The dissertation concerns F. A. Hayek’s critique of legislation. The purpose of the investigation is to clarify and assess that critique. I argue that there is in Hayek’s work a critique of legislation that is distinct from his well-known critique of social planning. Further that the main claim of this critique is what I refer to as Hayek’s legislation tenet, namely that legislation that aims to achieve specific aggregate results in complex orders of society will decrease the welfare level. The (...) legislation tenet gains support; from the welfare claim – according to which there is a positive correlation between the utilization of knowledge and the welfare level in society; from the dispersal of knowledge thesis – according to which the total knowledge of society is dispersed and not available to any one agency; and from the cultural evolution thesis – according to which evolutionary rules are more favorable to the utilization of knowledge in social cooperation than are legislative rules. More specifically, I argue that these form two lines of argument in support of the legislation tenet. One line of argument is based on the conjunction of the welfare claim and the dispersal of knowledge thesis. I argue that this line of argument is true. The other line of argument is based on the conjunction of the welfare claim and the cultural evolution thesis. I argue that this line of argument is false, mainly because the empirical work of political scientist Elinor Ostrom refutes it. Because the two lines of argument support the legislation tenet independently of each other, I argue that Hayek’s critique of legislation is true. In this dissertation, I further develop a legislative policy tool as based on the welfare claim and Hayek’s conception of coercion. I also consider Hayek’s idea that rules and law are instrumental in forging rational individual action and rational social orders, and turn to review this idea in light of the work of experimental economist Vernon Smith and economic historian Avner Greif. I find that Smith and Greif support this idea of Hayek’s, and I conjecture that it contributes to our understanding of Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand: It is rules – not an invisible hand – that prompt subjects to align individual and aggregate rationality in social interaction. Finally, I argue that Hayek’s critique is essentially utilitarian, as it is concerned with the negative welfare consequences of certain forms of legislation. And although it may appear that the dispersal of knowledge thesis will undermine the possibility of carrying out the utilitarian calculus, due to the lack of knowledge of the consequences of one’s actions – and therefore undermine the legislation tenet itself – I argue that the distinction between utilitarianism conceived as a method of deliberation and utilitarianism conceived as a criterion of correctness may be used to save Hayek’s critique from this objection. (shrink)

English summary: C. Mantzavinos offers a theory of how the institutional framework of a society emerges and how markets within institutions work. He shows that both social institutions, defined as the rules of the game, and exchange processes can be analyzed along a common theoretical structure. Mantzavinos's proposal is that a problem-solving model of individual behaviour inspired by the cognitive sciences provides such a unifying theoretical structure. Integrating the latest scholarship in economics, sociology, political science, law, and anthropology, the author (...) offers a genuine political economy showing how social institutions affect economic outcomes. His book was first published in English by Cambridge University Press. German description: C. Mantzavinos entwickelt eine Theorie der Entstehung des institutionellen Rahmens einer Gesellschaft und der Funktionsweise von Markten innerhalb dieses Rahmens. Er zeigt, dass sowohl Institutionen, d.h. Spielregeln, als auch Austauschprozesse mit Hilfe einer gemeinsamen theoretischen Struktur analysiert werden konnen. Als gemeinsame vereinheitlichende Struktur schlagt er ein kognitionswissenschaftlich inspiriertes Problemlosungsmodell individuellen Verhaltens vor. Indem er neueste Erkenntnisse aus Okonomik, Soziologie, Politikwissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaft und Anthropologie integriert, entwickelt der Autor eine genuin politische Okonomie, die zeigt, wie soziale Institutionen okonomische Ergebnisse beeinflussen.Das englische Original ist unter dem Titel Individuals, Institutions, and Markets bei Cambridge University Press erschienen.Die Institutionenanalyse hat jungst Fortschritte in der Ausweitung ihrer Domane gemacht und sich Fragen des Wissens und der Kognition zugewandt. Dieses Buch zahlt zu den ersten und einzigen, die dieses wichtige Thema systematisch behandeln. Ausserdem umfasst es sowohl die Diskussion und Analyse dieses Themas als auch die eher traditionelle institutionelle Analyse. Es ist ein Meilenstein und wird als Referenzmass fur kunftige Forschung dienen.Avner Greif, Stanford University. (shrink)

Avner Baz presents a critique of the working practices of analytic philosophy in recent decades. He challenges the assumptions on which the philosophical 'method of cases' rests, and he presents a pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as used both 'armchair' and 'experimental' philosophers is fundamentally misguided.

The basic conflict: an initial characterization -- The main arguments against ordinary language philosophy -- Must philosophers rely on intuitions? -- Contextualism and the burden of knowledge -- Contextualism, anti-contextualism, and knowing as being in a position to give assurance -- Conclusion: skepticism and the dialectic of (semantically pure) "knowledge" -- Epilogue: ordinary language philosophy, Kant, and the roots of antinomial thinking.

Two aspects of cognitive coupling, as brought forward in the Extended Mind Hypothesis, are discussed in this paper: how shall the functional coupling between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail? What are the paradigmatic external entities to enter into that coupling? These two related questions are best answered in the light of an aetiological variety of functionalist argument that adds historical depth to the “active externalism” promoted by Clark and Chalmers and helps to (...) counter some of the core criticisms levelled against this view. Under additional reference to conceptual parallels between the Extended Mind Hypothesis and a set of heterodox theories in biology—environmental constructivism, niche construction, developmental systems theory—an argument for the grounding of environmentally extended cognitive traits in evolved biological functions is developed. In a spirit that seeks to integrate extended functionalism with views from cognitive integration and complementarity, it is argued that instances of environmental coupling should be understood as being constitutive to cognitive functions in either of two distinct ways. It is further argued that the historically and systematically prior environmental counterparts in that coupling are features of the natural environment. Language and linguistically imbued artefacts are likely to have descended from more basic relations that have an extension over the environment. (shrink)

There have been attempts to subsume Charles Darwin's theory of evolution under either one of two distinct intellectual traditions: early Victorian natural science and its descendants in political economy (as exemplified by Herschel, Lyell, or Malthus) and the romantic approach to art and science emanating from Germany (as exemplified by Humboldt and Goethe). In this paper, it will be shown how these traditions may have jointly contributed to the design of Darwin's theory. The hypothesis is that their encounter created a (...) particular tension in the conception of his theory which first opened up its characteristic field and mode of explanation. On the one hand, the domain of the explanandum was conceived of under a holistic and aesthetic view of nature that, in its combination with refined techniques of observation, was deeply indebted to Humboldt in particular. On the other hand, Darwin fashioned explanations for natural phenomena, so conceived, in order to identify their proper causes in a Herschelian spirit. The particular interaction between these two traditions in Darwin, it is concluded, paved the way for a transfer of the idea of causal laws to animate nature while salvaging the romantic idea of a complex, teleological and harmonious order of nature. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to grasp the relevant distinctions between various ways in which models and simulations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) relate to cognitive phenomena. In order to get a systematic picture, a taxonomy is developed that is based on the coordinates of formal versus material analogies and theory-guided versus pre-theoretic models in science. These distinctions have parallels in the computational versus mimetic aspects and in analytic versus exploratory types of computer simulation. The proposed taxonomy cuts across the (...) traditional dichotomies between symbolic and embodied AI, general intelligence and symbol and intelligence and cognitive simulation and human/non-human-like AI. -/- According to the taxonomy proposed here, one can distinguish between four distinct general approaches that figured prominently in early and classical AI, and that have partly developed into distinct research programs: first, phenomenal simulations (e.g., Turing’s “imitation game”); second, simulations that explore general-level formal isomorphisms in pursuit of a general theory of intelligence (e.g., logic-based AI); third, simulations as exploratory material models that serve to develop theoretical accounts of cognitive processes (e.g., Marr’s stages of visual processing and classical connectionism); and fourth, simulations as strictly formal models of a theory of computation that postulates cognitive processes to be isomorphic with computational processes (strong symbolic AI). -/- In continuation of pragmatic views of the modes of modeling and simulating world affairs, this taxonomy of approaches to modeling in AI helps to elucidate how available computational concepts and simulational resources contribute to the modes of representation and theory development in AI research—and what made that research program uniquely dependent on them. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that the requested euthanasia of adults is morally permissible and should be legalised; I use an argument from analogy which compares physician-assisted euthanasia with morally less ambiguous and, in my opinion, an acceptable instance of mercy killing. I also respond to several objections that either try to prove that the instance of mercy killing is not acceptable, or that there is a fundamental difference between these two cases of killing. Furthermore, in the remainder (...) of the paper I defend the moral permissibility and legalisation of euthanasia against several objections that appeared in local disputes on this issue, based on the concepts of the limits of freedom, the slippery slope, and the needlessness of euthanasia. (shrink)

What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? These are questions that motivate "4E" theories of cognition (as being embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). In his take on that family of views, Hajo Greif first defends and refines a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character, which had been eclipsed by information-processing views of cognition. He (...) continues with an inquiry into the cognitive bearing of some artefacts that are sometimes referred to as 'intelligent environments'. Without necessarily having much to do with Artificial Intelligence, such artefacts may ultimately modify our informational environments. -/- With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of digital computers is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way we perceive, think and act. (shrink)

In The Tragedy of the Self, Gary F. Greif attributes social violence and individual isolation to a contemporary neglect of a fundamental human need for support that only human culture and interaction can promote and reinforce. Greif bases this interpretation on the works of Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst who by degrees transformed Freud's theory of the instincts into a theory of the self. Kohut maintains that every individual fundamentally requires continual human support in order to live with confidence (...) and hope. Greif introduces Kohut's understanding of the nature, development, and disintegration of the self, analyzes modern and contemporary assumptions regarding the individualistic, anti-social nature of humans, and concludes that contemporary societal assumptions regarding the acceptance of individualism reflect and perpetuate a tragic human condition. Greif argues that the inability of the self to experience a human, fulfilling life is a tragedy intensified by a century of economic and cultural forces promoting social antagonism. A unique and stimulating book, The Tragedy of the Self will appeal to professionals in psychoanalytic psychology, self-psychology, and philosophy as well as academics and students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. (shrink)

In his book On What Matters, Derek Parfit defends a version of moral non-naturalism, a view according to which there are objective normative truths, some of which are moral truths, and we have a reliable way of discovering them. These moral truths do not exist, however, as parts of the natural universe nor in Plato’s heaven. While explaining in what way these truths exist and how we discover them, Parfit makes analogies between morality on the one hand, and mathematics and (...) logic on the other. Moral truths “exist” in a way that numbers exist, and we discover these truths in a similar way as we discover truths about numbers. By the end of the second volume, Parfit also responds to a powerful objection against his view, an objection based on the phenomenon of moral disagreement. If people widely and deeply disagree about what is the moral truth, it is doubtful whether we have a reliable way of discovering it. In his reply, he claims that in ideal conditions for thinking about moral questions, we would all have sufficiently similar moral beliefs. However, we often find ourselves in less-than-ideal conditions due to various factors that distort our ability to agree. Therefore, differences in moral opinion can be expected. In this paper, I draw a connection between these parts of Parfit’s theory and comment on them. Firstly, I argue that Parfit’s analogy with mathematics and logic and his answer to the disagreement objection are in tension because there are important epistemic differences between morality and these fields. If one would try to account for the differences, one would have to sacrifice some measure of similarity between morality and them. Secondly, I comment on Parfit’s reply to the disagreement objection itself. I believe that, although his description of ideal conditions has some potential for reaching moral agreement, it may be difficult to tell if ideal conditions prevail. This obscurity spells further trouble for Parfit’s overall theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and criticize several historical arguments in favour of prohibition and criminalization of illicit psychoactive substances. I consider several versions of Charles Brent’s argument from drug harms and an argument from addiction based on Kantian view on autonomy. My criticism will mainly rely on empirical evidence on drugs, drug use, and addiction. I think that in light of this evidence, all of the arguments lose their cogency or can be refuted altogether. Moreover, the evidence reveals an (...) inconsistency in the international drug law framework. In conclusion, I therefore provide a general argument challenging the legitimacy of the existing distinction between licit and illicit drugs based on the inconsistency. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that while other conceptions (...) can easily fit morality into a naturalistic worldview, objectively realistic conception faces theoretical challenges, including the challenge of explaining how moral facts and concepts play an explanatory role and the challenge of bridging the is/ought gap. The paper focuses on Railton's ethical naturalism as a prominent naturalistic theory of morality and evaluates its ability to overcome these challenges. The conclusion is that, so long as we consider a theory like Railton's, naturalism and realistically conceived morality are incompatible. (shrink)

Paleontological evidence suggests that human artefacts with intentional markings might have originated already in the Lower Paleolithic, up to 500.000 years ago and well before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’. These markings apparently did not serve instrumental, tool-like functions, nor do they appear to be forms of figurative art. Instead, they display abstract geometric patterns that potentially testify to an emerging ability of symbol use. In a variation on Ian Hacking’s speculative account of the possible role of “likeness-making” in the (...) evolution of human cognition and language, this essay explores the central role that the embodied processes of making and the collective practices of using such artefacts might have played in early human cognitive evolution. Two paradigmatic findings of Lower Paleolithic artefacts are discussed as tentative evidence of likenesses acting as material scaffolds in the emergence of symbolic reference-making. They might provide the link between basic abilities of mimesis and imitation and the development of modern language and thought. (shrink)

Concerns over epistemic opacity abound in contemporary debates on Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, it is not always clear to what extent these concerns refer to the same set of problems. We can observe, first, that the terms 'transparency' and 'opacity' are used either in reference to the computational elements of an AI model or to the models to which they pertain. Second, opacity and transparency might either be understood to refer to the properties of AI systems or to the epistemic (...) situation of human agents with respect to these systems. While these diagnoses are independently discussed in the literature, juxtaposing them and exploring possible interrelations will help to get a view of the relevant distinctions between conceptions of opacity and their empirical bearing. In pursuit of this aim, two pertinent conditions affecting computer models in general and contemporary AI in particular are outlined and discussed: opacity as a problem of computational tractability and opacity as a problem of the universality of the computational method. (shrink)

“Teleosemantic” or “biosemantic” theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of “proper functions” as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms. This essay critically explores (...) various interpretations of this analogy. It suggests that these interpretations can be explicated by contrasting adaptationist with pluralist readings of the evolutionary concept of adaptation. Among the possible interpretations of the relations between biological adaptations and their analogues in language and culture, the two most relevant are a linear, hierarchical, signalling-based model that takes its cues from the evolution of co-operation and joint intentionality and a mutualistic, pluralist model that takes its cues from mimesis and symbolism in the evolution of human communication. Arguing for the merits of the mutualistic model, the present analysis indicates a path towards an evolutionary pluralist version of biosemantics that will align with theories of cognition as being environmentally “scaffolded”. Language and other cultural forms are partly independent reproducible structures that acquire proper functions of their own while being integrated with organism-based cognitive traits in co-evolutionary fashion. (shrink)

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s work on modelling “the action of the brain” (letter from Turing to Ashby, 1946) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: While it is clear that Turing was committed to formal, computational and Ashby to material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no straightforward mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based (...) AI and embodiment-centered views respectively. Instead, it will be demonstrated that both approaches, starting from a formal core, were at least partly concerned with biological and embodied phenomena, albeit in revealingly distinct ways. (shrink)

There are two related points at which J.J. Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception remains remarkably underspecified: Firstly, the notion of information for perception is not explicated in much detail beyond the claim that it “specifies” the environment for perception, and, thus being an objective affair, enables an organism to perceive action possibilities or “affordances.” Secondly, misperceptions of affordances and perceptual illusions are not clearly distinguished from each other. Although the first claim seems to suggest that any perceptual illusion amounts (...) to the misperception of affordances, there might be some relevant differences between various ways of getting things wrong. In this essay, Gibson’s notion of “specifying” information shall be reconstructed along the lines of Fred Dretske’s relational theory of information. This refined notion of information for perception will then be used to carve out the distinction between perceptual illusions and the misperception of affordances, with some help from the “Empirical Strategy” (developed by Purves et al.). It will be maintained that there are cases where perceptual illusions actually help an organism to correctly perceive an affordance. In such cases, the prima facie misrendered informational relations involved are kept intact by a set of appropriate transformation rules. Two of Gibson’s intuitions shall thus be preserved: the objectivity of informational relations and the empowerment of the organism as an active perceiver who uses those objective relations to his specific ends. (shrink)

Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s work on modelling “the action of the brain” (letter from Turing to Ashby, 1946) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: While it is clear that Turing was committed to formal, computational and Ashby to material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no straightforward mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based (...) AI and embodiment-centered views respectively. Instead, it will be demonstrated that both approaches, starting from a formal core, were at least partly concerned with biological and embodied phenomena, albeit in revealingly distinct ways. (shrink)

Two popular, yet highly controversial concepts of non-human agency from two different fields of knowledge are compared in this essay: the theory of the Selfish Gene, introduced into neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology by Richard Dawkins, and Actor-Network Theory, as brought forward in Science & Technology Studies by Bruno Latour. It is argued that the two theories, despite all apparent differences, share key motifs and motivations when they try to forward knowledge in their respective fields by adopting a vocabulary that aims at (...) metaphorical redescriptions of the origins of intentionality – in both senses: as purposefulness of action and as meaning. (shrink)

This paper commences from the critical observation that the Turing Test (TT) might not be best read as providing a definition or a genuine test of intelligence by proxy of a simulation of conversational behaviour. Firstly, the idea of a machine producing likenesses of this kind served a different purpose in Turing, namely providing a demonstrative simulation to elucidate the force and scope of his computational method, whose primary theoretical import lies within the realm of mathematics rather than cognitive modelling. (...) Secondly, it is argued that a certain bias in Turing’s computational reasoning towards formalism and methodological individualism contributed to systematically unwarranted interpretations of the role of the TT as a simulation of cognitive processes. On the basis of the conceptual distinction in biology between structural homology vs. functional analogy, a view towards alternate versions of the TT is presented that could function as investigative simulations into the emergence of communicative patterns oriented towards shared goals. Unlike the original TT, the purpose of these alternate versions would be co-ordinative rather than deceptive. On this level, genuine functional analogies between human and machine behaviour could arise in quasi-evolutionary fashion. (shrink)

I start with some of the early challenges to the widely-employed philosophical method of cases—the very challenges that originally prompted the new movement of experimental philosophy—and with some fundamental questions about the method that are yet to have been given satisfying answers. I then propose that what has allowed both ‘armchair’ and ‘experimental’ participants in the ongoing debates concerning the method to ignore or repress those early challenges—and in particular Robert Cummins’s ‘calibration objection’—and to discount fundamental disagreements about those questions, (...) is in large part ‘the claim of continuity’, which is the claim, or assumption, that there is no philosophically significant difference between whatever it is that we do when we give our answer to the theorist’s question of whether some philosophically interesting word ‘applies’ (positively or negatively) to some theoretically significant case, and our use of that same word in the course of ordinary, non-philosophical discourse. I then summarize the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) argument against the claim of continuity, and explain why answers to the theorist’s questions are vulnerable to the calibration objection in a way that our non-philosophical, everyday employment of the same words is not. This then leads me to question another widespread assumption, which is the assumption that the theorist’s questions—as raised in the theorist’s context—have clear enough sense and correct answers. I end by responding to a series of objections to my argument and to OLP more generally. (shrink)

Alan M. Turing’s last published work and some posthumously published manuscripts were dedicated to the development of his theory of organic pattern formation. In “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952), he provided an elaborated mathematical formulation of the theory of the origins of biological form that had been first proposed by Sir D’Arcy Wendworth Thompson in On Growth and Form (1917/1942). While arguably his most mathematically detailed and his systematically most ambitious effort, Turing’s morphogenetical writings also form the most thematically (...) self-contained and least philosophically explored part of his work. We dedicate our inquiry to the reasons and the implications of Turing’s choice of biological topic and viewpoint. We will probe for possible factors in Turing’s choice that go beyond availability and acquaintance with On Growth and Form. On these grounds, we will explore how and to what extent his theory of morphogenesis actually ties in with his concept of mechanistic computation. Notably, Thompson’s pioneering work in biological ‘structuralism’ was organicist in outlook and explicitly critical of the Darwinian approaches that were popular with Turing’s cyberneticist contemporaries—and partly used by Turing himself in his proto-connectionist models of learning. Resolving this apparent dichotomy, we demonstrate how Turing’s quest for mechanistic explanations of how organisation emerges in nature leaves room for a non-mechanist view of nature. (shrink)

The problem of epistemic opacity in Artificial Intelligence is often characterised as a problem of intransparent algorithms that give rise to intransparent models. However, the degrees of transparency of an AI model should not be taken as an absolute measure of the properties of its algorithms but of the model’s degree of intelligibility to human users. Its epistemically relevant elements are to be specified on various levels above and beyond the computational one. In order to elucidate this claim, I first (...) contrast computer models and their claims to algorithm-based universality with cybernetics-style analogue models and their claims to structural isomorphism between elements of model and target system. While analogue models aim at perceptually or conceptually accessible model-target relations, computer models give rise to a specific kind of underdetermination in these relations that needs to be addressed in specific ways. I then undertake a comparison between two contemporary AI approaches that, although related, distinctly align with the above modelling paradigms and represent distinct strategies towards model intelligibility: Deep Neural Networks and Predictive Processing. I conclude that their respective degrees of epistemic transparency primarily depend on the underlying purposes of modelling, not on their computational properties. (shrink)

We define a new topology on the space of strong types of a given theory and use it to state an omitting types theorem for countably saturated models of the theory. As an application we show that if T is a small, stable theory of finite weight such that every elementary extension of the countably saturated model is ω-saturated then every weakly saturated model is ω-saturated.

Le but de cette étude est de 1) cerner la fragmentation de l’identitaire à l’ère de la postmodernité ainsi que l’indécidabilité de l’existence à la suite d’un bricolage souvent destructeur tout au long de la vie ; 2) d’examiner le rôle de la religion dans un contexte essentiellement juif ; 3) de clarifier le concept de la mémoire juive, exclusive, qui ne peut accepter, dans un contexte de transculturation, l’interaction avec d’autres mémoires. Elle est porteuse de souvenirs insoutenables, d’échecs répétés (...) au fil de son histoire, prisonnière de lieux imaginaires, reflets de l’errance juive. This study tries : 1) to define the fragmentation of identities in the postmodern era as well as show the difficult decisions the individual has to make after a life-long and often destructive patchwork-improvisation ; 2) to examine the role of religion in an essentially Jewish context ; 3) to clarify the concept of exclusive Jewish memory which is unable to accept, in the context of transculturation, any interaction with other memories. It is burdened with insufferable facts, repeated failures in history, imprisoned in imaginary sites which reflect the Jewish wandering. (shrink)

The philosophical “method of cases” has been the subject of intense discussion. In a recent paper, Frank Jackson attempts to vindicate the method by proposing that it is underwritten by the “representational view of language.” Jackson's proposal is potentially very significant. For if it is true, then the method of cases stands, but quite possibly also falls, with the representational view of language as characterized by Jackson. The aim of this paper is to question the philosophical method of cases by (...) showing that it does in fact presuppose a particular view of language that is at the very least questionable, both philosophically and empirically. (shrink)

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust.Avner Offer argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social (...) commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. His approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.The book falls into three parts. Part one analyses the ways in which economic resources map on to human welfare, why choice is so intractable, and how commitment to people and institutions is sustained. It argues that choice is constrained by prior obligation and reciprocity. The second section then applies these conceptual arguments to comparative empirical studies of advertising, of eating and obesity, and of the production and acquisition of appliances and automobiles. Finally, in part three, Offer investigates social and personal relations in the USA and Britain, including inter-personal regard, the rewards and reversals of status, the social and psychological costs of inequality, and the challenges posed to heterosexual love and to parenthood by the rise of affluence. (shrink)

In Mind and World and related works, John McDowell attempts to offer us an understanding of the relation between our experience of the world and our wording of it. In arguing for this understanding, McDowell sees himself as engaged in a Wittgensteinian exorcism of a philosophical puzzlement; and his aim is to recover for us a truly satisfying way of conceiving of the relation between our words and our world. Taking my bearing from Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein, in which, (...) as I argue, the notion of 'the point of an utterance' plays a central role, I develop a criticism of McDowell on two levels. First, I try to show that McDowell fails to lead his words - 'experience', 'seeing', 'judging', 'claiming', and others - back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. His use of these words is still controlled by a particular picture of our relation to the world, rather than by our everyday criteria. Second, I argue that the picture controlling McDowell's account of our wording of our world is one in which the question concerning the point of putting something into words is being repressed. McDowell proposes that our experience 'contains claims', in the sense that it provides us with the very same content that a claim, or a judgment, might have. I argue that, given the philosophical work that McDowell intends such formulations to perform, the 'innocent' understanding that he aims to recover for us betokens a failure to attend to the conditions that allow our words to express, or otherwise carry, any determinate content.Not: 'How can I describe what I see?' but 'What does one call "description of what is seen"'? (Wittgenstein). Wittgenstein (1980a), remark 981. (shrink)

The perception of what he calls 'aspects' preoccupied Wittgenstein and gave him considerable trouble in his final years. The Wittgensteinian aspect defies any number of traditional philosophical dichotomies: the aspect is neither subjective nor objective; it presents perceivable unity and sense that are not conceptual; it is 'subject to the will', but at the same time is normally taken to be genuinely revelatory of the object perceived under it. This Element begins with a grammatical and phenomenological characterization of Wittgensteinian 'aspects'. (...) It then challenges two widespread ideas: that aspects are to be identified with concepts; and that aspect perception has a continuous version that is characteristic of human perception. It concludes by proposing that aspect perception brings to light the distinction between the world as perceived and the world as objectively construed, and the role we play in the constitution of the former. (shrink)

The argument of this chapter proceeds in the form of constructive criticism of Charles Travis’s recent work on perception. Travis has presented a powerful argument against the idea that perception, as such, provides us with true-or-false representations of the world. The representationalist view, Travis argues, fails to respect the fundamental Fregean distinction between "the conceptual" and "the nonconceptual." According to Travis, what perception presents us with is nonconceptual; hence, perception is indeterminate as far as representational content goes. Travis argues that (...) determinate representational content, on the other hand, is only created when things are judged to be some particular way or another. In this chapter, Avner Baz finds himself in substantial agreement with Travis, but argues that something important also goes missing in the latter’s account, namely what Baz calls "the phenomenal world"; that is, the world as perceived and responded toprior to becoming the object of true or false judgments. In particular, Baz shows how Travis consistently represses the phenomenal world in his account of perception whenever he attempts to explain the perception of what Wittgenstein calls "aspects"; for any respectable account of the perception of such aspects, Baz argues, ought to bring the phenomenal world into view. (shrink)

My plan in this article is to begin by raising the question of the point of judgements of beauty, and then to examine Kant's account of beauty in the third Critique from the perspective opened up by that question. Having raised the question of the point, I will argue, first, that there is an implied answer to it in Kant's text, and, second, that the answer is ultimately unsatisfying in that it falsely assumes that there is a ‘need’, or ‘task’, (...) or ‘purpose’, that we all necessarily share, to conceptualize all that encounters us in our experience, and fit it into one unified and comprehensive system. It is only against this assumption of our transcendental cognitive interest that Kant can so much as seem to have a real story to tell about where the value that we claim for things in calling them ‘beautiful’ derives from. This, in effect, means that to the extent that Kant offers us any answer at all to the question of the point of judgements of beauty, that answer testifies to his general neglect of the question of the point of judgements. And my purpose is to draw attention to that neglect, and to begin to assess its significance for Kant's transcendental project in general and for his conception of beauty in particular. (shrink)