From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series最新文献

{"title":"Intentionality, Information, and Experience","authors":"Johannes L. Brandl","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.9","url":null,"abstract":"The fact that we have thoughts about things is a salient feature of our mental life. In phenomenology this feature goes by the name intentionality, while cognitive psychologists prefer to speak of the representational power of the mind. Where does this power come from? It is generally agreed today that one attempt at answering this question has thoroughly failed. The power of mental representation (i.e. intentionality) cannot be explained as a feature of language. Many philosophers have therefore turned to a more promising project, namely to explain intentionality in information-theoretic terms. This project, too, has come under attack however. Such reductive explanations fail, it is argued, because they leave out the constitutive relation between intentionality and experience. If intentionality can be explained at all, it must be grounded in a primitive non-relational feature of our experience. In this paper I will take up this adverbialist challenge to an information-theoretic explanation of intentionality and show how it can be met.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"580 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131578532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY","authors":"P. Suppes","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.137","url":null,"abstract":"The slow but steady accretion of the case for an empirical view of all human phenomena calls for a revision of much thinking in philosophy that still retains unfortunate remnants needing the kind of critique that Kant gave earlier, but now applied to a wider circle of philosophical ideas. The purpose of this lecture is not to make a systematic analysis of principles of a completely general kind, but rather to give four extended examples of problems that have often been thought of in philosophy or in mathematics as not being really empirical in nature. They will be presented as naturally empirical from a psychological and a neural standpoint. The first example tries to bring out the empirical character of the ordinary use of the concept of truth, and the psychological methods by which the truth of ordinary empirical statements is assessed. The second example deals with beliefs, especially that of Bayesian priors. I find unsatisfactory the thinness of the psychological foundations that are provided, for example by the forefathers of the modern Bayesian viewpoint, Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, and Jimmy Savage. The third example deals with problems of rational choice and rational thinking in general. The deeper psychological account of how choices are actually made is a matter of extended psychological development of concepts not usually brought to bear on the theory of rational choice. Finally, in the fourth example, I set forth a psychological thesis about an important aspect of modern mathematics that is troublesome for many people. The purpose of this example is to stress the psychological nature of verifying—mind you, not discovering, but verifying—the correctness of informal mathematical proofs, which still dominates the practice of mathematicians. The topic of neural phenomena, in particular neural computations, comes last, and I will say no more at this point.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"184 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122156741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"DECOMPOSING, RECOMPOSING, AND SITUATING CIRCADIAN MECHANISMS: THREE TASKS IN DEVELOPING MECHANISTIC EXPLANATIONS","authors":"W. Bechtel, A. Abrahamsen","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.177","url":null,"abstract":"Success in reductionistic research in cognitive science or biology is often portrayed as eliminating any need for independent explanations at higher levels. On the standard philosophical account, successful reduction of a higher level science means that its laws can be derived from those of a lower level science and hence perform no explanatory work of their own. But this misrepresents what successful reductionistic inquiry promises or can deliver. At least in the life sciences (including cognitive science), the usual focus of reductionistic inquiry is not the discovery of laws at a lower level than some law of initial interest. Instead, investigators begin with a phenomenon and general idea of the mechanism responsible for it and seek to discover its component parts and operations and how they work together. The focus of actual reductionistic inquiry is the decomposition of mechanisms, not the derivation of laws, and the desire to understand scientific inquiry in this way has led some of us to propose and develop a new mechanistic philosophy of science. Building this new approach has required a variety of case studies of scientific inquiry. Our own most recent case is research on the circadian rhythms exhibited in numerous behaviors and physiological functions. Researchers have had considerable success with the most basic reductionistic task in this field: identifying the parts within organisms that are important to the generation of the rhythms. In mammals, it has been found that many individual neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus function as clocks, and that key components include genes such as Period ( Per ) and Cryptochrome ( Cry ) and the proteins PER and CRY into which they are translated. Moreover, some key operations performed by these parts are known: PER and CRY form a compound (dimer) which is transported into the nucleus and inhibits Per and Cry , hence reducing the rate of production of further molecules of PER and CRY. Reductionistic research in the last 15 years has succeeded in identifying these and many other parts of the clockworks. Such inquiry, no matter how successful it is in finding the parts and characterizing the operations they perform, does not suffice to explain circadian phenomena. The operations performed by the parts in individual cells are organized and orchestrated such that the cell functions as a unit – one that displays complex temporal dynamics. Moreover, there are operations between SCN cells that synchronize their oscillations and between SCN cells and the receptors responsive to environmental cues that entrain the clock to the local time and between SCN cells and the many bodily organs that exhibit circadian behavior. Finally, there are operations connecting the organism to the environment, especially to sources of light and temperature. None of these operations at higher levels are discovered by focusing on the operations involving genes and proteins inside SCN cells—they require tools and techniques a","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131017273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SORITICAL SERIES AND FISHER SERIES","authors":"P. Égré","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.91","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.91","url":null,"abstract":"A general issue in the study of vagueness concerns whether vagueness can be reduced to a form of ambiguity (Fine 1975, Pinkal 1995, Williamson 1994). In this talk I propose to discuss the link between the notions of vagueness and ambiguity in the perceptual domain. Wellknown examples of ambiguous stimuli are so-called bistable figures, such as Necker's cube or Jastrow's duckrabbit, namely physically stable configurations that can be perceived in two different ways. A striking aspect of the perception of bistable stimuli is that even when one's attention is sustained, spontaneous transitions still happen from one percept to the other (Hupe and Rubin 2003). On the other hand, a concept or category is characterized as vague if it has borderline cases, namely cases for which the concept fails to apply clearly or to be excluded clearly. Typically, in a series of color hues ranging from a clear red to a clear yellow, some stimuli would count as borderline cases of either category when it is no longer clear to which category they should be assigned. While vagueness and ambiguity have often been opposed in the semantic domain (much as underdetermination vs. overdetermination of meaning, in K. Fine's words), D. Raffman has suggested that within soritical series, borderline cases pattern typically as ambiguous stimuli (Raffman 1994). Moreover, as discussed by Raffman, soritical transitions from one category to the other typically give rise to hysteresis effects, namely to the longer persistence of one percept over the other, depending on which category one is coming from (Lindsey, Brown and Raffman 2005 in progress, cited in Raffman 2005). As it turns out, this effect is also observed in the perception of bistable figures (see Hock, Kelso and Schoner 1993). In this talk, I wish to examine some philosophical consequences of the idea put forward by Raffman that borderline cases within soritical series might pattern as ambiguous stimuli. If the analogy is correct, one important such consequence seems to me to be that there should be no fact of the matter, in the relevant instances, as to whether patches of color in the borderline area can be classified as red or not. Indeed, bistable figures are such that there is no fact of the matter as to whether they should be perceived one way or the other, given that physically they are invariant. Rather, variations in judgments are to be traced solely to perceptual instability on the side of perceiving subjects. To that extent, the analogy appears to run against epistemic accounts of vagueness, which postulate the existence of an unknowable sharp cut-off within soritical series. A second aspect I shall examine concerns the characterization of the uncertainty specific to vagueness. Standardly, for bistable figures it is said that one percept excludes the other. A duck-rabbit is perceived as a duck or as a rabbit, but not as something in between. Prima facie therefore, the analogy between bistability and vagueness may se","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115925658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ACCEPTANCE AS CONDITIONAL DISPOSITION","authors":"F. Paglieri","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.29","url":null,"abstract":"The notion of acceptance has a checkered history in philosophy. This paper discusses what version of acceptance, if any, should qualify for inclusion in epistemology. The inquiry is motivated by van Fraassen’s invitation to be more liberal in determining basic epistemological categories (section 1). Reasons are given to avoid extending this liberal attitude to include van Fraassen’s acceptance of scientific theories (section 2) and Bratman’s pragmatic acceptance (section 3): both notions are showed to be reducible to combinations of simpler constitutive elements, and thus useful only as a shorthand. Other cases of divergence between action and belief, due to automatic sub-personal routines, are also not liable of being interpreted as acceptances (section 4). Only acceptance of conditional statements is argued to have something solid to offer for epistemological purposes: in particular, discussion on accepting conditional statements serves as a springboard to develop a new understanding of acceptance in general (section 5). It is proposed to consider acceptance as a conditional disposition: the consequences of this view for epistemology are discussed (section 6).","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132182273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ENOUGH WITH THE NORMS ALREADY","authors":"J. Fodor","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.1","url":null,"abstract":"There is a robust philosophical/psychological tradition, dating at least from the associationism of the British empiricists, that seeks to provide a naturalistic and reductionistic account of the semantic/intensional properties of languages and minds. But the received view among ‘analytic’ philosophers, especially those influenced by Wittgenstein, is that this project can’t be carried out; the semantic/intentional is ‘autonomous’ with respect to naturalistic discourse. This talk will discuss three of the standard grounds for this kind of anti-reductionism. I'll argue that none of them is fully convincing; in particular, that the prospects for a causal reduction of linguistic/mental reference are distinctly better than is generally supposed.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128620918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“SUPERVENIENT AND YET NOT DEDUCIBLE”: IS THERE A COHERENT CONCEPT OF ONTOLOGICAL EMERGENCE?","authors":"Jaegwon Kim","doi":"10.1515/9783110328851.53","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328851.53","url":null,"abstract":"Formulating a concept of emergence which is at least prima facie intelligible and coherent is a significant issue not only because emergence concepts continue to proliferate, attracting much positive attention from some quarters, but also because the idea of emergence is closely related to some of the concepts of central importance in the current debates on the mind-body problem. Early emergence theorists, like C.D. Broad and C. Lloyd Morgan, clearly intended emergence to be an objective phenomenon in the world and conceived of emergent properties as real features of objects with their own distinctive causal powers. This classic conception of emergence is now often called “strong” or “ontological”. According to Broad’s characterization, emergent properties supervene on their “basal” conditions and yet are not deducible from them. The ontological conception of emergence is now contrasted with an “epistemological”, or “weak”, conception according to which properties are emergent in case they are “surprising” and “unexpected” for us, or unpredictable and unknowable from information concerning base-level phenomena. This paper begins with an examination of Broad’s characterization of ontological emergence, which is quite common among writers on emergence. It will be seen that some interesting issues arise from Broad’s approach. I extend my considerations to some recent conceptions of physicalism, reductive explanation, and other related issues.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121038872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"WEAK PHYSICALISM AND SPECIAL SCIENCE ONTOLOGY","authors":"J. Ladyman","doi":"10.1515/9783110328875.113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328875.113","url":null,"abstract":"Naturalists take science at face value and hence ought to be ontologically committed to the entities posited by the various special sciences. According to the Eleatic principle, causal efficacy is necessary condition for existence. This principle is plausible for concrete entities and so naturalists must attribute genuine causal powers to special science ontologies. However, physicalism is usually taken to require a commitment to the causal completeness of the physical world, and so a generalization of Kim's causal exclusion argument threatens the special sciences with the dilemma of epiphenomenalism versus reductionism. The former is incompatible with the Eleatic principle and so motivates eliminativism about the ontologies of the special sciences, whereas the latter is widely held to be untenable. Hence, there is a tension between physicalism and naturalism. However, ironically among philosophers of physics there is a widespread view that there is no causation in fundamental physics, suggesting the physicalism must be understood without reference to causal completeness. In this paper I argue that a weak form of physicalism can be combined with an independently motivated account of special science ontology to dissolve the generalized causal exclusion problem and harmonise naturalism and physicalism.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126035029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A PROBLEM AND A SOLUTION FOR NEO-FREGEANISM","authors":"M. Gabbay","doi":"10.1515/9783110328875.289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328875.289","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that Benacerraf’s famous objection to mathematical realism in his paper “What numbers could not be” can be adapted to present severe difficulties for the Neo-Fregean programme. I formulate an alternative abstraction principle and argue that there is no reason for the natural numbers to be generated by one abstraction principle rather than the other. Independently of this conclusion, the formal comparison of the two abstraction principles involves a result of interest to Neo-Fregeans: I offer a solution to the bad company objection.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122344214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SUPERVENIENCE AND MORAL REALISM","authors":"Alison Hills","doi":"10.1515/9783110328875.163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328875.163","url":null,"abstract":"Blackburn has argued that moral properties supervene on natural properties and that this is a problem for moral realists, because they cannot adequately explain why this relationship holds. In this paper, I clarify the supervenience objection to moral realism and evaluate recent responses to it from moral realists.","PeriodicalId":317292,"journal":{"name":"From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - New Series","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132458649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}