Inaugural Editorial

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review -     

The Inaugural Address: Kantian Modality: Tom Baldwin

Kant's claim that modality is a 'category' provides an approach to modality to be contrasted with Lewis's reductive analysis. Lewis's position is unsatisfactory, since it depends on an inherently modal conception of a world. This suggests that modality is 'primitive'; and the Kantian position is a prima facie plausible position of this kind, which is filled out by considering the relationship between modality and inference. This provides a context for comparing the Kantian position with Wright's non-cognitivist 'conventionalism'. Wright's position is vulnerable to the type of argument used against ethical non-cognitivism, and the Kantian position is further confirmed by Blackburn's acknowledgment that modality is 'antinaturalistic to its core'. The position is further elaborated to show that it can accommodate the famous Kripkean categories of the empirically necessary and the contingent a priori , and finally defended against the criticisms used by Quine against Carnap.     

The Inaugural Address: Perception and Metaphysical Scepticism

In this paper I introduce and critically examine a paradox about perceiving that is in some ways analogous to the paradox about meaning which Kripke puts forward in his exegesis of Wittgenstein's views on Rule-following.
When applied to vision, the paradox of perceiving raises a metaphysical scepticism about which object a person is seeing if he looks, for example, at an apple on a tree directly in front of him. Physical objects can be seen when their appearance is distorted in various ways by illusions. The question therefore arises as to how can we answer the sceptic who suggests the following: although the viewer appears to be seeing the green apple in front of him, he is actually suffering a bizarre illusion of a blue car situated somewhere behind him. The sceptic is not concerned with epistemic problems about how we know which object, if any, the subject is seeing; the sceptic is raising the more fundamental question: what fact of the matter underlies a person's perceptual relation to the physical world, in virtue of which that person may be justified in arriving at a perceptual belief about the environment?
Among the various different issues raised by the sceptic, I focus on the question: what determines the perceiving relation? I canvass a number of possible proposals in answer to it, concentrating mainly on two opposed accounts: the Disjunctive View and the Causal Theory of Perception. I argue in particular for the following two claims:
that the paradox highlights the fact that the Disjunctive View fails to provide a coherent positive account of what perceiving is.
that the problem of 'deviant causal chains', often thought to raise particular difficulties for the Causal theorist, can also be raised against other accounts of perception, including versions of the Disjunctive View.
I conclude that unless the Causal Theory of Perception can be upheld, there will be no way of answering the sceptic.     

Maya Angelou's Inaugural Poem

Maya Angelou's performance of her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton as 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993, was compared with other poetry and prose performances. Measurements of her pause frequency, pause location, pause duration, phrase length, speech rate, articulation rate, and percentage of pause time all uniquely characterized her performance. Printed versions of Angelou's inaugural poem were also analyzed. Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, spacing, and line and stanza breaks, along with additions, omissions, and sequence changes of words and phrases, were found. The poem performed possesses a richness unpredictable from either the extant literature on poetry readings or from Angelou's own printed pages.     

Spinoza: une lecture d'Aristote

Does (affirmative) judgement have a logical dual, negative judgement? Whether there is such a logical dualism was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frege argued in ‘Negation’ (1918/9) that logic can dispense with negative judgement. Frege's arguments shaped the views of later generations of analytic philosophers, but they will not have convinced such opponents as Brentano or Windelband. These philosophers believed in negative judgement for psychological, not logical, reasons. Reinach's ‘On the Theory of Negative Judgement’ (1911) spoke to the concerns of these philosophers. While Frege took the distinction between affirmative and negative judgement to be logically redundant, Reinach argued that it is the result of confusing judgement with a different mental act. In this article, I present Reinach's arguments against the ‘old logical dualism’ in context, analyse them and discuss Reinach's innovative use of the notion of focus in the theory of judgement. Recently, there has been a revival of the view that sentential negation is grounded in a prior mental act of rejection. In the final section, I argue that Reinach's analysis of rejection poses a challenge for the revivalists.     

The Inaugural Address: Why There Couldn't Be Zombies

Philosophical zombies are exactly as physicalists suppose we are, right down to the tiniest details, but they have no conscious experiences. (It is presupposed that all explicable physical events are explicable physically.) Are such things even logically possible? My aim is to contribute to showing not only that the answer is 'No', but why. (I concede that systems superficially like human beings might exist and lack consciousness.)
My strategy has two prongs: a fairly brisk argument which demolishes the zombie idea; followed by an attempt to throw light on how something can qualify as a conscious perceiver. The argument to show that zombies are impossible exploits the point that in order to be able to detect our own 'qualia' we should have to be somehow sensitive to them; which the zombie idea rules out. The attempt to make clear why my zombie twin must be conscious exploits the idea that we have a reasonably clear grasp of a 'Basic Package' of psychological concepts.     

Epistemic norms: truth conducive enough

Synthese - Epistemology needs to account for the success of science. In True Enough (2017), Catherine Elgin argues that a veritist epistemology is inadequate to this task. She advocates shifting...     

The Inaugural Address: Other Minds, Rationality and Analogy

Some see the co-cognitive view of how we arrive at judgements about others' thoughts as a version of the analogy approach, where I reason from how I find things to be with me to how they will be for others. These thinkers think it a virtue of the view that it need not accept any linkage between thought and rationality. This paper will, however, defend the view that a co-cognitive view is a natural ally of theories which link thought and rationality. It will try to show that exclusive stress on analogy is unduly sceptical about our cognitive capacities and overestimates our similarity to each other.     

生活哲学:一种哲学观

哲学观问题日益引起学者们的关注。本文从分析生活概念入手,尝试性地提出一种哲学观——生活哲学观,此种哲学观认为,哲学是人生活的一种形式,其功能在于保持人的生成意识。