Wittgenstein and religious dogma

It is well understood that Wittgenstein defends religious faith against positivistic criticisms on the grounds of its logical independence. But exactly how are we to understand the nature of that independence? Most scholars take Wittgenstein to equate language-games with belief-systems, and thus to assert that religions are logical schemes founded on their own basic beliefs and principles of inference. By contrast, I argue that on Wittgenstein’s view, to have religious faith is to hold fast to a certain picture of the world according to which one orients one’s actions and attitudes, possibly even in dogmatic defiance of contrary evidence. Commitment to such a picture is grounded in passion, not intellection, and systematic coherence is largely irrelevant.     

The Semantic Theory of Truth: Field’s Incompleteness Objection

According to Field’s influential incompleteness objection, Tarski’s semantic theory of truth is unsatisfactory since the definition that forms its basis is incomplete in two distinct senses: (1) it is physicalistically inadequate, and for this reason, (2) it is conceptually deficient. In this paper, I defend the semantic theory of truth against the incompleteness objection by conceding (1) but rejecting (2). After arguing that Davidson and McDowell’s reply to the incompleteness objection fails to pass muster, I argue that, within the constraints of a non-reductive physicalism and a holism concerning the concepts of truth, reference and meaning, conceding Field’s physicalistic inadequacy conclusion while rejecting his conceptual deficiency conclusion is a promising reply to the incompleteness objection.

The New Holism: The Grand Prospect for Science and Society

As we enter the 21st century and the new millennium, our collective evolution reaches a critical threshold. We cannot go on as we did before: our world has become unsustainable. Sooner or later many local ecosystems would collapse, the climate would change adversely for agriculture and habitation, species incompatible with a large and dense human population would profilerate, and resources critical for human health and survival would become scarce, or at least beyond the reach of a critical segment of humanity. We need to shift gears, moving from the kind of evolution that characterized our scientific-technological civilization, to the kind that is compatible with the human condition as it evolves on this planet. This shift requires a corresponding shift in our concept of the world. The dominant mechanistic and atomistic paradigm no longer serves us: it is not only factually incorrect in view of the latest discoveries of the sciences, it also inspires dangerously misguided behaviors. We need to find a deeper and better view of the human condition. We must no longer just see the trees: we must also see the forest. That is, we must learn to see the planetary socio-ecosystem with all its subsystems, diversities, and also its actual and potential unities. What we need is a holistic view, a view of the human being as part of her or his community, which is part of its local environment, which is part of its society and culture, which is part of the system of cultures and societies in the human family-which is part of the global environment: of the biosphere.     

Communication and Content: Circumstances and Consequences of the Habermas-Brandom Debate

The recent exchange between Robert Brandom and Jürgen Habermas provides an opportunity to compare and contrast some aspects of their systems. Both present broadly inferential accounts of meaning, according to which the content of an expression is determined by its role in an inferential network. Several problems confront such theories of meaning - one of which threatens the possibility of communication because content is relative to an individual's set of beliefs. Brandom acknowledges this problem and provides a solution to it. The point of this paper is to argue that it arises for Habermas's theory as well. I then present several solutions Habermas could adopt and evaluate their feasibility. The result is that Habermas must alter his theory of communicative action by contextualizing the standards for successful communication.     

The explanatory significance of wholes: How exclusive reliance on antecedent-consequent models of explanation undermines the study of persons

Psychology has long labored under a mechanistic view of persons as reducible to parts (i.e., traits) that dictate human functioning. Efforts to study persons holistically—as embodied wholes embedded in the world—have resuscitated the study of personhood and its development, overhauling linear cause-effect models of psychological functioning in favor of emergence-focused, dynamic process alternatives rooted in the concept of persons as necessarily constituted within interactive context. Focused on agency and self-determination, the study of personhood also calls for an appreciation of the explanatory significance of persons as persons, as unified wholes who preserve their own organization in the face of ceaseless exchange with the world. Fully adopting this important vantage point for understanding persons, however, is only possible by expanding notions of scientific explanation beyond the temporal framework of antecedent-consequent, parts-to-whole relations in order to embrace a person's wholeness itself as a legitimate mode of explanation for understanding functioning.     

Post-genomics, between reduction and emergence

It is frequently said that biology is emerging from a long phase of reductionism. It would be certainly more correct to say that biologists are abandoning a certain form of reductionism. We describe this past form, and the experiments which challenged the previous vision. To face the difficulties which were met, biologists use a series of concepts and metaphors - pleiotropy, tinkering, epigenetics - the ambiguity of which masks the difficulties, instead of solving them. In a similar way, the word “post-genomics” has different meanings, depending upon who uses it. Which of these meanings will become dominant in the future is an open question.     

Intersubjectivity as Co-phenomenology: From the Holism of Meaning to the Being-in-the-world-with-others

I outline in this paper a pragmatical approach to meaning. Meaning is defined as a phenomenologically experienced construal. As such, it is a dynamic object whose first evidence comes from the first person rather than the third one. At the same time, the approach assumes that meaning is not an individual creation, but rather an intersubjective one. Origins of meaning are also to be founded not ‘in the head’ of a cognitive system or subject, but in the intersubjective space contingently formed between a subject (S), an other (O) and a common object (R), which they talk about. Approaching this minimal communicative situation therefore requires realizing that the phenomenological dimension is always implied in any intersubjective encounter. The observed synchronized co-feeling among subjects, upon which language comprehension takes place, I call ‘co-phenomenology’. When analyzed in this way, intersubjectivity shows at the same time its social, phenomenological and biological dimensions.

The Holistic Way: John Wesley’s Practical Piety as a Resource for Integrated Healthcare

In the midst of the multifarious healthcare of the 21st century an Anglican clergyman from the 18th century named John Wesley can serve as a valuable resource for contemporary Christians seeking to faithfully live a life of well-being which incorporates different forms of medicine. In order to explore Wesley’s contributions to integrative care this essay will first situate Wesley in his 18th century context—a time period not completely unlike our own in which medicine was also experiencing dramatic shifts in practice and philosophy. In order to demonstrate his integration of the medical knowledge of his day the essay will look at Wesley’s own medical practices and his relationships to physicians as forging a “middle way” between physic and empiricism. The essay will examine Wesley’s theology as a practical piety which is grounded in a holistic sotieriology that sustains an integrative medicine (caring for body, mind, and spirit). Finally, the essay concludes with possibilities for integrated medicine in our own day as informed by a Wesleyan “way” of holistic practice.

Featural processing in face preferences

Two experiments examined how practice and time pressure influence holistic processing, defined as the relative importance of feature interactions, in a face preference task. Participants rated 32 cartoon faces that varied along five dichotomous features (Experiment 1) or 27 realistic morphed faces that varied along three trichotomous dimensions (Experiment 2), under high and low time pressure (operationalized as a short vs. long stimulus presentation time), over a series of experimental blocks. In both experiments, the overall importance of facial features, but not of feature interactions, increased over blocks and, in one condition of Experiment 1, under high vs. low time pressure. Analyses of idiosyncratic importance indicated that the feature effects were due to the increasing importance of participants’ idiosyncratically most influential features. Functional differences between face preferences and face recognition are offered to explain and predict when facial features will be processed independently vs. holistically.     

Justice, Holism and Principles

Some moral theorists defend a holistic account of practical reasons and deny that the possibility of moral thought depends upon the existence of moral principles. This article explores the implications of this position for theorising about justice, which has often aspired to provide us with an ordered list of principles to govern our institutions and practices.