Naïve Realism,Privileged Access,and Epistemic Safety

Working from a naïve‐realist perspective, I examine first‐person knowledge of one's perceptual experience. I outline a naive‐realist theory of how subjects acquire knowledge of the nature of their experiences, and I argue that naive realism is compatible with moderate, substantial forms of first‐person privileged access. A more general moral of my paper is that treating “success” states like seeing as genuine mental states does not break up the dynamics that many philosophers expect from the phenomenon of knowledge of the mind.     

Naturalized metaphilosophy

Traditional representations of philosophy have tended to prize the role of reason in the discipline. These accounts focus exclusively on ideas and arguments as animating forces in the field. But anecdotal evidence and more rigorous sociological studies suggest there is more going on in philosophy. In this article, we present two hypotheses about social factors in the field: that social factors influence the development of philosophy, and that status and reputation—and thus social influence—will tend to be awarded to philosophers who offer rationally compelling arguments for their views. In order to test these hypotheses, we need a more comprehensive grasp on the field than traditional representations afford. In particular, we need more substantial data about various social connections between philosophers. This investigation belongs to a naturalized metaphilosophy, an empirical study of the discipline itself, and it offers prospects for a fuller and more reliable understanding of philosophy.     

Privileged Access by Irrelevant Speech to Short-term Memory: The Role of Changing State

Memory for visually presented items is impaired by speech that is played as an irrelevant background. The paper presents the view that changing state of the auditory material is an important prerequisite for this disruption. Four experiments studied the effects of sounds varying in complexity in an attempt to establish which features of changing state in the auditory signal lead to diminished recall. Simple unvarying or repetitive speech sounds were not sufficient to induce the irrelevant speech effect (Experiment 1): in addition, simple analogues of speech, possessing regular or irregular envelopes and using a range of carriers, failed to imitate the action of speech (Experiment 2). Variability of between-utterance phonology in the irrelevant stream (Experiment 3) emerged as a crucial factor. Moreover, predictability of the syllable sequence did not reduce the degree of disruption (Experiment 4) suggesting that supra-syllabic characteristics of the speech are of little importance. The results broadly support the idea that disruption of short-term memory only occurs when the speech stream changes in state. It is argued that disruption occurs in memory when cues to serial order based on phonological representations of heard material interfere with the phonological codes of visual origin. It is suggested that cues to changing state of the speech input contaminate those associated with items of visual origin, which are already in a phonological store.     

Content Naturalized

Philosophical Studies -     

自然化的认识论

认识论关乎科学的基础.当这样宽泛地来构想认识论时,它把对数学基础的研究作为自己的一个部门包括在自身之内.在本世纪初,专家们认为,在这个独特的部门中,他们的努力取得了显著的成功:数学似乎都可以还原为逻辑.     

Privileged access

That everyone has some privileged access to some information is trivially true. The doctrine of privileged access is that I am the authority on all of my own experiences. Possibly this thesis was attacked by Wittgenstein (the thesis on the non‐existence of private languages). The thesis was refuted by Freud (I know your dreams better than you), Duhem (I know your methods of scientific discovery better than you), Malinowski (I know your customs and habits better than you), and perception theorists (I can make you see things which are not there and describe your perceptions better than you can). The significance of this rejected thesis is that it is the basis of sensationalism and thus of all inductivist and some conventionalist philosophy.     

Nietzsche's Naturalized Aestheticism

This essay seeks to overcome the divide that has emerged in recent scholarship between Alexander Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche as an aestheticist who eschews the dogmatism implicit in the scientific project and Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche as a hard-nosed naturalist whose project is continuous with the natural sciences. It is argued that Nietzsche turns to the natural sciences to justify a relationalist ontology that not only eliminates metaphysical concepts such as ‘being’ and ‘things-in-themselves’, but also can be linked to key components of the aestheticist reading. As a result, Nietzsche's naturalism should not be understood as opposing important features of his aestheticism. Instead, Nietzsche's project should be understood in terms of a naturalized aestheticism that rejects the metaphysical-moral interpretation of existence espoused by philosophers such as Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer.     

Religion Generalized and Naturalized

Much of contemporary scholarly opinion rejects the attempt to construct a general theory of religion (that is, its origin, structure, and functions). This view says that particular religious traditions are unique, sui generis , incommensurable, and cannot therefore be generalized. Much of contemporary opinion also rejects the attempt to explain religious phenomena using the categories and concepts of the natural and social sciences. This view says that the phenomena of religion cannot be understood apart from a recognition of "the sacred," or some element of transcendence, implying that religion cannot be naturalized. This article begins to show how the phenomena of religion can be both generalized and naturalized.     

Naturalized Epistemics and Conditional Reasoning

The continued predominance of SL-logic and deductive paradigms in the research on conditional-based reasoning by experimental psychologists is examined and criticized. After recounting the history and influence of the model, I note the emergence of trends in epistemology and other areas of theory that might provide a springboard for the critique of the model, and I argue that a new approach to examining reasoning with conditionals ought to be developed. I conclude that a superior approach would model such reasoning with sociolinguistic, inductive, and neurophysiological parameters, and that it would not involve any comparison of subjects' reasoning with the standard deductive rules of logic.     

Another Defense of Naturalized Ethics

This essay argues against Richard Joyce, using him as an exemplar of a number of writers who purport to show that the best a naturalized ethics can provide are demands that we can hold only as moral agnostics; that is, that no moral claims can be shown to be epistemically warranted, hence no moral claims have the property of “inescapable authority” necessary for real moral discourse or deliberation. The prudent (and “dignified”) course of action is therefore to act as if moral claims had categorical standing, knowing full well that we cannot, in principle, know this. The essay proposes instead that a fully naturalized account of moral reasoning and sentiments, compatible with the commitment to understanding human beings as products of evolutionary processes, can provide “existence imperatives” necessarily implicated in our being social animals. It argues that, on the one hand, we're mistaken in believing that real moral discourse must include imperatives that hold with inescapable authority as a foundation and, on the other, that a naturalistic perspective can offer demands that are authoritative enough to make moral judgment sound.