Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality’

ABSTRACT

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In Section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In Section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a ‘public health approach’, in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.     

Interpreting Neurath’s Protocols. Reply to Nottelmann

This paper responds to a recent criticism of Uebel's analysis of Neurath's protocol statements and proposes some independent amendments.

Animal Experience: A Formal-Indicative Approach to Martin Heidegger’s Account of Animality

In the present paper I attempt an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of animality, developed in winter semester 1929/1930. My general purpose is to examine Heidegger’s analysis in the wider context of formal-indicative phenomenology as such. Thus I show that in order to develop a phenomenology of animality, Heidegger must tacitly renounce the re-enactment of animal experience in which the formal-indicative concepts of his analysis could gain concreteness, and he resorts instead to scientific concepts and concrete experiments in biology or zoology. This is due to the fact that what I call the a-logical bursts into the field of the phenomenological regard when it is oriented toward animality. I therefore argue that the phenomenology of animality presents us with a paradigmatic case of a tension that is at work in any phenomenon, one between logos and a-logos, between hiddenness and unhiddenness—constituting a basic problem of future research in phenomenology and its approach to intersubjectivity and alterity.     

Found in Translation … Perhaps: Reply to Commentaries

The commentaries by Cornell and Markman are read here as attempts to convert or translate my text in terms they have found useful building on ideas by Winnicott, Bion, and others. I experience meaning in these commentaries in the sense that I can feel found at times in their words, but also, perhaps not. I try to convey the value and limits of our attempts to use a languaged representation of the polyrhythmic weave of embodied registrations, which I emphasize as a useful expansion for analytic attention. It is with these registrations that dissociated affect might be engaged in a way that helps the analyst to navigate, rather than react to, difficult to bear affects associated with dysregulation and shame.     

A helpful argument — Reply to K. Eichner

Das von K. Eichner konstruierte Gegenbeispiel ist logisch nicht stichhaltig. Trotzdem ist sein Einwand hilfreich. Er zeigt nämlich, daß die starke Falsifikation, die notwendig ist, um die Vorschrift des Falsifikationismus zu rechtfertigen, daß eine Theorie aufgrund eines einzigen Gegenbeispiels zu verwerfen sei, durch Beobachtungsdaten widerlegt werden kann. Auf diese Weise wird erneut das Scheitern einer deduktiven Begründung für die Falsifikationsmethodologie und damit die Gültigkeit der Symmetriethese erwiesen.     

Reply to William R. Ferrell’s paper “A model for realism of confidence judgments: Implications for underconfidence in sensory discrimination”

Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model and our subjective distance model belong to the same family of Thurstonial models. The subjective distance model is limited to sensory discrimination with the method of constant stimuli and rooted in such notions as discriminal dispersion and sense distance. Ferrell’s model is intended to be wider in scope and to apply to both cognitive and sensory tasks. Both models need supplementary assumptions to predict calibration phenomena. The point of departure for us is the fact that the model predicts under-confidence under “guessing” and the empirical finding that people are about 100% correct when they report “absolutely certain.” Ferrell makes assumptions about cutoffs on the decision variable. The respondent is assumed to adjust or not adjust cutoffs according to “cues to difficulty.” We disagree with Ferrell’s claim that the hard-easy effect is explained by the respondent’s failure to adjust cutoffs sufficiently when there is a change in level of difficulty, and argue that this amounts to little more than a translation of the hard-easy effect into the lingua of Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model. Our argument is that the hard-easy effect is a consequence of the post hoc division of items according to solution probability. In addition, error variance may contribute to regression effects that enlarge the hard-easy effect. Finally, in contrast to Ferrell’s position, we regard inference (cognitive uncertainty) and discrimination (sensory uncertainty) as different psychological processes. An understanding of calibration in these two areas requires separate models.     

Reply to Critiques of Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake

Philosophia - In what follows, I reply to critical appraisals of my book entitled Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession (Cavanaugh 2018)....     

How to Define a Number? A General Epistemological Account of Simon Stevin’s Art of Defining

This paper explores Simon Stevin’s l’Arithmétique of 1585, where we find a novel understanding of the concept of number. I will discuss the dynamics between his practice and philosophy of mathematics, and put it in the context of his general epistemological attitude. Subsequently, I will take a close look at his justificational concerns, and at how these are reflected in his inductive, a postiori and structuralist approach to investigating the numerical field. I will argue that Stevin’s renewed conceptualisation of the notion of number is a sort of “existential closure” of the numerical domain, founded upon the practice of his predecessors and contemporaries. Accordingly, I want to make clear that l’Aritmetique have to be read not as an ontological analysis or exploration of the numerical field, but as an explication of a mathematical ethos. In this sense, this article also intends to make a specific contribution to the broader issue of the “ethics of geometry.”     

Does Empathy Have Any Place in Aquinas’s Account of Justice?

Recent developments in cognitive science have prompted philosophers to speculate about the importance of empathy, the ability to directly apprehend and take on the mental and emotional states of others, in understanding and being motivated by moral norms—particularly moral norms concerning other humans. In this paper, I investigate whether some kind of empathy is involved in Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of justice, which he describes as essentially other-directed. I claim that a kind of empathy is involved in Aquinas’s notion of friendship and that this notion of friendship is related to justice as a virtue as its goal. Having the virtue of justice is geared towards establishing true friendship, at least in part. In so doing, it is directed towards establishing a sufficient groundwork for genuine empathy. Instances of genuine empathy, then, are approximations of this goal of the work of justice, even if they occur outside the context of a true friendship. Given this, I describe possible roles Aquinas might afford empathy and empathetic emotions in the context of cultivating the virtue of justice, including roles in motivation and knowledge.     

A Different Rationale for Redistribution: A Reply to Bjørnskov

First we would like to thank Christian Bjørnskov for his comments and in particular for acknowledging the contribution we make in introducing the idea that inter-country redistribution might be more effective a way of redistributing incomes than interpersonal redistribution within a country and, in general, the quality of our theoretical and indeed empirical analysis. We feel that the more critical points he makes of the paper are largely due to a misunderstanding and we welcome the opportunity to further clarify our contribution.     

Does Every Good Behaviorist Deserve Favor? A Reply to Neil Jacobson

This is a response to Dr. NeilJacobson's article, An Outsider's Perspective on Psychotherapy Integration, which appears in this issue. It addresses the issue of the differences between eclecticism and psychotherapy integration as well as the possible advantages integration holds over a one-model therapy system. This article suggests that virtually all psychotherapy systems operate under an integrated three paradigm model, and offers some concrete examples of this explanation. It also suggests that the use of psychotherapy integration may lead to a better paradigm match between client and therapist, and ultimately to better outcome. This article concludes that psychotherapy integration possibly offers the best alternative in terms of reducing the biases of one's underlying treatment oaradiem.     

There’s No Need to Rethink Desert: A Reply to Pummer

Pummer (Philosophical Review 123(1): 43–77, 2014) ingeniously wraps together issues from the personal identity literature with issues from the literature on desert. However, I wish to take issue with the main conclusion that he draws, namely, that we need to rethink the following principle: Desert.: When people culpably do very wrong or bad acts, they deserve punishment in the following sense: at least other things being equal they ought to be made worse off, simply in virtue of the fact that they culpably did wrong—even if they have repented, are now virtuous, and punishing them would benefit no one. (Pummer Philosophical Review 123(1):43–77, 2014: 43–44) Pummer offers an argument that is intended to show that this principle, along with widely-held views about personal identity, entails an inconsistent triad of propositions. I agree. But I think Pummer's argument attacks a straw man. I believe that no-one holds Desert, at least as it is stated, and that once the principle is stated correctly it is easy to see that no inconsistent triad follows from it. So, Desert does not need rethinking. It just needs to be stated correctly.     

Does It Make You Happy Feeling This Way? A Core Affect Account of Preference for Current Mood

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether and how preference for current mood is related to the valence and activation dimensions of core affect. In Study 1, 100 undergraduates rated valence and activation of their naturally occurring current mood and preference for this mood. In Study 2, another 90 undergraduates performed the same ratings for various induced moods. The results showed as expected that preference for current mood is related to both valence and activation. Whereas the relation to valence is direct, the relation to activation is invertedly U-shaped with a maximum that increases with valence.     

Two Objections to Moran’s Transparency Account

Abstract

Gareth Evans and others have argued that our intentional attitudes are transparent to facts in the world. This suggests we can know them by looking outwards to the world rather than inwards to our minds. Richard Moran uses this idea of transparency in his account of self-knowledge. Critics have objected to his account on several counts. For example, Jonathan Way has argued that irrational attitudes can give ordinary self-knowledge when they are not transparent and that there are rational attitudes that are not transparent. I argue here that these objections fail because Way does not fully consider the two different kinds of self-knowledge, ‘ordinary’ and evidence-based, that differentiate the two stances that Moran claims a subject can have towards his attitudes. It is the differences between these two stances and the implications of these that motivate Moran’s account, rather than whether the formed attitude is rational or irrational, as long as the subject avows it from the deliberative stance, focuses on the attitude’s object and conforms to the transparency condition as Moran sets this out.     

Two Challenges to Hutto’s Enactive Account of Pre-linguistic Social Cognition

Daniel Hutto??s Enactive account of social cognition maintains that pre- and non-linguistic interactions do not require that the participants represent the psychological states of the other. This goes against traditional ??cognitivist?? accounts of these social phenomena. This essay examines Hutto??s Enactive account, and proposes two challenges. The account maintains that organisms respond to the behaviours of others, and in doing so respond to the ??intentional attitude?? which the other has. The first challenge argues that there is no adequate account of how the organisms respond to the correct aspect of the behaviour in each situation. The second challenge argues that the Enactive account cannot account for the flexibility of pre- and non-linguistic responses to others. The essay concludes that these challenges provide more than sufficient reason to doubt the viability of Hutto??s account as an alternative to cogntivist approaches to social cognition.