darwin's influence on psychology; namely, that it is he who passed on to psychology the concept of individual adaptation. Three arguments are presented: a) that Darwin, qua scientist, was only interested in species adaptation, an entirely different concept from that of individual adaptation, b) that Darwin's writings on individual adaptation are so unexceptional that it is inconceivable that psychologists should have been influenced by them, and c) that the two concepts are logically incompatible since species adaptation presupposes a strict hereditary determinism, while individual adaptation conceives of the organism either as free and undetermined or else as determined by the environment.     

Kant and the Conventionality of Simultaneity

In his Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues that a universal system of mutual causal interaction-at-a-distance is presupposed in the very construction of experience, and thereby also can be assumed to hold of objects of experience qua appearances. This implies in turn a notion of objective simultaneity. I discuss whether Kant's project is rendered wholly obsolete by the relativity and conventionality of simultaneity as it is now understood under the theory of relativity. I conclude that, while major parts of his project are indeed obsolete, there may still be useful insights into time-awareness to be gleaned from his work.     

Intentionality and Presence: On the Intrinsic Of-ness of Consciousness from a Transcendental-Phenomenological Perspective

This paper discusses the nature of consciousness?? intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of ??qualia?? or the ??what-it-is-like-ness?? of mental states and it is hard to see why such subjective ??feels??, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in terms of presence. Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e., consists in something coming to appearance. This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. Naturalism only knows ??nature??, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be ??representations?? of other inner-worldly objects. In fact, no object is ever intrinsically ??about?? anything. This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects but rather exists as the manifestation of objects.     

Aspectual Shape: Presentational Approach

Aspectual shape is widely recognized property of intentionality. This means that subject’s access to reality is necessarily conditioned by applied concepts, perspective, modes of sensation, etc. I argue against representational and indirect-realist account of this phenomenon. My own proposition—presentational and direct realist—is based on the recognition of historical contexts, in which the phenomenon of aspectuality should be reconsidered; on the other hand—it is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of aspectual perception. Moreover I apply some results from the area of logicophilosophical investigations called qua theory.     

Experts and Bias: When is the Interest-Based Objection to Expert Argumentation Sound?

I discuss under what conditions the objection that an expert’s argument is biased by her self-interest can be a meaningful and sound argumentative move. I suggest replacing the idea of bias qua self-interest by that of a conflict of interests, exploit the distinction between an expert context and a public context, and hold that the objection can be meaningful. Yet, the evaluation is overall negative, because the motivational role of self-interest for human behavior remains unclear. Moreover, if recent social-psychological results from the “heuristics and biases” program are accepted, it is plausible to assume that humans also satisfice (rather than optimize/maximize) when identifying and then acting in their self-interest. My thesis is: insofar as the objection is sound with a particular audience, it is not needed; and insofar as the objection is needed, it is unsound.     

Philosophical Works as Objects of Aesthetic Judgment

This paper draws attention to the fact that works of philosophy are often judged by aesthetic criteria. This raises the question of whether philosophical writings may properly be regarded as suitable objects of aesthetic judgement in a strong sense; namely, that judging their worth qua works of philosophy is an aesthetic endeavour. The paper argues in the affirmative with the aid of a Kantian account of aesthetic judgement. Judging a work of philosophy by the means chosen may be regarded as subjecting it to criticism by criteria established within a philosophical aesthetic.     

Is it wrong to impose the harms of human life? A reply to Benatar

Might it be morally wrong to procreate? David Benatar answers affirmatively in Better Never to Have Been, arguing that coming into existence is always a great harm. I counter this view in several ways. First, I argue against Benatar’s asserted asymmetry between harm and benefit—which would support the claim that any amount of harm in a human life would make it not worth starting—while questioning the significance of his distinction between a life worth starting and one worth continuing. I further contend that his understanding of hedonism and desire-fulfillment theories distorts their implications for the quality of human life; as for objective-list theories, I rebut his critique of their human-centered basis of evaluation. Notwithstanding this multi-tiered challenge to Benatar’s reasoning, I conclude with praise for his work and the intellectual virtues it embodies.     

Reactive Attitudes as Communicative Entities

Many theorists claim that the reactive emotions, even in their private form, are communicative entities. But as widely endorsed as this claim is, it has not been redeemed: the literature lacks a clear and compelling account of the sense in which reactive attitudes qua private mental states are essentially communicative. In this paper, I fill this gap. I propose that it is apt to characterize privately held reactive attitudes as communicative in nature because they, like many paradigmatic forms of communication, have representational content and the function of evoking uptake of this content in a recipient.     

The Solvability of Probabilistic Regresses. A Reply to Frederik Herzberg

We have earlier shown by construction that a proposition can have a welldefined nonzero probability, even if it is justified by an infinite probabilistic regress. We thought this to be an adequate rebuttal of foundationalist claims that probabilistic regresses must lead either to an indeterminate, or to a determinate but zero probability. In a comment, Frederik Herzberg has argued that our counterexamples are of a special kind, being what he calls ‘solvable’. In the present reaction we investigate what Herzberg means by solvability. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of making solvability a sine qua non, and we ventilate our misgivings about Herzberg’s suggestion that the notion of solvability might help the foundationalist.     

Mental Files,Blown Up by Indexed Files

Abstract

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable.     

On Husserl and Cavellian Scepticism

In the early parts of The Claim of Reason , Stanley Cavell develops an account of scepticism based on his distinction between specific and generic objects. Because there are no ('Austinian') criteria for generic objects, it seems that we cannot know them; and the sceptic argues that this kind of knowledge is a 'best case', so that failure here indicates the impossibility of knowledge in general. I show that, in Husserl's Ideen I, the transcendental ego is the cause of being of all objects qua generic, or, in other words, that we know generic objects in the manner of an intellectus archetypus . Hence Husserl has a kind of refutation of the Cavellian sceptic, albeit perhaps at a very high price.     

Correlates of adolescent assertiveness with HIV avoidance in a four-nation sample

Adolescents are frequently admonished to be socially assertive in order to confront negative interpersonal peer influences. Since the advent of HIV/AIDS in human social chemistry, the admonition has become more critical than ever. But the warning is often proffered in the misguided presumption that social assertiveness is the all-required psycho-structure against risk. The present cross-national study examines social and sexual assertiveness in four-country adolescent samples of Nigerian, Thai, Chinese, and Japanese college students. The findings reveal that sexual rather than social assertiveness was the sine qua non against risk, cross-culturally.