What is Wrong with Husserl's Scientific Anti-Realism?

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental.     

What is an emotional feeling? Lessons about affective origins from cross-species neuroscience

Cross-species affective neuroscience aspires to provide an evidence-based foundation for understanding the primary-process emotional networks that concurrently control instinctual emotional actions and affective feelings—direct emotional circuit mediated ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’. In humans and other mammals, the ancestral subcortical regions of the brain are central to such affective BrainMind functions (a monistic term, here used synonymously with MindBrain, depending on stylistic needs). Although these circuits cannot be ‘identical’ across species (that would be incompatible with evolutionary principles) they are sufficiently similar, anatomically, neurochemically and functionally, to allow animal brain research to illuminate (yield testable predictions) about homologous human mind functions. Primal emotional feelings (affects) are inbuilt value functions of the brain that energize and inform the rest of the mental apparatus about basic survival values, thereby promoting secondary-process learning/memory functions and tertiary-process cognitive thinking-ruminative functions, yielding bottom-up evolutionary controls that ultimately allow top-down regulatory controls. As we envision how such “nested” hierarchies—two-way paths of causality—reflecting both bottom-up and top-down functions—we will need disciplined distinctions between cognitions and emotions at the primary-process level, while also accepting total interpenetrance of cognitions and affects at the tertiary-process level of MindBrain organization. This allows full and synergistic integration of basic and dimensional approaches to emotions. Here the primal emotional networks, so critically important for understanding ‘human-nature’ and psychiatric disorders, are discussed didactically in ways that can minimize dilemmas that non-evolutionary, non-hierarchical perspectives are subject to in modern emotion research.     

What is Structural Empiricism? Scientific Change in an Empiricist Setting

In this paper a constructive empiricist account of scientific change is put forward. Based on da Costa's and French's partial structures approach, two notions of empirical adequacy are initially advanced (with particular emphasis on the introduction of degrees of empirical adequacy). Using these notions, it is shown how both the informativeness and the empirical adequacy requirements of an empiricist theory of scientific change can then be met. Finally, some philosophical consequences with regard to the role of structures in this context are drawn.Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable.Henri Poincaré (1905), p. xxi     

What is primed in priming from imagery?

Priming from imagery is typically weaker than that from perception. This has been interpreted as resulting from weaker activation of perceptual processes. However, for imagery and perception, commonality is only half the story: Each is also characterized by specific processes. If priming can be due to both unshared and shared components of imagery and perception, then it should be possible to observe greater priming from imagery than from perception. Two new priming experiments were designed to test this hypothesis, while controlling incidental task differences. In both experiments, participants studied objects by counting their parts (from a mental image or a picture). Experiment 1 used a word-picture matching test task, which was hypothesized to depend on stimulus processing specific to perception, and Experiment 2 a size judgment test task, which was hypothesized to depend on retrieval and generation processes specific to imagery. As predicted, priming for perceived objects was greater than priming for imagined objects in the word-picture matching task. Conversely, in the size judgment task, more priming from imagery than from perception was observed. These results support the conclusions that (a) imagery and perception have substantial unshared processes, and (b) these processes contribute to priming.     

What is spiritual? What is spiritual suffering?

The author offers definitions for "spiritual" and for "spiritual suffering," suggesting that human spiritual needs include Love, Faith, Hope, Virtue, and Beauty. Spiritual suffering is experienced when these needs are unfulfilled. Spiritual care involves assisting in the fulfillment of these needs. He considers the constant movement between spiritual needs and fulfillments, encouraging use of fluid (not static) assessment methods using "spiritual spectra." As a model, this outline of basic spiritual needs may serve as the foundation for many current spiritual assessment tools.     

The Pessimistic Meta-induction: Obsolete Through Scientific Progress?

Recently, Fahrbach and Park have argued that the pessimistic meta-induction (PMI) about scientific theories is unsound. They claim that this very argument does not properly take into account scientific progress, particularly during the twentieth century. They also propose amended arguments in favour of scientific realism, which are supposed to properly reflect the history of science. I try to show that what I call the argument from scientific progress cannot explain satisfactorily why the current (best) theories should have reached a degree of success that excludes their future refutations and allows the inference to their truth. I further argue that this line of argumentation dismisses the burden of proof in a rather unfair manner by using a delaying tactic to postpone the question about the validity of the PMI in the future.     

What is Science? Methodological Pitfalls Underlying the Empirical Exploration of Scientific Knowledge

Summary  The validity of three premises, set as foundational pillars of modern sociological approach to science, is contested, namely: (i) the postulate, stating that science is devoid of whatever generis specifical; (ii) it is liable to the usual empirical study; (iii) the practicing scientist’s self-reflexive judgements must be disbelieved and rejected. Contrariwise, the ignored so far quaint nature of knowledge, escaping even from the elementary empirical treating - discernment and observation – is revealed and demonstrated. This peculiar nature requires, accordingly, a specific meta-cognitive dealing for positing it as ‘empirical object’, unfortunately missed still by the Strong Programme. The inadequate approach adopted led to a substitution of ‘scientific’ for common knowledge. The tacit thus far alternative, setting the foundations of meta-science, is suggested.     

What is analysis?

This paper attempts to discern a ground for doing depth psychological work in times of disappearance, loss and the absence of the gods. Through the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, and to a lesser extent, Rainer Maria Rilke, it seeks to discover the significance of fragmentation and conflagration in the manifestations of both psyche and the post-industrial landscape we inhabit. What does the ‘death of god’ mean for our notions of symbol and self and for the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis? How do we understand our daily clinical work in the context of ruin, holocaust and despair?     

What is historicism?

“Historicism” has become a ubiquitous and equivocal term. A classification is given here of five separate uses of the term currently in vogue, each provided with a unique qualifying adjective to help keep them distinct. I then offer a few objections to some of the more radical conclusions which have been drawn by proponents of a specific version of historicism, one associated with “postmodernism “. The positions of Rorty and Putnam are contrasted as examples of strong and weak degrees of historicism, respectively.     

What is presentism?

Presentism has received much scrutiny of late, yet little has been said of its definition. Many assume that it means simply that all that exists, exists at present. However, this definition will not do. It is defective in a multiplicity of ways. I consider and reject each of a number of intuitive ways in which to amend it. Each carries us a bit closer to our goal, but not until the end do we reach a definition that is wholly satisfactory. The final definition has this remarkable feature: it has us posit abstracta of two kinds, namely, times and haecceities.     

What is Apple-Psych?

Apple Psych, a system of software subroutines written in Apple Pascal and 6502 assembly language, was designed to run real-time psychological experiments on the Apple II, II+, and IIe microcomputers. This paper describes the minimum system requirements necessary to run Apple-Psych, the capabilities of the basic system, and the advantages and disadvantages of using Apple-Psych. Because the utility of a system to a researcher is often linked to its flexibility and expandability, this paper includes a brief discussion of hardware expansions already supported by the Apple Psych software and hardware expansions that would require additional software support.     

What is Presentism?

Different versions of the A‐theory of time (according to which some instant of time is absolutely, objectively present) are traditionally defined in terms of whether everything is present, or whether there are also past and future things. In this paper I argue that the traditional way of defining A‐theories should be abandoned. I focus on the traditional definition of presentism, according to which always, everything is present (§2). First, I argue that there are good reasons to reject all the most plausible interpretations of the predicate ‘is present’ as it appears in the traditional definition of presentism (§3). It follows that there are also good reasons to reject the most plausible interpretations of the traditional definitions of the other A‐theories. I then argue that there is a better way of defining the A‐theories, in terms of the question of whether existence has a beginning and an end (§4). Finally, I argue that what goes for the traditional definition of presentism goes for the traditional definition of its modal analogue actualism, according to which necessarily, everything is actual (§5): there are good reasons to reject the traditional definition of actualism in favour of a definition in terms of contingent existence.     

What is morality?

Philosophical Studies - In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe argued that the moral vocabulary does not correspond to any concept in Aristotelian ethics, that it derives from a...