What Is Neurophilosophy? A Methodological Account

The term ``neurophilosophy' is often used either implicitly or explicitly for characterizing the investigation of philosophical theories in relation to neuroscientific hypotheses. The exact methodological principles and systematic rules for a linkage between philosophical theories and neuroscientific hypothesis, however, remain to be clarified. The present contribution focuses on these principles, as well as on the relation between ontology and epistemology and the characterization of hypothesis in neurophilosophy. Principles of transdisciplinary methodology include the `principle of asymmetry', the `principle of bi-directionality' and the `principle of transdisciplinary circularity'. The `principle of asymmetry' points to an asymmetric relationship between logical and natural conditions. The `principle of bi-directionality' claims for the necessity of bi-directional linkage between natural and logical conditions. The `principle of transdisciplinary circularity' describes systematic rules for mutual comparison and cross-conditional exchange between philosophical theory and neuroscientific hypotheses. The relation between ontology and epistemology no longer is determined by ontological presuppositions i.e. ``ontological primacy'. Instead, there is correspondence between different `epistemological capacities' and different kinds of ontology which consecutively results in ``epistemic primacy' and ``ontological pluralism'. The present contribution concludes by rejecting some so-called `standard-arguments' including the `argument of circularity', the `argument of categorical fallacy', the `argument of validity' and the `argument of necessity'. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Is There A Logic Of Confirmation Transfer?

This article begins by exploring a lost topic in the philosophy of science:the properties of the relations evidence confirming h confirmsh' and, more generally, evidence confirming each ofh₁, h₂, ..., h_m confirms at least one of h₁, h₂,ldots;, h_n'.The Bayesian understanding of confirmation as positive evidential relevanceis employed throughout. The resulting formal system is, to say the least, oddlybehaved. Some aspects of this odd behaviour the system has in common withsome of the non-classical logics developed in the twentieth century. Oneaspect – its ``parasitism' on classical logic – it does not, and it is this featurethat makes the system an interesting focus for discussion of questions in thephilosophy of logic. We gain some purchase on an answer to a recently prominentquestion, namely, what is a logical system? More exactly, we ask whether satisfaction of formal constraints is sufficient for a relation to be considered a (logical) consequence relation. The question whether confirmation transfer yields a logical system is answered in the negative, despite confirmation transfer having the standard properties of a consequence relation, on the grounds that validity of sequents in the system is not determined by the meanings of the connectives that occur in formulas. Developing the system in a different direction, we find it bears on the project of ``proof-theoretic semantics': conferring meaning on connectives by means of introduction (and possibly elimination) rules is not an autonomous activity, rather it presupposes a prior, non-formal,notion of consequence. Some historical ramifications are alsoaddressed briefly.     

Is the Reasonable Person a Person of Virtue?

Res Publica - The ‘reasonable person standard’ (RPS) is often called on in difficult legal cases as the last resource to be appealed to when other solutions run out. Its complexity...     

Is There A Simple,Pedestrian Arithmetic Sentence Which Is Independent Of Zfc?

We show that the P < NP conjecture can beformulated as a Pi₂ ⁰ sentence, and explore some of theconsequences of that fact. This paper summarizes recent workby the author with N. C. A. da Costa on the P相似文献   

Is Human Life Absurd?

Philosophia - This essay examines whether or not absurdity is intrinsic to human life. It takes Camus’ interpretation of ‘The Absurd’ as its conceptual starting point. It traces...     

Is Human Learning Rational?

We can predict and control events in the world via associative learning. Such learning is rational if we come to believe that an associative relationship exists between a pair of events only when it truly does. The statistical metric ΔP, the difference between the probability of an outcome event in the presence of the predictor and its probability in the absence of the predictor tells us when and to what extent events are indeed related. Contrary to what is often claimed, humans' associative judgements compare very favourably with the ΔP metric, even in situations where multiple predictive cues are in competition for association with the outcome. How do humans achieve this judgemental accuracy? I argue that it is not via the application of an explicit mental version of the ΔP rule. Instead, accurate judgements are an emergent property of an associationist learning process of the sort that has become common in adaptive network models of cognition. Such an associationist mechanism is the “means” to a normative or statistical “end”.     

Is There a Viable Account of Well-Founded Belief?

My starting point is some widely accepted and intuitive ideas about justified, well-founded belief. By drawing on John Pollock’s work, I sketch a formal framework for making these ideas precise. Central to this framework is the notion of an inference graph. An inference graph represents everything that is relevant about a subject for determining which of her beliefs are justified, such as what the subject believes based on what. The strengths of the nodes of the graph represent the degrees of justification of the corresponding beliefs. There are two ways in which degrees of justification can be computed within this framework. I argue that there is not any way of doing the calculations in a broadly probabilistic manner. The only alternative looks to be a thoroughly non-probabilistic way of thinking wedded to the thought that justification is closed under competent deduction. However, I argue that such a view is unable to capture the intuitive notion of justification, for it leads to an uncomfortable dilemma: either a widespread scepticism about justification, or drawing epistemically spurious distinctions between different types of lotteries. This should worry anyone interested in well-founded belief.     

Is Any Human Behavior Schedule-Induced?

The Psychological Record - Theoretical and empirical studies of schedule-induced behavior in humans are examined. As there is no terminological consensus in the field, a set of terms is defined,...     

‘Incommensurability’ and Vagueness: Is the Vagueness View Defensible?

The vagueness view holds that when evaluative comparisons are hard, there is indeterminacy about which comparative relation holds. It is sceptical about whether there are any incommensurate items (in some domain). The sceptical element of John Broome’s version of this view rests on a controversial principle. Robert Sugden advances a similar view which does not depend on this principle. Sugden’s argument fails as a vagueness view because it assumes rather than shows that there are no incommensurate items (in some domain). Nonetheless, I argue that an interpretation of his argument constitutes a defensible vagueness view which is supported by intuition about examples. On this interpretation Sugden’s view can be mapped onto Broome’s application of a supervaluationist view of vagueness. It is also (on this reading) a close relative of James Griffin’s ‘rough equality’ view when this is interpreted in terms of vagueness. On an alternative interpretation Sugden’s view is not sceptical about incommensurateness. On this interpretation he does not defend a vagueness view and is ‘sceptical’ about the contribution of the philosophical literature to our understanding of rational choice.     

A Generative System for Intentional Action?

It has been proposed that intentional actions are supplied by a generative system of the sort described by Chomsky for language. In this paper I aim to provide a closer analysis of this claim for the sake of conceptual clarification. To this end, I will first clarify what is involved in the thesis of a structural analogy between language and action, and then I will consider what kind of evidence there seems to be in favour of the thesis of a neurobiological identity. On this basis, I will subsequently focus on two definitional issues. The first is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, humans may perform an infinite number of possible actions. The second is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, what is at issue is conscious planning of action and therefore controlled processing.     

What In Nature Is The Compulsion Of Reason?

If reason is a real causal force,operative in some, but not all ofour cognition and conation, then itought to be possible to tell anaturalistic story that distinguishes themind which is moved byreason from the mind which is movedby forces other than reason.This essay proposes some steps towardthat end. I proceed by showingthat it is possible to reconcile certainemerging psychological ideasabout the causal powers of themind/brain with a venerablephilosophical vision of reason as the facultyof norms. My accountof reason is psychologistic, social, and consistent with anevolutionary approach to mind. The account preserves thenormativity by deflating it. But I argue that onlysuch deflated normativity has any chance of beingmade naturalistically respectable.     

Is There a Problem of Special Angelic Action?

One of the most widely discussed topics in the recent science & theology literature has been divine activity. It is odd that in this literature there has been no discussion of whether and how to accommodate special angelic action (hereafter SAA). Just as the Bible records many instances of apparent SDA, it records many instances of apparent SAA. This neglect may be due to an assumption that there is no distinct problem relating to SAA; the existing suggested solutions to the problem(s) surrounding SDA may be transferable to the angelic context. My aim is to disprove that idea.     

What Is A Newtonian System? The Failure Of Energy Conservation And Determinism In Supertasks

Supertasks recently discussed in the literature purport to display a failure ofenergy conservation and determinism in Newtonian mechanics. We debatewhether these supertasks are admissible as Newtonian systems, with Earmanand Norton defending the affirmative and Alper and Bridger the negative.     

Is Human Behavior Autocorrelated? An Empirical Analysis

The current review and analysis investigated the presence of serial dependency (or autocorrelation) in single-subject applied behavior-analytic research. While well researched, few studies have controlled for the number of data points that appeared in the time-series and, thus, the negative bias of the r coefficient, and the power to detect true serial dependency effects. Therefore, all baseline graphs that appeared in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) between 1968 and 1993 that provided more than 30 data points were examined for the presence of serial dependency (N = 103). Results indicated that 12% of the baseline graphs provided a significant lag-1 autocorrelation, and over 83% of them had coefficient values less than or equal to (±.25). The distribution of the lag-1 autocorrelation coefficients had a mean of .10. Subsequent distributions of partial autocorrelations at lags two through seven had smaller means indicating that as the distance between observations increases (i.e., the lag), serial dependency decreased. Although serial dependency did not appear to be a common property of the single-subject behavioral experiments, it is recommended that, whenever statistical analyses are contemplated, its presence should always be examined. Alternatives for coping with the presence of significant levels of serial dependency were discussed in terms of: (a) using alternative statistical procedures (e.g., ARIMA models, randomization tests, the Shewhart quality-control charts); (b) correcting statistics of traditional parametric procedures (e.g., t, F); or (c) using the autocorrelation coefficient as an indicator and estimate of reliable intervention effects.     

Is Human Enhancement also a Personal Matter?

Emerging technologies are increasingly used in an attempt to “enhance the human body and/or mind” beyond the contemporary standards that characterize human beings. Yet, such standards are deeply controversial and it is not an easy task to determine whether the application of a given technology to an individual and its outcome can be defined as a human enhancement or not. Despite much debate on its potential or actual ethical and social impacts, human enhancement is not subject to any consensual definition. This paper proposes a timely and much needed examination of the various definitions found in the literature. We classify these definitions into four main categories: the implicit approach, the therapy-enhancement distinction, the improvement of general human capacities and the increase of well-being. After commenting on these different approaches and their limitations, we propose a definition of human enhancement that focuses on individual perceptions. While acknowledging that a definition that mainly depends on personal and subjective individual perceptions raises many challenges, we suggest that a comprehensive approach to define human enhancement could constitute a useful premise to appropriately address the complexity of the ethical and social issues it generates.     

The Ontological Status of Human DNA: Is It Not First and Foremost a Biological ``File Self'?

This paper investigates which of the various legal notions proposed for human DNA is the most appropriate from an ontological viewpoint - unique legal status, private property, common property, person, or information. The focus is on the difficulties that private property, common property and person present. By using Harré's notion of "file-self" we argue that, ontologically, the most appropriate legal notion to be applied is information. This has consequences for storage, control and use of genetic information as well as identifiable human body material.     

Jean Reith Schroedel,Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Is Everything A World?

This paper discusses “inclusionism” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as\ John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realism; and finally that it suffers from an as-yet unsolved difficulty, the problem of the unmarried husbands. This problem also shows that Stephen Yablo’s analysis of “intrinsic” is inadequate. Thanks to Philip Bricker, Ross Cameron, Daniel Nolan, John Divers, Kit Fine, Kris McDaniel, Augustin Rayo, Steve Yablo, to participants in the Arche modality seminar, University of St Andrews, and to the delegates of the APA Pacific Division Conference 2005.     

Discrimination: A Challenge to First‐Person Authority?

It is no surprise that empirical psychology refutes, again and again, assumptions of uneducated common sense. But some puzzlement tends to arise when scientific results appear to call into question the very conceptual framework of the mental to which we have become accustomed. This paper shall examine a case in point: Experiments on colour-discrimination have recently been taken to refute an assumption of first-person authority that appears to be constitutive of our ordinary notion of perceptual experience. The paper is to show that those experiments do not refute this assumption, and will suggest that the impression to the contrary is, ultimately, due to two factors: to misleading imagery and, above all, to mistaken translation from the technical idiom of empirical psychology into the plain English we use every day. This is to take the mystery out of what we shall see to constitute a pretty puzzle; it is to remind us just how careful we need to be when drawing conclusions from results of scientific psychology; and it is to bring out the virtues of methods commonly lumped together under the entirely misleading label of 'ordinary language philosophy', of methods far more useful than their common caricature would make one think.