The Real World: What Good Is It?

Any experimental science runs the risk of implosion. The tasks that were created as surrogates for complicated real-world situations can take on lives of their own. When that happens, scientists become fascinated with the nuances of variations within that little world. Their theoretical accounts end up with little place for phenomena that could not be observed there. Extrapolations to other settings may require large doses of conjecture (or leaps of faith). This essay examines some possibilities for understanding the world of the lab by grappling with applied problems in the world outside and perhaps doing a little good along the way.     

How Really Real Is Real?

This paper takes issue with a number of family therapists who appear to hold that reality is entirely constructed out of our beliefs and that different views of reality can only be discriminated between on the basis of their usefulness for a particular purpose. Rather this paper argues for a co-constructivist position, that is, that the knower's beliefs and constructs are in an interpenetrating relationship with reality and that different views of reality can be discriminated between on the basis of their adequacy in describing that reality and that it is this adequacy that will determine their usefulness. These issues are not just of theoretical interest but have important implications for the practice of therapy.     

The ‘If’ in the ‘What If’

In this paper, I defend the view that any good account of the logical form of thought experiments should contain a conditional. Moreover, there are some reasons to think it should be a counterfactual conditional. First, I defend Williamson’s account of the logical form of thought experiments against a competing account offered by Ichikawa and Jarvis. The two accounts have a similar structure, but Williamson’s posits a counterfactual conditional where Ichikawa and Jarvis’ posits a strict conditional. Williamson’s motivation is related to the problem of deviant realizations, and Ichikawa and Jarvis propose to take care of this problem by enriching the content of the thought experiment in the way we enrich the content of a text of fiction. However, this sort of enrichment is also compatible with Williamson’s account. I then consider a different view, defended by Malmgren, on which a complex possibility claim exhausts our reasoning on typical thought experiments. I argue that this account, leaving out a conditional, fails to represent an important part of our reasoning with thought experiments. This is brought out by reflection on the relationship between thought experiments and similar actual cases and by reflection on the requirement, formulated by Malmgren herself, that our reasoning should have an adequate level of generality.

     

From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’ in Moral Epistemology

Many philosophers claim that no formally valid argument can have purely non-normative premises and a normative or moral conclusion that occurs essentially. Mark Nelson recently proposed a new counterexample to this Humean doctrine:All of Dahlia's beliefs are true.Dahlia believes that Bertie morally ought to marry Madeleine. Bertie morally ought to marry Madeleine.I argue that Nelson's universal premise has no normative content, that Nelson's argument is valid formally, and that Nelson's moral conclusion occurs essentially and not vacuously. Nonetheless, I show that Nelson's argument faces a more fundamental problem if it is used in moral epistemology. An argument that appeals to a moral authority, such as Dahlia, might justify some moral belief out of a contrast class that does not include extreme views like moral nihilism; but it begs the question against moral nihilism, since one cannot be adequately justified in believing the conjunction of its premises without depending on assumptions that moral nihilists would deny. Thus, arguments like Nelson's can accomplish something important in moral epistemology, but their use is strictly limited.     

What is ‘mental action’?

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within the philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental-act–bodily-act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition which, arguably, further undermine the credibility of the distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on “inner” acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action.     

Is ‘human action’ A category?

It seems to have been taken for granted that we all know what a human action is. However in attempting to draw from what philosophers have said about actions the necessary clues as to their distinguishing features, one finds little to discourage the idea that there is no way of distinguishing one category of occurrences, human actions, from the complex of different sorts of things which happen. From this I am tempted to conclude that there is no category of human action. But before drawing such a conclusion an ancient but terrible question must be faced: What sorts of things happen in the world ? This ancient question is faced but not answered. It is brought up because the failure to find a satisfactory answer to the question, Is human action a category? is a failure even to find a satisfactory assumption about what kind of reference the term ‘human action’ is supposed to have.     

What Is the Model in Model-Based Planning?

Flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human problem-solving. In everyday life, people adapt to changes in common tasks with little to no additional training. Much of the existing work on flexibility in human problem-solving has focused on how people adapt to tasks in new domains by drawing on solutions from previously learned domains. In real-world tasks, however, humans must generalize across a wide range of within-domain variation. In this work we argue that representational abstraction plays an important role in such within-domain generalization. We then explore the nature of this representational abstraction in realistically complex tasks like video games by demonstrating how the same model-based planning framework produces distinct generalization behaviors under different classes of task representation. Finally, we compare the behavior of agents with these task representations to humans in a series of novel grid-based video game tasks. Our results provide evidence for the claim that within-domain flexibility in humans derives from task representations composed of propositional rules written in terms of objects and relational categories.     

Liberalism in Poland: What Is Left?

Studies in East European Thought -     

What’s the object of object working memory in infancy? Unraveling ‘what’ and ‘how many’

Infants have a bandwidth-limited object working memory (WM) that can both individuate and identify objects in a scene, (answering ‘how many?’ or ‘what?’, respectively). Studies of infants’ WM for objects have typically looked for limits on either ‘how many’ or ‘what’, yielding different estimates of infant capacity. Infants can keep track of about three individuals (regardless of identity), but appear to be much more limited in the number of specific identities they can recall. Why are the limits on ‘how many’ and ‘what’ different? Are the limits entirely separate, do they interact, or are they simply two different aspects of the same underlying limit?We sought to unravel these limits in a series of experiments which tested 9- and 12-month-olds’ WM for object identities under varying degrees of difficulty. In a violation-of-expectation looking-time task, we hid objects one at a time behind separate screens, and then probed infants’ WM for the shape identity of the penultimate object in the sequence. We manipulated the difficulty of the task by varying both the number of objects in hiding locations and the number of means by which infants could detect a shape change to the probed object. We found that 9-month-olds’ WM for identities was limited by the number of hiding locations: when the probed object was one of two objects hidden (one in each of two locations), 9-month-olds succeeded, and they did so even though they were given only one means to detect the change. However, when the probed object was one of three objects hidden (one in each of three locations), they failed, even when they were given two means to detect the shape change. Twelve-month-olds, by contrast, succeeded at the most difficult task level.Results show that WM for ‘how many’ and for ‘what’ are not entirely separate. Individuated objects are tracked relatively cheaply. Maintaining bindings between indexed objects and identifying featural information incurs a greater attentional/memory cost. This cost reduces with development. We conclude that infant WM supports a small number of featureless object representations that index the current locations of objects. These can have featural information bound to them, but only at substantial cost.     

What Is Ineffable?

In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud's notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture's resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises.     

What Is Ignorance?

This article offers an analysis of ignorance. After a couple of preliminary remarks, I endeavor to show that, contrary to what one might expect and to what nearly all philosophers assume, being ignorant is not equivalent to failing to know, at least not on one of the stronger senses of knowledge. Subsequently, I offer two definitions of ignorance and argue that one’s definition of ignorance crucially depends on one’s account of belief. Finally, I illustrate the relevance of my analysis by paying attention to four philosophical problems in which ignorance plays a crucial role.     

Why ‘Is’ Must Entail ‘Ought’

I argue below for the view that non-moral truths entail moral ones. I first argue that moral claims do have truth values which are objectively true or false. I then argue that this objectivism does not entail non-relativism. I produce a simple possible worlds argument for the entailment view. I then give some examples where p entails q but many intelligent people have thought it does not, and where it does not, but many intelligent people have thought that it does. I also try to evaluate a somewhat neglected argument by Hume. In the final section, I further consider some moral and meta-moral opinions.     

What Is Dissent?

Res Publica - Dissent is a word we come across frequently these days. We read it in the newspapers, use it in discussions with friends and colleagues—perhaps even engage in the...     

What Is Love?

SUMMARY

A theory to explain the phenomena of love is suggested. The construct of love is dissected into physiological and psychodynamic components. Love is explained first via its adaptive function, then by its physiological arousal which is interpreted as either anxiety or excitement, which is activated via goodness-of-fit of each individual's internal love model. The leap to love is contingent on the complex constellation of the above-mentioned idiosyncratic components finding synthesis within individuals and between mates. Intimacy can be nurtured, but love, similar to humans and life itself, appears to be greater than the sum of its parts.     

What Is Terrorism?

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is not to try to formulate the meaning the word ‘terrorism’has in ordinary use; the word is used in so many different, even incompatible ways, that such an enterprise would quickly prove futile. My aim is rather to try for a definition that captures the trait, or traits, of terrorism which cause most of us to view it with moral repugnance. I discuss the following questions: Is the historical connection of terrorism with terror to be preserved on the conceptual level, or relegated to the psychology and sociology of terrorism? Does mere infliction of terror qualify as terrorism, so that we can speak of non-violent terrorism? If terrorism is a type of violence, does it have to be against persons, or should violence against property also count? In what sense can terrorism be described as indiscriminate violence? Should we use the word only in a political context? In such a context, can we speak of ‘state terrorism’, or should the word be restricted to actions not sanctioned by law? Is the terrorist necessarily oblivious to moral considerations, as those who define terrorism in terms of antinomianism imply? My answers to these questions lead up to the following definition: terrorism is the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they otherwise would not take.     

Is ‘Knowing that P’ Identical with ‘Knowing that “P” Is True’?

Philosophia - It is epistemological orthodoxy that the object of propositional knowledge is the truth of propositions. This traditional view is based on what I call the ‘KT-schema’,...