Kant’s “I think” and the agential approach to self-knowledge

ABSTRACT

This paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my representations’ (B131) does not concern the possibility of self-ascribing beliefs. Kant does advance this claim in the service of identifying an a priori warrant we have as psychological persons, that is, subjects of acts of thinking that are imputable to us. But this warrant is not one to self-knowledge that we have as critical reasoners. It is, rather, an a priori warrant we have, as thinkers, to prescribe to given representations their conformity to principles of thinking inherent in our capacity of understanding itself.     

Is Personal Identity Evaluative?

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum subscribes to the view that our identity is an evaluative question determined by our common, deeply held beliefs about what is worthwhile in human life. In so doing, she asserts that for an account of ethics to have “philosophical power” it needs to be grounded in an account of human nature that is both evaluative and internal.

I focus on Nussbaum’s claim that personal identity has to include the necessary features of practical rationality and sociability. Although Nussbaum puts forward self-validating arguments to prove that we cannot - on pain of pragmatic inconsistency - dispute that practical rationality and sociability are necessary features of human life, it is my claim that her account is flawed. The nature of the relationship between ethics and human nature is the broader context to such debates. This paper raises questions regarding on the one hand, whether it is possible to found ethics in human nature and, on the other, what we are to make of accounts that turn on the assumption that identity is ethical, not metaphysical.     

Emergent substance

In this paper, I develop an ontological position according to which substances such as you and I have no substantial parts. The claim is not that we are immaterial souls. Nor is the claim that we are “human atoms” co-located with human organisms. It is, rather, that we are macrophysical objects that are, in the relevant sense, simple. I contend that despite initial appearances, this claim is not obviously false, and I defend it by showing how much work it can do.

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The Epistemology of Testimony: Fulfilling the Sincerity Condition

Abstract

In this paper I aim to defend the claim that we are a priori entitled to accept that a speaker is being sincere, unless there are positive reasons not to. I look initially at the trust approach to testimony, which claims affective trust plays an epistemic role in our coming to believe that a speaker is being sincere. My claim is that this view is mistaken, and yet has something important to say in recognising the essential difference between testimony and other forms of evidence. This difference is intentionality. It is my view that in exploring the real intentions behind assertions we can discover why it is that we have an a priori entitlement to accept that a speaker is being sincere. If we recognise that intending to communicate is intending to transfer belief, then we must recognise that intending to communicate entails sincerity. A hearer is entitled to accept that an assertion which is explicitly offered as communication is in fact sincere.     

Are We Essentially Animals?

Animalism is the view that we human individuals are animals. And standard animalists claim that if we are animals, we are animals essentially. This is because they believe that if we are animals, we are essentially members of the human kind (e.g., human animal, Homo sapiens), and as a result, we have the criterion of identity by virtue of that kind. The goal of this paper is to reject the claim that our being animals implies our essentially being animals. I begin by reformulating the standard animalist's argument for the claim that we are essentially biological entities of some sort. I then argue that the very same argumentative strategy can be applied against standard animalism. Specifically, the standard animalist's reasoning for the claim that we are contingently psychological beings faces a dilemma that undermines the claim that we are animals essentially. In the remainder of the paper, I reply to various objections to my argument and consider a strategy that animalists can pursue in attempting to block the dilemma.     

Attitudes to suffering: Parfit and Nietzsche

Abstract

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that Nietzsche does not disagree with central normative beliefs that ‘we’ hold. Such disagreement would threaten Parfit’s claim that normative beliefs are known by intuition. However, Nietzsche defends a conception of well-being that challenges Parfit’s normative claim that suffering is bad in itself for the sufferer. Nietzsche recognizes the phenomenon of ‘growth through suffering’ as essential to well-being. Hence, removal of all suffering would lead to diminished well-being. Parfit claims that if Nietzsche understood normative concepts in Parfit’s objectivist sense, he would not disagree with the claim that suffering is bad in itself – that intrinsic facts about suffering count in favour of our not wanting it. I argue that Nietzsche would disagree. Suffering for Nietzsche is not merely instrumentally necessary for psychological growth, nor is it easy to construe it as something bad in itself that contributes value as part of a good whole. Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But for Nietzsche, suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts.     

Prioritizing Rights in the Social Justice Curriculum

The biggest problem facing schools having social justice curricula, beyond implementation of a programme, I claim, is the problem of justification: what grounds what in social justice and how do we make this manifest to ourselves and to the curricula? If we cannot address this, then social justice curricula are doomed to begging the question. I claim that a ranking of human rights is not only necessary to adjudicate competing claims for social justice and at the same time, thwart interference with already agreed-upon human rights: it is necessary for any curriculum of social justice for schools. That is to say, curricular programs of social justice cannot justify social practices that interfere with human rights, nor can they teach otherwise than this. Due attention to the violation of human rights is necessary, I shall argue, and must be central in the discussion of education for social justice.     

The A Posteriori Armchair

A lot of good philosophy is done in the armchair, but is nevertheless a posteriori. This paper clarifies and then defends that claim. Among the a posteriori activities done in the armchair are assembling and evaluating commonplaces; formulating theoretical alternatives; and integrating well-known past a posteriori discoveries. The activity that receives the most discussion, however, is the application of theoretical virtues to choose philosophical theories: the paper argues that much of this is properly seen as a posteriori.     

Personal Dualism and the Argument from Differential Vagueness

Abstract

In Causing Actions, Pietroski defends a distinctive view of the relationship between mind and body which he calls Personal Dualism. Central to his defence is the Argument from Differential Vagueness. It moves from the claim that mental events have different vagueness of spatiotemporal boundaries from neural events to the claim that mental events are not identical to neural events. In response, I argue that this presupposes an ontological account of vagueness that there is no reason to believe in this context. I further argue that Pietroski's reasons for rejecting the possibility that mental events are vaguely constituted from neural events are inadequate. I go on to show how Pietroski's Personal Dualism is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of mental causation because of its apparently necessary appeal to ceteris paribus laws.     

The Virtue of Dialogue,Dialogue as Virtue in Plato's Protagoras

Abstract

This article interprets Plato's Protagoras as a defense, against the claim of the sophists to possess a skill of teaching virtue, of Socrates’ claim in the Apology (38a) that the greatest good for a human being is examining oneself and others every day with regard to virtue. Attention to the often-neglected complex series of prologues as well as the dispute about method at the dialogue's center shows both the erotic and the dialogical character of Socratic virtue. Specifically, human virtue turns out to be a process of becoming as opposed to being good that can be carried out only in constant dialogue with others. In this context, the ‘science of measurement’ Socrates describes on behalf of Protagoras and the other sophists is exposed for what it is: a delusion that continues to exert its power over us today on account of the recurrent human wish to possess a skill or technique that could save us by guaranteeing the goodness and happiness of our lives.     

Armstrong was a Cheat: A Reply to Eric Moore

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we reply to Eric Moore’s argument that Lance Armstrong did not cheat, at least according to one, standard account of cheating. If that is the case, we argue, so much the worse for the standard account of cheating, since Armstrong was a cheat. We argue that the standard account of cheating fails on several counts: it specifies conditions that are not necessary for cheating: that cheating involves trying to secure an unfair advantage and that cheating depends on fair application of the rules. We dispute Moore’s claim that doping in the peloton was a convention that had normative force, and reject his anti-formalist analogy between doping in the peloton and bodily contact in basketball.     

Trust and the Healing Encounter: An Examination of an Unorthodox Healing Performance

Just why a patient should trust a particular healer isa question that has not been adequately explored inthe literature on healing. This ethnographiccase-report examines the healing performance of achiropractor and proposes that it contains fourintrinsic claims to trustworthiness: he claims to bea qualified and sincere healer who is inpossession of knowledge and techniques that derivetheir power from their truth content and whichempower him to make beneficial changes in thepatient. Taking each claim in turn I described thenature of the claim, how it might be adequatelyvalidated, ways in which his healing performance mightvalidate it and how he might be assisted by thepatient, and how their actual validation may bedistorted by the healer and patient. It is suggestedthat while unusual in many regards, this unorthodoxhealing performance may be a foil by which toexamine other more orthodox healing performances.     

Ecological Neuroscience: From Reduction to Proliferation of Our Resources

Abstract

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.     

Exploring a new paradigm for empathy research / Explorando un nuevo paradigma para el estudio de la empatía

Abstract

The present paper proposes an alternative experimental procedure for studies on empathy. It is intended as a simple and reliable alternative to the commonly used designs, which are certainly very elegant, but costly, as they require delicate real-life experimental manipulations. We advocate that studies using simple well-formulated text stimuli can be methodologically as reliable and valid as game task approaches. To underscore our claim, we report first behavioural evidence that supports this conclusion. The clear advantage of the method we present is that it is less susceptible to bias and, more importantly, more accessible to laboratories that do not have the financial means and the spatial infrastructure to manoeuvre complex and costly experimental setups and techniques. It is an easy to use, computer-based paradigm.     

Light Affine Set Theory: A Naive Set Theory of Polynomial Time

In [7], a naive set theory is introduced based on a polynomial time logical system, Light Linear Logic (LLL). Although it is reasonably claimed that the set theory inherits the intrinsically polytime character from the underlying logic LLL, the discussion there is largely informal, and a formal justification of the claim is not provided sufficiently. Moreover, the syntax is quite complicated in that it is based on a non-traditional hybrid sequent calculus which is required for formulating LLL.In this paper, we consider a naive set theory based on Intuitionistic Light Affine Logic (ILAL), a simplification of LLL introduced by [1], and call it Light Affine Set Theory (LAST). The simplicity of LAST allows us to rigorously verify its polytime character. In particular, we prove that a function over {0, 1}* is computable in polynomial time if and only if it is provably total in LAST.     

Evolutionary psychology: the emperor's new paradigm

For some evolutionary psychology is merely a field of inquiry, but for others it is a robust paradigm involving specific theories about the nature and evolution of the human mind. Proponents of this paradigm claim to have made several important discoveries regarding the evolved architecture of the mind. Highly publicized discoveries include a cheater-detection module, a psychological sex difference in jealousy, and motivational mechanisms underlying parental love and its lapses, which purportedly result in child maltreatment. In this article, I argue that the empirical evidence for these "discoveries" is inconclusive, at best. I suggest that, as the reigning paradigm in evolutionary psychology has produced questionable results, the evolutionary study of human psychology is still in need of a guiding paradigm.     

A PEIRCEAN RESPONSE TO THE EVOLUTIONARY DEBUNKING OF MORAL KNOWLEDGE

The evolutionary debunking argument advanced by Sharon Street, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce employs the logic of Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins to contend that humans cannot have knowledge of moral truths, since the evolutionary process that has produced our basic moral intuitions lacks causal connections to those (putative) truths. Yet this argument is self‐defeating, because its aim is the categorical, normative claim that we should suspend our moral beliefs in light of the discoveries about their non‐truth‐tracking origins, when it is precisely this claim that relies upon the normativity under attack. This article cites Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) to argue that such self‐defeat can be avoided by expanding upon the basic structure of the argument put forth by Griffiths and Wilkins, provided that one embraces a version of realism that corresponds with Peirce's doctrine of final causation. So construed, final causation reconciles real generals (including real moral values) with natural selection and undergirds further speculation of moral facts within values per se.     

Consciousness and the Moral Permissibility of Infanticide1

abstract In this paper, we present a conditional argument for the moral permissibility of some kinds of infanticide. The argument is based on a certain view of consciousness and the claim that there is an intimate connection between consciousness and infanticide. In bare outline, the argument is this: it is impermissible to intentionally kill a creature only if the creature is conscious; it is reasonable to believe that there is some time at which human infants are not conscious; therefore, it is reasonable to believe that it is permissible to intentionally kill some human infants.