De re modality,generic essences,and science

Conclusion I have taken the traditional problem of the seeming interdependence of identity concepts and essentialistic concepts and the attendant difficulties with circularity as a starting point in my consideration of recent attempts to provide accounts ofde re essences. Having distinguished between theories of individual and generic essences, I have shown how a linguistic device based upon a new approach to referring expressions has, perhaps, provided some advance in the understanding of individualde re essences. I have argued that, however efficacious these linguistic devices may be in dealing with individual essences, they are of no help in dealing with generic essences. I considered, therefore, one of the recent attempts to use science as the arbiter ofde re essences and concluded that such attempts will not, ultimately, solve the traditional problem of circularity. That problem remains, arising in different forms to thwart different attempts to account forde re generic essences.     

Rethinking the Ontology of Cartesian Essences

The old and recent debates on Cartesian essences have focused on the question of whether Descartes is a Platonist or a conceptualist about essences. I argue that this is a false dichotomy. An adequate account of Cartesian essences must accommodate and reconcile two central doctrines and texts in Descartes' philosophy. I will argue that recent conceptualist and Platonist interpretations neither accommodate these doctrines nor reconcile these texts. Such failures are not accidental since Descartes' doctrines of divine creation and simplicity render it impossible for Descartes to be either a conceptualist or a Platonist. Failure to notice this fact explains why there has been no progress on this exegetical issue.     

The Distinction between Reason and Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics

While both intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva) and reason (ratio) are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. Intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza describes as the ‘greatest virtue of mind’, is superior to reason. The nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's notoriously parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In this paper, I argue that intuitive knowledge differs from reason not only in terms of its method of cognition—but also in terms of its content. More specifically, I maintain that there is something that is known by intuition, namely the unique essences of things, that is not known by reason. My argument is supported by an examination of Spinoza's account of essences in the Ethics, which reveals that he is committed to both unique and shared essences. Based on this dual commitment, I argue that whereas for Spinoza both reason and intuition can be said to reach adequate knowledge of the shared essence of a thing, the unique essence of a singular thing, which is nothing but its actual essence, can only be known through intuitive knowledge.     

Similarity chains in the transformational paradigm

Rips’ (1989) results with the transformational paradigm have often been cited as supporting accounts of categorisation not based on similarity, such as involving necessary or sufficient features (or a belief in such features), which guarantee a categorisation outcome once their presence has been established. We discuss a similarity account of the transformational paradigm based on similarity chains, which predicts that when the transformation is more gradual the identity of the transformed object is less likely to change. Conversely, we suggest that an essentialist approach to categorisation predicts that essences are more likely to change in gradual transformations, across generations, as is the case with evolutionary change of species. In two experiments we examined the scope of the similarity versus the essentialist account in the transformational paradigm. With space aliens, the similarity account was superior to the essentialist one, but the converse was true with earth creatures. We suggest that an essentialist mode of categorisation is more likely than a similarity one for stimuli that are in better correspondence with our naïve understanding of the world.     

Thirsty for H2O? Multiple essences and psychological essentialism

Within psychology, essentialism has often been understood as the imputation of a hidden natural underpinning that determines the identity and membership of a given category. This naturalistic understanding has failed to address the varied and multi-faceted manner in which essentialist beliefs function on a cognitive level. Specifically, such an understanding does not account for essentialist beliefs that are related to functional categories derivative of a particular individual's present needs or social context. A parsimonious theory of psychological essentialism that accounts for beliefs in essences with respect to all categories, including those believed to be “natural”, is found in the writing of James (The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2, Dover, New York, NY, 1890/1950). After accounting for the manner in which James’ theory addresses the limitations of the naturalistic view and extends it, it is recommended that his theory be incorporated into future empirical study of psychological essentialism.     

Spinoza on Essences,Universals, and Beings of Reason

The article proposes a new solution to the long‐standing problem of the universality of essences in Spinoza's ontology. It argues that, according to Spinoza, particular things in nature possess unique essences, but that these essences coexist with more general, mind‐dependent species‐essences, constructed by finite minds on the basis of similarities (‘agreements’) that obtain among the properties of formally‐real particulars. This account provides the best fit both with the textual evidence and with Spinoza's other metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The article offers new readings of how Spinoza understands not just the nature of essence, but also the nature of being, reason, striving, definitions, and different kinds of knowledge.     

Nietzsche and the origin of the idea of modernism

This paper combines a phenomenological account of the types of causal transaction found in social reality with a critique of two theories, one structuralist and one Marxist, that contravene it. Part I argues that there are three types of causal transaction in social life in addition to physical causal transactions: people bringing about states of affairs by acting, states of affairs bringing about actions by inducing responses, and entities and states of affairs bringing about what makes sense to people to do by making certain factors determine this. It is also contended that social formations and structures cause actions and other social formations/structures only by way of participating in these types of transaction. The conditions under which this occurs are discussed. Part II criticizes Peter Blau's account of structural effects and Jean‐Paul Sartre's version of a materialist theory of history, two theories that either advocate or require causal transactions between social structures/ formations which do not reduce to transactions of the types described in Part I. The paper concludes by suggesting that social entities that make actions possible do not thereby cause them.     

Knowing how things might have been

I know that I could have been where you are right now and that you could have been where I am right now, but that neither of us could have been turnips or natural numbers. This knowledge of metaphysical modality stands in need of explanation. I will offer an account based on our knowledge of the natures, or essencess, of things. I will argue that essences need not be viewed as metaphysically bizarre entities; that we can conceptualise and refer to essences; and that we can gain knowledge of them. We can know about which properties are, and which properties are not, essential to a given entity. This knowledge of essence offers a route to knowledge of the ways those entities must be or could be.

     

Free Variation and the Intuition of Geometric Essences: Some Reflections on Phenomenology and Modern Geometry

Edmund Husserl has argued that we can intuit essences and, moreover, that it is possible to formulate a method for intuiting essences. Husserl calls this method ‘ideation’. In this paper I bring a fresh perspective to bear on these claims by illustrating them in connection with some examples from modern pure geometry. I follow Husserl in describing geometric essences as invariants through different types of free variations and I then link this to the mapping out of geometric invariants in modern mathematics. This view leads naturally to different types of spatial ontologies and it can be used to shed light on Husserl's general claim that there are different ontologies in the eidetic sciences that can be systematically related to one another. The paper is rounded out with a consideration of the role of ideation in the origins of modern geometry, and with a brief discussion of the use of ideation outside of pure geometry. What would be the study that would draw the soul away from the world of becoming to the world of being?… Geometry and arithmetic would be among the studies we are seeking … a philosopher must learn them because he must arise out of the region of generation and lay hold on essence or he can never become a true reckoner … they facilitate the conversion of the soul itself from the world of generation to essence and truth… they are knowledge of that which always is and not of something which at some time comes into being and passes away.     

Shallow versus deep response-dependence

This paper explores a distinction between two types of response-dependence (RD) account (shallow vs. deep). This distinction is inherent in much of the existing literature, however it is neither widely nor well understood, and has never been drawn explicitly. The distinction is often taken to be a metaphysical, or ‘realism-relevant’ one—i.e. deep RD accounts entail qualified realism (or perhaps anti-realism), while shallow RD accounts are metaphysically neutral. I argue that the distinction is not reliably realism-relevant. I formulate a weaker version of the distinction that may help prevent some common and understandable confusion about RD biconditionals and their relationship to realism. The weaker distinction rests on the different roles assigned to RD biconditionals by the two types of account.     

A Computational Theory of Learning Causal Relationships

I present a cognitive model of the human ability to acquire causal relationships. I report on experimental evidence demonstrating that human learners acquire accurate causal relationships more rapidly when training examples are consistent with a general theory of causality. This article describes a learning process that uses a general theory of causality as background knowledge. The learning process, which I call theory-driven learning (TDL), hypothesizes causal relationships consistent both with observed data and the general theory of causality. TDL accounts for data on both the rate at which human learners acquire causal relationships, and the types of causal relationships they acquire. Experiments with TDL demonstrate the advantage of TDL for acquiring causal relationships over similarity-based approaches to learning: Fewer examples are required to learn an accurate relationship.     

Stages in the psychological response to unemployment: A (dis)integrative review

There are widespread assertions in the literature on the psychological effects of unemployment that the response to job loss takes the form of qualitatively distinct stages or phases. This review gives an exposition of the main stage accounts, suggests reasons why such accounts appear compelling, and reveals what is entailed by the decision to hold such an account. When this is made clear the empirical evidence for a stage-by-stage account of unemployment experience is seen to be ambivalent at best. Most evidence is seriously flawed. Stage accounts are further criticized for inconsistency, internal contradictions, nonspecificity of domain, overindividualism, and restrictive ethnocentricity. It is suggested that evidence apparently supportive of stage accounts may be partly artifactual. Stage accounts are not recommended.     

Hierarchical Propositions

The notion of a proposition is central to philosophy. But it is subject to paradoxes. A natural response is a hierarchical account and, ever since Russell proposed his theory of types in 1908, this has been the strategy of choice. But in this paper I raise a problem for such accounts. While this does not seem to have been recognized before, it would seem to render existing such accounts inadequate. The main purpose of the paper, however, is to provide a new hierarchical account that solves the problem.     

Happiness is an Emotion

Accounts of happiness in the philosophical literature see it as either a judgment of satisfaction with one’s life or as a balance of positive over negative feelings or emotional states. There are sound objections to both types of account, although each captures part of what happiness is. Seeing it as an emotion allows us to incorporate both features of the accounts thought to be incompatible. Emotions are analyzed as multicomponent states including judgments, feelings, physical symptoms, and behavioral dispositions. It is shown that prototypical happiness contains all these components, and each is explicated. The concept of happiness, like the concepts of other emotions, is a cluster concept. The features of such concepts are made clear. Happiness is shown to be similar to other emotions in many respects, including the phenomenon of adaptation, the “paradox of happiness,” and the existence of both paradigm and borderline instances. The account allows us to capture all that was right in earlier accounts while avoiding objections to them.     

Perception,belief, and the structure of physical objects and consciousness

Conclusion We have now provided an overall simple theoretical account of the structure of perceptual experience proto-philosophically examined in Part I. The next task is to find the proper logical machinery to formulatte those accounts rigorously.This essay is an abridgment of a monograph written while the author enjoyed both a 1975–76 sabbatical leave from Indiana University and a concurrent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for doing research in metaphysics.     

The breakdown of semantic knowledge: insights from a statistical model of meaning representation

Investigations of patients with semantic category-specific deficits have revealed a wide range of performance and variability in categories that are impaired or spared; this variability presents a challenge to accounts of category specificity. Accounts based only on impairment to semantic features of a particular type (e.g., visual), as well as accounts based only on featural properties (e.g., feature intercorrelations), are insufficient to explain the variability of patients' performance. A first goal of the paper is to discuss how a hybrid account incorporating both a level of organization according to feature types (a level of nonlinguistic conceptual representations) and a level of organization dictated by featural properties may provide a more comprehensive account of the cases reported in the literature. The second and most novel goal of the study reported here is to derive from our hybrid account a series of novel predictions concerning the representation and impairment of a different domain of knowledge: knowledge of actions and events, a domain of knowledge that has received remarkably little attention to date.     

Rationality through the Eyes of Shame: Oppression and Liberation via Emotion*

Standard accounts of shame characterize it as an emotion of global negative self‐assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self‐evaluation. According to nonstandard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self‐assessment. I argue here in favor of nonstandard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor's standard account (Taylor 1985). Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper's experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor's account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame (Piper 1992/1996). Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (that is, by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized).