Kidnapping an ugly child: is William James a pragmaticist?

Since the term ‘pragmatism’ was first coined, there have been debates about who is or is not a ‘real’ pragmatist, and what that might mean. The division most often drawn in contemporary pragmatist scholarship is between William James and Charles Peirce. Peirce is said to present a version of pragmatism which is scientific, logical and objective about truth, whereas James presents a version which is nominalistic, subjectivistic and leads to relativism. The first person to set out this division was in fact Peirce himself, when he distinguished his own ‘pragmaticism’ from the broad pragmatism of James and others. Peirce sets out six criteria which defines ‘pragmaticism’: the pragmatic maxim; a number of ‘preliminary propositions’; prope-positivism; metaphysical inquiry; critical common-sensism; and scholastic realism. This paper sets out to argue that in fact James meets each of these criteria, and should be seen as a ‘pragmaticist’ by Peirce’s own lights.     

Picturing the Soul: Moral Psychology and the Recovery of the Emotions

This paper draws from the resources of Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy to analyze the ethical status of the emotions at two related levels of reflection. Methodologically, it argues that a recovery of the emotions requires a revised notion of moral theory which affirms the basic orientation of consciousness to some notion of value or the good. Such a theory challenges many of the rationalist premises which in the past have led moral theory to reject the role of emotions in ethics. In particular, it acknowledges the centrality of moral psychology to ethics and reclaims the notion of consciousness rather than the will as the primary mode of human moral being. At a second, more substantive level, the paper explores the relation between the emotions and consciousness. Specifically, it defends a cognitivist and reflexive theory of the emotions which affirms a strong relation between the emotions and our evaluative beliefs. On this view, the emotions reflexively mediate our relation to objective value. In order to earn their cognitive status, however, the emotions must be tested in relation to a critical principle in order to guard against the egoistic tendencies of consciousness to build up images of reality to serve its own purposes. Therefore, a theory of the Good must be part of the critical content of a reflexive theory of the emotions.     

Ethical Education in Software Engineering: Responsibility in the Production of Complex Systems

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics.     

Missed Opportunities: Speculation on What Japanese Psychology Could Have Been

Takasuna (Integr. Physiol. Behav. Sci. 41, 2007) mentioned the ease with which evolutionary theory was accepted by Japanese psychologists, and certainly this is admirable. He also mentioned the stubborn force which had to be used to gain an understanding of the (thoroughly Western) subjective–objective distinction. Alas, during the formative years of Japanese psychology, there was much philosophical work afoot attempting to destroy that distinction. It is speculated that only a small change of which books were translated, or with which Americans early Japanese psychologists trained under, would have made Japan into a haven for these still underdog theories.     

Against digital ontology

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only “modes of presentation” of Being (to paraphrase Kant), that is, ways in which reality is experienced or conceptualised by an epistemic agent at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of research. The pars construens, entitled “A Defence of Informational Structural Realism”, is developed in a separate article, also published in this journal.