Seeing Meaning: Frege and Derrida on Ideality and the Limits of Husserlian Intuitionism

The article seeks to challenge the standard accounts of how to view the difference between Husserl and Frege on the nature of ideal objects and meanings. It does so partly by using Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Husserl to open up a critical space where the two approaches can be confronted in a new way. Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics (that it was essentially psychologistic) was partly overcome by the program of transcendental phenomenology. But the original challenge to the prospect of a fulfilled intuition of idealities remained and was in fact encountered again from within the transcendental analysis by Husserl himself in his last writings on geometry and language. According to the two standard and conflicting accounts, Husserl either changed his earlier psychologistic program as a result of Frege’s criticism, or he was in fact never challenged by it in the first place. The article shows instead how Husserl continued to struggle with the problem of the constitution of ideal objects, and how his quest led him to a point where his analyses anticipate a more dialectical and deconstructive conclusion, eventually made explicit by Derrida. It also shows not only how this development constitutes a philosophical continuity from the original dispute with Frege, but also how Frege’s critique in a certain respect could be read as an anticipation of Derrida’s deconstructive elaboration of Husserl’s phenomenology.     

Seeing ahead: Experience and language in spatial perspective

Spatial perspective can be directed by various reference frames, as well as by the direction of motion. In the present study, we explored how ambiguity in spatial tasks can be resolved. Participants were presented with virtual reality environments in order to stimulate a spatialreference frame based on motion. They interacted with an ego-moving spatial system in Experiment 1 and an object-moving spatial system in Experiment 2. While interacting with the virtual environment, the participants were presented with either a question representing a motion system different from that of the virtual environment or a nonspatial question relating to physical features of the virtual environment. They then performed the target task assign the label front in an ambiguous spatial task. The findings indicate that the disambiguation of spatial terms can be influenced by embodied experiences, as represented by the virtual environment, as well as by linguistic context.     

Seeing What We Know, Knowing What We See: Challenging the Limits of Visual Acuity

Ageism has resulted in overstated expectations regarding the inevitable deterioration in human capabilities, such as visual perception, with age (Rowe and Kahn in Science, 237, 143?C149, 1987; Grant in Health and Social Work, 21, 9?C15, 1996). Human visual perception, however, is of a largely constructive nature, evidenced in the complementary interactions between top-down inputs (e.g., expectations) and bottom-up stimuli (Engel et al. in National Review of Neuroscience, 2(10), 704?C716, 2001; Miller and Cohen in, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202, 2001). Based on this constructive nature, we hypothesized that visual perception may be better than is typically expected. In three experiments, we demonstrated the malleability of visual acuity using a conditioning procedure involving manipulations in bottom-up stimuli. Experimental groups read a book excerpt with one letter in decreased font size, while the control groups read the same book excerpt with all letters in the same font size. Experiment 1 (N?=?112) examined whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a specific letter. Experiment 2 (N?=?70) assessed whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a non-conditioned letter, while Experiment 3 (N?=?108) evaluated whether the visual conditioning effects would transfer to all non-conditioned letters. Visual acuity for experimental groups was significantly better than that in the control groups, speaking to the general malleability of our visual sense.     

Autobiographical Memories About the Experience of Seeing Frightening Movies in Childhood

Two autobiographical memory studies were conducted in order to better understand the social experience and short- and long-term effects of seeing frightening movies at a young age. Young adult participants (a) recalled the experience of watching a movie they had been frightened by as a child or teen, and (b) were assessed for levels of four kinds of dispositional empathy. They also reported who they watched the movie with, who chose it, what sorts of emotional reactions were experienced during viewing, and what negative effects they experienced following viewing. Participants typically remembered horror movies seen on video in the evening or at night at a mean age of 11 years. Results also showed that (a) fantasy empathy and perspective taking played a role in negative experiences; (b) some situational factors predicted later likelihood of viewing, anticipated fear; and enjoyment of the genre; and (c) a younger age at viewing and higher degree of perceived realism were associated with more negative effects of viewing.     

Constructive Empiricism and Epistemic Modesty: Response to van Fraassen and Monton

Bas van Fraassen claims that constructive empiricism strikes a balance between the empiricist’s commitments to epistemic modesty – that one’s opinion should extend no further beyond the deliverances of experience than is necessary – and to the rationality of science. In “Should the Empiricist be a Constructive Empiricist?” I argued that if the constructive empiricist follows through on her commitment to epistemic modesty she will find herself adopting a much more extreme position than van Fraassen suggests. Van Fraassen and Bradley Monton have recently responded. My purpose here is to contest their response. The goal is not merely the rebuttal of a rebuttal; there is a lesson to learn concerning the realist/anti-realist dialectic generated by van Fraassen’s view.     

Realism and Uncertainty of Unobservable Common Causes in Factor Analysis

Famously, scientific theories are underdetermined by their evidence. This occurs in the factor analytic model (FA), which is often used to connect concrete data (e.g. test scores) to hypothetical notions (e.g. intelligence). After introducing FA, three general topics are addressed. (i) Underdetermination: the precise reasons why FA is underdetermined illuminates various claims about underdetermination, abduction, and theoretical terms. (ii) Uncertainties: FA helps distinguish at least four kinds of uncertainties. The prevailing practice, often encoded in statistical software, is to ignore the most difficult kinds, which are essential to FA's underdetermination. (iii) What to do: some suggestions for dealing with these hardest types of uncertainty are offered.     

The Limits of Experience and Explanation: F. A. Lange and Ernst Mach on Things in Themselves

In the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in experimental psychology and the physiology of the sense organs inspired so-called ‘Back to Kant’ Neo-Kantians to articulate robustly psychologistic visions of Kantian epistemology. But their accounts of the thing in itself were fraught with deep tension: they wanted to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out. This paper diagnoses the source of that problem in views of one Neo-Kantan, F. A. Lange, and argues that it is solved only by Ernst Mach. No less than Lange and other Neo-Kantians, Mach was inspired to develop a psychologistic account of the foundations of knowledge, but his account also includes a coherent denial of things in themselves’ existence. Finally, this paper uses this account of Lange and Mach on things in themselves to illuminate Mach's relation to a certain strain of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of his own time: his views constitute a more fully coherent version of the psychologistic theory of knowledge Back to Kant figures tried to articulate.     

Sentimentalism: Its Scope and Limits

The subject of this paper is sentimentalism. In broad terms this is the view that value concepts, moral concepts, practical reasons—some or all of these—can be analysed in terms of feeling, sentiment or emotion. More specifically, the paper discusses the following theses:

1. there are reasons to feel (‘evaluative’ reasons) that are not reducible to practical or epistemic reasons
2. value is analysable in terms of these reasons to feel.
3. all practical reasons are in one way or another grounded in evaluative reasons.

(i) and (ii) are accepted while (iii) is rejected.