Philosophy of Mind,Past and Present

This article attempts to summarize a few criteria of progress in philosophy—clarifying problems; rejecting false theories; opening new perspectives in familiar fields; inventing new arguments or thought experiments; and so on—and to apply them to contemporary philosophy of mind. As a result, the article concludes that while some progress was obvious in the past fifty years, there is much work yet to be done. It then tries to outline a transformation of conceptual analysis needed for further developments in this field. The author argues that conceptual analysis might be revived if it is treated as a clarification of the relations among our natural beliefs.     

Odometry and backtracking: social and individual navigation in group foraging desert harvester ants (Veromessor pergandei)

Animal Cognition - Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (pheromone-marked columns) and individual cues (e.g., self-generated movement,...     

The revised monoamine hypothesis: Mechanism of antidepressant treatment in the context of behavior

The temporal restoration of brain monoamines in the synaptic cleft due to MAO inhibition or by blocking catecholamine reuptake is only the the first step on the way to recovery from depression. The second and crucial step represents the feedback system, which can provide the continuous restoration of brain monoamines in the context of free search behavior. This feedback system on the one hand helps to overcome depression and on the other hand causes the hyposensitivity of the postsynaptic catecholamine (CA) receptors, due to the increased activity of the brain CA system. According to the search activity concept, REM sleep in the healthy subject, being a part of the same feedback system, restores brain monoamines. The mechanism of REM sleep deprivation in the treatment of depression is discussed in the context of this feedback system.     

From Inexactness to Certainty: The Change in Hume's Conception of Geometry

Although Hume's analysis of geometry continues to serve as a reference point for many contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science, the fact that the first Enquiry presents a radical revision of Hume's conception of geometry in the Treatise has never been explained. The present essay closely examines Hume's early and late discussions of geometry and proposes a reconstruction of the reasons behind the change in his views on the subject. Hume's early conception of geometry as an inexact non-demonstrative science is argued to be a consequence of his attempt to discredit geometrical proofs of infinite divisibility of extension by anchoring the meaning of geometrical concepts in inherently inexact qualitative measurement procedures. This measurement-based attack on the exactness and certainty of geometry is analyzed and shown to be both self-refuting and inconsistent with the general epistemological framework of the Treatise. The revised conception of geometry as a demonstrative science in the first Enquiry is then interpreted as Hume's response to the failure of his earlier attempt to discredit geometrical proofs of infinite divisibility of extension. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A picture is worth a thousand words: a comparison of pupils’ images of intelligence in Finnish and Russian Karelia

The study set out to examine Finnish and Russian children’s images of intelligence as contextualized in the systems of the school and gender. Finnish and Russian pupils, aged 11–12 years, were asked to draw pictures of an intelligent and an ordinary pupil and a good and an ordinary pupil. A distinctive feature shared by the children in both countries was that intelligent pupils were depicted as positively orientated to knowledge and studies and as similar to good pupils. The Russian children’s pictures emphasized academic performance, suggesting that the contribution of the school to children’s representations was greater in Russia than in Finland. In regard to gender appearance, the intelligent pupil was usually pictured in gender-neutral or childish features, suggesting that being defined as intellectually competent entailed deviating from the heterosexual ideal. In the discussion, the ambivalence associated with social definitions of intelligence is addressed.     

Introduction

This article introduces the papers from two video conferences recently held between philosophers at Moscow State University and the University at Albany, State University of New York. The overarching theme is philosophical progress in the past fifty years, but the conferences were designed also to illustrate the range of work now being done by American analytic philosophers and by Russian thinkers. The Albany essays focus on philosophy of science, philosophical logic, Kantian studies, applied ethics, and ethical and political theory. The Russian essays concern philosophy of culture, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, social philosophy, feminism, and postmodernism. This introductory essay notes similarities and differences that exist among American and Russian approaches to philosophy and the prospects for the convergence (or not) of these approaches. It also indicates ways in which contemporary Russian thinkers are striking out in new directions while seeking to recover those parts of their past that were silenced during much of the twentieth century.     

Hiding and searching strategies of adult humans in a virtual and a real-space room

Adults searched for or cached three objects in nine hiding locations in a virtual room or a real-space room. In both rooms, the locations selected by participants differed systematically between searching and hiding. Specifically, participants moved farther from origin and dispersed their choices more when hiding objects than when searching for hidden objects. In addition, in both virtual and real-space rooms, prior experience in the hiding task increased the distance participants traveled from origin and the dispersion of their choices during searching. Furthermore, gender differences appeared in the virtual room but not in the real-space room. Specifically, during hiding females travelled farther from origin than males and during searching they dispersed their choices more than males. Overall, the results suggest that strategies used by adult humans for searching and caching are consistent with those seen in non-human animals and children.     

The philosophical cap of Yegor Fjodorovič or becoming Belinskij

The impact of Hegelian philosophy on Belinskij’s thinking and especially on his self-understanding did not end with his well-known and ostentatious anti-Hegelian tirades. By focusing on Belinskij’s tormented early years in Petersburg, after he had supposedly reneged on his “reconciliation with reality,” this paper will attempt to show how the continued conceptual evolution of Belinskij’s Hegelian thinking was intimately interrelated with his personal striving for self-realization. Ultimately, Hegelian ideas not only allowed Belinskij to affirm a unique sense of self as the subject of a not-yet-world-historical nation, they also served as the crucial theoretical framework that would finally allow Belinskij to conceptualize the essential, organic connection between Russian literature and Russian life, as evidenced in his monumental eleven-part study on Pushkin.     

When good theories make bad predictions

Chaos-related obstructions to predictability have been used to challenge accounts of theory validation based on the agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data (Rueger & Sharp, 1996. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 47, 93–112; Koperski, 1998. Philosophy of Science, 40, 194–212). These challenges are incomplete in two respects: (a) they do not show that chaotic regimes are unpredictable in principle (i.e., with unbounded resources) and, as a result, that there is something conceptually wrong with idealized expectations of correct predictions from acceptable theories, and (b) they do not explore whether chaos-induced predictive failures of deterministic models can be remedied by stochastic modeling. In this paper we appeal to an asymptotic analysis of state space trajectories and their numerical approximations to show that chaotic regimes are deterministically unpredictable even with unbounded resources. Additionally, we explain why stochastic models of chaotic systems, while predictively successful in some cases, are in general predictively as limited as deterministic ones. We conclude by suggesting that the way in which scientists deal with such principled obstructions to predictability calls for a more comprehensive approach to theory validation, on which experimental testing is augmented by a multifaceted mathematical analysis of theoretical models, capable of identifying chaos-related predictive failures as due to principled limitations which the world itself imposes on any less-than-omniscient epistemic access to some natural systems. We give special thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that have substantially contributed to the final version of this paper