The Philosophy of History contains a selection of the talks given at the Philosophy of History seminar in the Institute of Historical Research, London, in the period 2000-6. It puts students of the Philosophy of History, historians, teachers of History and anyone else interested in the subject in touch with what is being researched and discussed today at the cutting edge of Philosophy of History studies. With contributions from, among others, Robert Burns, Keith Jenkins, James Connelly, Beverly Southgate, Ellen O'Gorman, (...) Be;atrice Han-Pile, Mary Fulbrook, Alun Munslow and Ray Monk. (shrink)

Christian PlantinCentre National de Recherche Scientifi que:CNRS. Universidad de Lyon.

After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still (...) predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon. (shrink)

Some have argued that chance and determinism are compatible in order to account for the objectivity of probabilities in theories that are compatible with determinism, like Classical Statistical Mechanics (CSM) and Evolutionary Theory (ET). Contrarily, some have argued that chance and determinism are incompatible, and so such probabilities are subjective. In this paper, I argue that both of these positions are unsatisfactory. I argue that the probabilities of theories like CSM and ET are not chances, but also that they are (...) not subjective probabilities either. Rather, they are a third type of probability, which I call counterfactual probability. The main distinguishing feature of counterfactual-probability is the role it plays in conveying important counterfactual information in explanations. This distinguishes counterfactual probability from chance as a second concept of objective probability. (shrink)

In this article, I reply to the preceding articles by Naomi Oreskes, Chrysostomos Mantzavinos, Brad Wray, Sarah Green, Alexander Bird, and Timothy Lyons. These articles contain a number of objections and suggestions concerning systematicity theory, as developed in my book ystematicity: The Nature of Science.

This paper is about intentional identity, the phenomenon of intentional attitudes having a common focus. I present an argument against an approach to explaining intentional identity, defended by Nathan Salmon, Terence Parsons and others, that involves positing exotic objects. For example, those who adopt this sort of view say that when two astronomers had beliefs about Vulcan, their attitudes had a common focus because there is an exotic object that both of their beliefs were about. I argue that countenancing these (...) exotic objects does not help us explain intentional identity. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

Doxastic dualists acknowledge both outright beliefs and credences, and they maintain that neither state is reducible to the other. This gives rise to the ‘Bayesian Challenge’, which is to explain why we need beliefs if we have credences already. On a popular dualist response to the Bayesian Challenge, we need beliefs to simplify our reasoning. I argue that this response fails because credences perform this simplifying function at least as well as beliefs do.

This paper considers contractarianism as a method of justification. The analysis accepts the key tenets of contractarianism: expected utility maximization, unanimity as the criteria of acceptance, and social-scientific uncertainty of modelled agents. In addition to these three features, however, the analysis introduces a fourth feature: a criteria of rational belief formation, viz. Bayesian belief updating. Using a formal model, this paper identifies a decisive objection to contractarian justification. Insofar as contractarian projects approximate the Agreement Model, therefore, they fail to justify (...) their conclusions. Insofar as they fail to approximate the Agreement Model, they must explain which modelling assumption they reject. (shrink)

Peter Lipton argues that inference to the best explanation involves the selection of a hypothesis on the basis of its loveliness. I argue that in optimal cases of IBE we may be able to eliminate all but one of the hypotheses. In such cases we have a form of eliminative induction takes place, which I call ‘Holmesian inference’. I argue that Lipton’s example in which Ignaz Semmelweis identified a cause of puerperal fever better illustrates Holmesian inference than Liptonian IBE. I (...) consider in detail the conditions under which Holmesian inference is possible and conclude by considering the epistemological relations between Holmesian inference and Liptonian IBE.Keywords: Inference to the best explanation; Peter Lipton; Abduction; Holmesian inference; Eliminative induction. (shrink)

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the (...) concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. (shrink)

We examine a contribution L. Susan Stebbing made to the understanding of critical thinking and its relation to formal logic. Stebbing took expertise in formal logic to authorise logical intervention in public debate, specifically in assessing of the validity of everyday reasoning. She held, however, that formal logic is purely the study of logical form. Given the problems of ascertaining logical form in any particular instance, and that logical form does not always track informal validity, it is difficult to see (...) how she could justify her belief in logical interventionism. Her answer to this problem is the contribution we explore here. It involves the view that although the logician’s expertise is not sufficient to assess arguments made in everyday contexts on its own, it nevertheless plays a unique role in giving systematicity and direction to the critique of such arguments, in particular, in public debate. (shrink)

In the second edition of this highly successful text, postmodernity is seen as the social condition of the twenty-first century, in which some of the most familiar features of the modern world are not only called into question, but actually undermined by novel trends. The key carriers of the postmodern--new technologies and consumerism--emerged in thoroughly modern contexts, but so profoundly affect everyday social life that modernity itself is changing shape. Postmodernity is a way of describing a new society-in-the-making without supposing (...) that modernity has been entirely left behind. While some dub these changes as "high" or "late" modern, this book argues that "postmodernity" best captures today's transformations or modernity. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of literature, I introduce two new concepts for understanding and exploring distributed cognition: resilience engineering and degeneracy. By re-examining Ed Hutchins’ (1995) ethnographic study of the navigation team I show how a focus on the developmental acquisition of cognitive practices can draw out several crucial insights that have been overlooked. Firstly, that the way in which agents learn and acquire cognitive practices enables a form of resilience engineering: the process by which the system is able to (...) overcome and adapt to errors and the vagaries of nature. Secondly, that the best way to engineer a resilient system is through promoting degeneracy – how differing structures produce the same function – at the level of cognitive practices. These two features show that focusing on cognitive practices and developmental trajectories is important for both greater explanatory leverage; and is also useful in regard to the practicalities of designing real-world cognitive systems. (shrink)

This essay aims to articulate why the Orthodox have historically, and to the present, opposed cremation. Its primary line of argument is that inhumation is a site of “theophanic encounter”: a manifestation of the Glory of God. This theophanic quality is borne out in the scriptures and the Church’s liturgical experience. In particular, the connections between the funeral service and the entombed Christ on Holy Friday and Saturday properly situate the meaning of the post-mortem body. This intimate connection between the (...) deceased and their body is clear in Orthodoxy’s “hylomorphism,” the soul-body unity, which champions the eschatology of resurrection. Finally, all of the above is concretely experienced in the cult of the saints and their relics, which become vehicles for the divine energies: a theophany of Christ’s ongoing conquest of sin and death. Thus, cremation can only be viewed as a tragic misunderstanding of the dual meaning of “doxa” in Orthodoxy: right-belief and right-glory. (shrink)

Ame, vie, souffle, qui saurait bien les distinguer exactement?1like heartburn, a pronounced discomfort with the very idea of consciousness followed the early days of experimental psychology. Received wisdom has it that psychologists came to mistrust consciousness for largely behaviorist reasons—they are supposed to have worried about the alleged impossibility of performing quantifiable, repeatable measurements on an essentially private phenomenon.2 But this is a historical distortion, one that obscures some interesting and earlier philosophical concerns about the scientific study of consciousness.Behaviorists rejected (...) the scientific respectability of consciousness, to be sure. But by the... (shrink)

I respond to Vaidman’s recent criticisms of my paper “A New Problem for Quantum Mechanics”.

We prove the following Main Theorem: $ZF + AD + V = L(R) \Rightarrow DC$ . As a corollary we have that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + DC)$ . Combined with the result of Woodin that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + \neg AC^\omega)$ it follows that DC (as well as AC ω ) is independent relative to ZF + AD. It is finally shown (jointly with H. Woodin) that ZF + AD + ¬ DC (...) R , where DC R is DC restricted to reals, implies the consistency of ZF + AD + DC, in fact implies R # (i.e. the sharp of L(R)) exists. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 30-32.

In this lively and accessible study, David Lyon explores the relationship between religion and postmodernity, through the central metaphor of 'Jesus in Disneyland.' Contemporary disciples of Jesus have used Disneyland for religious events, whilst Disney characters are now probably better known throughout the world than many biblical figures. But this book cautions against seeing it as a simple substitution. Rather, Lyon shows how this metaphor reveals highly innovative and potentially enduring features of contemporary spiritual quests. In the West, (...) many religious institutions have declined in social significance, but what Lyon calls the religious realm, including faith and spirituality, is flourishing in multifarious forms. Throughout the text he examines a wide variety of religious and para-religious behaviour, exploring its relation to issues of identity, cyberculture, consumer culture and social theories of time. Lyon's stimulating use of contemporary case studies illuminates the interconnections between religion and postmodernity in a world where holy wars are waged in cyberspace, New Age self religions resonate with new identity quests, and Pentecostalism sparks globalization from below. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars in the sociology of religion, sociology of culture, social theory, religious studies and theology.. (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

This chapter considers the two major ways Oakeshott attempted to make sense of the state, first, in the 1920s and 1930s, as “the whole of moral and social experience”, and second, from the 1950s onwards, as one particular political idea, which was ambiguous and so had to be theorised in terms of a contradiction, or, as he put it in 1975, “an unresolved tension between the two irreconcilable dispositions represented by the words societas and universitas”. In this chapter, both of (...) these theories are fed back into Oakeshott’s major critical recognition that the state was an ambiguous concept. The point is to indicate that the ambiguities Oakeshott’s own writings exhibit were even greater than the ambiguities he was willing to recognise. In order to make sense of the state, we have to struggle with the metaphors and analogies which have been used to make sense of political order ever since the Greeks and Romans spoke of the related but distinct terms stasis and status. As everyone now knows, the concept of the state arose when the standard phrase, “the state of x”, was replaced by the phrase “the state”. I argue that the state is the attempt to strip metaphor out of politics. It allowed us to remove all older and authoritative meanings from politics in order to think again. The state is best seen as the blank slate on which modern political theorists have attempted to inscribe their theories of politics. (shrink)

To figure out whether the main empirical question “Is our brain hardwired to believe in and produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive and experience God?” is answered, this paper presents systematic critical review of the positions, arguments and controversies of each side of the neuroscientific-theological debate and puts forward an integral view where the human is seen as a psycho-somatic entity consisting of the multiple levels and dimensions of human existence (physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual reality), allowing (...) consciousness/mind/spirit and brain/body/matter to be seen as different sides of the same phenomenon, neither reducible to each other. The emergence of a form of causation distinctive from physics where mental/conscious agency (a) is neither identical with nor reducible to brain processes and (b) does exert “downward” causal influence on brain plasticity and the various levels of brain functioning is discussed. This manuscript also discusses the role of cognitive processes in religious experience and outlines what can neuroscience offer for study of religious experience and what is the significance of this study for neuroscience, clinicians, theology and philosophy. A methodological shift from “explanation” to “description” of religious experience is suggested. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion between theologians, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)

The value of resting electroencephalogram (EEG) in revealing neural constitutes of consciousness (NCC) was examined. We quantified the dynamic repertoire, duration and oscillatory type of EEG microstates in eyes-closed rest in relation to the degree of expression of clinical self-consciousness. For NCC a model was suggested that contrasted normal, severely disturbed state of consciousness and state without consciousness. Patients with disorders of consciousness were used. Results suggested that the repertoire, duration and oscillatory type of EEG microstates in resting condition quantitatively (...) related to the level of consciousness expression in brain-damaged patients and healthy-conscious subjects. Specifically, results demonstrated that (a) decreased number of EEG microstate types was associated with altered states of consciousness, (b) unawareness was associated with the lack of diversity in EEG alpha-rhythmic microstates, and (c) the probability for the occurrence and duration of delta-, theta- and slow-alpha-rhythmic microstates were associated with unawareness, whereas the probability for the occurrence and duration of fast-alpha-rhythmic microstates were associated with consciousness. In conclusion, resting EEG has a potential value in revealing NCC. This work may have implications for clinical care and medical–legal decisions in patients with disorders of consciousness. (shrink)

Building on Nozick's invariantism about objectivity, I propose to define scientific objectivity in terms of counterfactual independence. I will argue that such a counterfactual independence account is (a) able to overcome the decisive shortcomings of Nozick's original invariantism and (b) applicable to three paradigmatic kinds of scientific objectivity (that is, objectivity as replication, objectivity as robustness, and objectivity as Mertonian universalism).

In March 2004 the French parliament controversially adopted legislation regulating the wearing of symbols indicating religious affiliation in public educational establishments. This note discusses several features of the new law indicating its origins, its rationale and its position within French constitutional discourse on religious freedom and secularity. It is based on a panel discussion held in April 2004 within the Gender Studies Programme at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. Placing the French legislative initiative in (...) the context of recent developments in national and European case law (suggesting clear limitations to freedom of religion), the note explores the complexity of issues of gender, identity and difference in the present debate, especially when considered in the light of reactions to the law in Islamic countries. (shrink)

To understand how individuals adapt to and anticipate each other in joint tasks, we employ a bidirectional delay–coupled dynamical system that allows for mutual adaptation and anticipation. In delay–coupled systems, anticipation is achieved when one system compares its own time‐delayed behavior, which implicitly includes past information about the other system’s behavior, with the other system’s instantaneous behavior. Applied to joint music performance, the model allows each system to adapt its behavior to the dynamics of the other. Model predictions of asynchrony (...) between two simultaneously produced musical voices were compared with duet pianists’ behavior; each partner performed one voice while auditory feedback perturbations occurred at unpredictable times during live performance. As the model predicted, when auditory feedback from one musical voice was removed, the asynchrony changed: The pianist’s voice that was removed anticipated (preceded) the actions of their partner. When the auditory feedback returned and both musicians could hear each other, they rapidly returned to baseline levels of asynchrony. To understand how the pianists anticipated each other, their performances were fitted by the model to examine change in model parameters (coupling strength, time‐delay). When auditory feedback for one or both voices was removed, the fits showed the expected decrease in coupling strength and time‐delay between the systems. When feedback about the voice(s) returned, the coupling strength and time‐delay returned to baseline. These findings support the idea that when people perform actions together, they do so as a coupled bidirectional anticipatory system. (shrink)

Jérôme Beauchez est sociologue, maître de conférences à l’université de Lyon/Saint-Étienne, et membre de l’équipe « Cultures publiques » du Centre Max Weber. Dans son premier livre, L’Empreinte du poing. La boxe, le gymnase et leurs hommes 1, il mène une enquête ethnographique au sein d’une salle de boxe anglaise d’une ville de l’Est de la France. Dans l’entretien qui suit, il revient sur les enjeux de l’ethnographie aujourd’hui, en situant son enquête à la convergence de la sociologie urbaine (...) américaine de Mitchell Duneier, de l’anthropologie de Clifford Geertz et de la sociologie culturelle de Jeffrey Alexander. Il prend clairement ses distances avec l’ethnographie inspirée par la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu. C’est l’occasion de constater que si l’ethnographie n’est pas tout à fait un sport de combat, elle constitue un champ de questions théoriques passionnées, et un instrument irremplaçable pour la découverte des mondes contemporains, de leurs drames, de leurs combats et des résistances qui s’y affirment. (shrink)