Affect,Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza's Account of Motivation

Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect (3d3; 3 General Definition of the Affects), desires do not themselves consist in changes in one's power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns the priority of desires and evaluative judgements. While 3p9s and 3p39s suggest that evaluative judgements are (necessarily) posterior to desires, Andrew Youpa has recently argued that passages in Ethics 4 indicate that rational evaluative judgements can give rise to, rather than arise out of, desires. I aim to offer solutions to these problems that reveal the elegance and coherence of Spinoza's account of motivation. Ultimately, I argue that whereas emotions and desires stand in a non-reductive, symmetrical relationship to one another, evaluative judgements must be understood as asymmetrically dependent on, and reducible to, emotions or desires. This interpretation sheds light on our understanding of Spinoza's cognitivist account of emotion. For Spinoza, while emotions are representational, they are not underpinned by evaluative judgements. Rather than inflating emotions to include evaluative judgements, he deflates evaluative judgements, treating them as emotions, or valenced representations, and nothing more.     

Sensations as Representations in Kant

This paper defends an interpretation of the representational function of sensation in Kant's theory of empirical cognition. Against those who argue that sensations are ‘subjective representations’ and hence can only represent the sensory state of the subject, I argue that Kant appeals to different notions of subjectivity, and that the subjectivity of sensations is consistent with sensations representing external, spatial objects. Against those who claim that sensations cannot be representational at all, because sensations are not cognitively sophisticated enough to possess intentionality, I argue that Kant does not use the term ‘Vorstellung’ to refer to intentional mental states exclusively. Sensations do not possess their own intentionality, but they nevertheless perform a representational function in virtue of their role as the matter of empirical intuition. In empirical intuition, the sensory qualities given in sensation are combined with the representation of space to constitute the intuited appearance. The representational function of sensation consists in sensation being the medium out of which intuited appearances are constituted: the qualities of sensations stand in for what the understanding will judge (conceptualize) as material substance.     

Attitudes and social representations: a theoretical and experimental approach

We propose here to establish the theoretical link between the concepts of ‘attitude’ and ‘social representation’. We shall base our proposal on recent conceptions of the notion of attitude, and on a structural approach to representations which account for their evaluative nature. This theoretical proposal will be followed by two experiments. The first showed that attitudes towards objects are based on the evaluative components of the representation of those objects. The second showed that a change in attitude about an object may be accompanied by changes in the evaluative dimension of its representation. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Representing ethical reality: a guide for worldly non-naturalists

Abstract

Ethical realists hold (i) that our ethical concepts, thoughts, and claims are in the business of representing ethical reality, by representing evaluative or normative properties and facts as aspects of reality, and (ii) that such representations are at least sometimes accurate. Non-naturalist realists add the further claim that ethical properties and facts are ultimately non-natural, though they are nonetheless worldly. My aim is threefold: to elucidate the sort of representation involved in ethical evaluation on realist views; to clarify what exactly is represented and how non-naturalism comes into the picture for non-naturalists; and to defend worldly non-naturalism against some objections. The first question addressed is how we should model evaluation on any realist view, which should in turn guide the identification of which properties and facts are credibly regarded as ‘evaluative’ ones. Then the question is: what role might non-natural properties and facts play, and how are they related to what is represented in ethical evaluation? Once that is clear, we will be in a position to answer certain objections to non-naturalist realism from Jackson, Gibbard, Bedke, and Dreier. I argue that the objections all mischaracterize the role played by non-natural properties and facts on plausible versions of non-naturalist realism.     

Iconic Representations and Representative Practices

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation. I claim that his account of iconic representations shows that it is the very process of representing, construed as a practice which is coextensive with observing and experimenting, that casts light on the nature of representative relations.     

Objects,pictures and words. Effects of representational format on four-year-olds’ quantity knowledge / Objetos,imágenes y palabras. Efectos del formato representacional en el conocimiento de la cantidad a los cuatro años

Abstract

This study explores whether and how different external representations of quantity influence the performance of four-year-old children when constructing sets of a given cardinal number. Three representations of quantity were presented (objects, pictures and number words) in an adaptation of the ‘Give-a-number’ task, in sets that contained 2–6 items. The results show that the use of pictures facilitated children’s performance with quantities of three and four. These results are discussed by analysing the cognitive demands of representational formats, in terms of dual representation and iconicity, and according to the magnitude of the quantities involved.     

The role and impact of mental simulation in design

Although theories of mental simulations have used different formulations of the premises of ‘thought experiments’, they can be fitted under a minimalist hypothesis stating that mental simulations are run under situations of uncertainty to turn that uncertainty into approximate answers. Three basic assumptions of mental simulations were tested by using naturalistic data from engineering design. Results from the design protocols showed (1) initial representations in mental simulation had higher than base‐rate uncertainty, (2) uncertainty in mental simulations were lowered after simulation runs, (3) resulting representations had more approximations than base‐rate or initial representations. Further, the reference to external representational systems (sketches and prototypes) was examined. It was found that prototypes had fewer technical/functional simulations compared to sketches or unsupported cognition. Although prototypes were associated with more approximation than unsupported cognition, the different external representation categories did not differ in information uncertainty. The results support the minimalist hypothesis of mental simulations. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Avicenna on the Primary Propositions

Avicenna introduces the primary propositions (or the primaries, for short) as the most fundamental principles of knowledge. (In this paper, we are not primarily concerned with the primary/first intelligibles as concepts/conceptions.) However, as far as we are aware, Avicenna’s primaries have not yet been independently studied. Nor do Avicenna scholars agree on how to characterize them in the language of contemporary philosophy. It is well-known that the primaries are indemonstrable; nonetheless, it is not clear what the genealogy of the primaries is (§2), how, epistemologically speaking, they can be distinguished from other principles (§3), what their phenomenology is (§4), what the cause of the assent to them is (§5), how to explain the relationship between the ‘innate [nature] of the intellect’ and the primaries (§6) and, finally, back to their indemonstrability, in what sense they are ‘indemonstrable’ (§7). We will try to fill this gap. As a corollary, we will explain why Gutas’s view [Gutas, Dimitri. 2012. ‘The empiricism of Avicenna’, Oriens, 40, 391–436], among others, according to which the primaries are analytic (in the Kantian sense) is not true in general (§8). More particularly, we will argue that some primary propositions can be categorized under Kantian synthetic a priori, consistent with Black’s and Ardeshir’s conjecture [Black, Deborah L. 2013. ‘Certitude, justification, and the principles of knowledge in Avicenna’s epistemology’, in Peter Adamson, Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays, New York: Cambridge University Press; Ardeshir, Mohammad. 2008. ‘Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy of mathematics’, in S. Rahman, T. Street, and H. Tahiri, The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition, New York: Springer]. We hope that this work opens up some space to study Avicenna’s philosophy of mathematics and logic in connection with his epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.     

Representation and cognitive science

‘Representation’ is a concept which occurs both in cognitive science and philosophy. It has common features in both settings in that it concerns the explanation of behaviour in terms of the way the subject categorizes and systematizes responses to its environment. The prevailing model sees representations as causally structured entities correlated on the one hand with elements in a natural language and on the other with clearly identifiable items in the world. This leads to an analysis of representation and cognition in terms of formal symbols and their relations. But human perception and cognition use multiple informational constraints and deal with unsystematic and messy input in a way best explained by Parallel Distributed Processing models. This undermines the claim that a formal representational theory of mind is ‘the only game in town’. In particular it suggests a radically different model of brain function and its relation to epistemology from that found in current representational theories.     

Unmasking the Truth Beneath the Beauty: Why the Supposed Aesthetic Judgements Made in Science May Not Be Aesthetic at All

In this article I examine the status of putative aesthetic judgements in science and mathematics. I argue that if the judgements at issue are taken to be genuinely aesthetic they can be divided into two types, positing either a disjunction or connection between aesthetic and epistemic criteria in theory/proof assessment. I show that both types of claim face serious difficulties in explaining the purported role of aesthetic judgements in these areas. I claim that the best current explanation of this role, McAllister's ‘aesthetic induction’ model, fails to demonstrate that the judgements at issue are genuinely aesthetic. I argue that, in light of these considerations, there are strong reasons for suspecting that many, and perhaps all, of the supposedly aesthetic claims are not genuinely aesthetic but are in fact ‘masked’ epistemic assessments.     

The Nature of External Representations in Problem Solving

This article proposes a theoretical framework for external representation based problem solving. The Tic-Tac-Toe and its isomorphs are used to illustrate the procedures of the framework as a methodology and test the predictions of the framework as a functional model. Experimental results show that the behavior in the Tic-Tac-Toe is determined by the directly available information in external and internal representations in terms of perceptual and cognitive biases, regardless of whether the biases are consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to the task. It is shown that external representations are not merely inputs and stimuli to the internal mind and that they have much more important functions than mere memory aids. A representational determinism is suggested—the form of a representation determines what information can be perceived, what processes can be activated, and what structures can be discovered from the specific representation.     

AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL IN EVALUATIVE DESCRIPTIONS

Children made a series of evaluative judgements of 20 nonsense words, which they were told to imagine were people's names. Each subject judged half the names in terms of two-category rating scales containing an affirmative (A) response category which was evaluatively positive (E +) and a negative (n) category which was evaluatively negative (E -), e.g. ‘happy-not happy’, the other half were judged in terms of scales where the A category was E -, and the N category E +, e.g. ‘rude - not rude’. The main finding was a highly significant tendency for subjects to give more A than N responses, irrespective of evaluative content: in addition, a tendency for subjects to give more E - than E + responses, irrespective of grammatical form, approached significance.     

Social representations of drugs,causal judgment and social perception

The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of social representation on both social perceptions and social judgments. In the first stage of this study, 47 drug users and 80 ‘normal’ subjects were asked to respond to a questionnaire about representations of drugs. Three weeks later we contacted the same subjects. They were asked to answer some questions about a fictitious story in which an actor labelled as ‘a drug user’ or ‘a person’ disputed with a trader. Three different social representations of drugs were found. It was shown that these social representations were anchored in different social groups which were defined by their proximity to the world of drugs. Subjects who were themselves drug users shared an accepting or an ambivalent social representation of drugs but they also made the most negative judgements about the causes of a fictitious dispute between a trader and a drug addict. Moreover, these subjects had the most negative perception of the drug addict. Furthermore, some factors which increase the salience of social representations were studied. The effect on social perception and causal attributions of the interaction between social representations, the context and personal involvement in drugs was also shown. Some relations between the theory of social representations and the theories about asymmetrical intergroup relationships are exposed.     

Defending David Lewis’s modal reduction

David Lewis claims that his theory of modality successfully reduces modal items to nonmodal items. This essay will clarify this claim and argue that it is true. This is largely an exercise within ‘Ludovician Polycosmology’: I hope to show that a certain intuitive resistance to the reduction and a set of related objections misunderstand the nature of the Ludovician project. But these results are of broad interest since they show that would-be reductionists have more formidable argumentative resources than is often thought. Lewis’s reduction depends on a set of methodological commitments each of which is fairly plausible or at least currently popular, and none of which is particular to modality. The choice of which of these commitments to reject I leave to the discerning antireductionist. The essay proceeds as follows: §1 discusses reduction generally and one or two relevant puzzles; §2 discusses Lewis’s reduction in particular; the longest section, §3 replies to four objections.     

Why Feynman Diagrams Represent

There are two distinct interpretations of the role that Feynman diagrams play in physics: (i) they are calculational devices, a type of notation designed to keep track of complicated mathematical expressions; and (ii) they are representational devices, a type of picture. I argue that Feynman diagrams not only have a calculational function but also represent: they are in some sense pictures. I defend my view through addressing two objections and in so doing I offer an account of representation that explains why Feynman diagrams represent. The account that I advocate is a version of that defended by Kendall Walton, which provides us with a basic characterization of the way that representations in general work and is particularly useful for understanding distinctively pictorial representations – in Walton’s terms, depictions. The question of the epistemic function of Feynman diagrams as pictorial representations is left for another time.     

Representations gone mental

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation.     

多元表征假设：概念表征机制的新观点

传统的认知主义认为概念表征是与主体的感知系统无关的抽象符号。而具身理论则认为,概念表征以主体的感觉、知觉运动系统为基础的,感知系统在概念表征中具有中心作用。然而,具身性假设无法恰当的解释抽象概念表征这一问题。这种局限性说明主体的概念系统可能具有多元表征机制：既包括感知表征以加工与身体经验相关的具体知识,也包括抽象符号表征以加工与身体经验无关的抽象知识。来自病理学、认知神经科学和行为实验的实证研究证明了不同类型的概念会涉及不同的表征机制,证实了多元表征存在的合理性。今后的研究应探讨各种表征机制之间的关系等问题。