: Recently developed projective models of consciousness and its contents challenge received schemas in which all contents of consciousness are held to be well contained in the skull. Working our way into this from several angles, it becomes evident that there are inconsistencies in how we frame classes of mental contents which are arguably equivalent in being. Particular examples of imagery, of dancing and of words, are brought forward to highlight the clash in our apprehensive assumptions, focusing on possible cognitive (...) as well as psychological costs of such inconsistency. A coherent way to blend the container and projector schemas is pointed out; yet such a blend does not support the standard claim for any kind of purely inner voice, contained but not projected. Conscious reflection may in all instances depend on projection, with reflection in imagery - visual, audible, even tactile and otherwise felt - placed just the far side of what can schematically be grasped as the sensory horizon where, in the space-time just beyond here and now, our imaginative expectations backstop recognition of here-now present things. Resumo: Os modelos projetivos de consciência e de seus conteúdos, recentemente desenvolvidos, desafiam os esquemas tradicionais, nos quais todos os conteúdos da consciência são mantidos bem contidos dentro do crânio. Trabalhando desta forma, a partir de vários ângulos, torna-se evidente que existem inconsistências na forma como emolduramos classes de conteúdos mentais que são possivelmente equivalentes em seu ser. Exemplos particulares de imagens, de dança e de palavras são apresentados para ressaltar o choque em nossas suposições apreensivas, focalizando possíveis custos cognitivos e psicológicos de tal inconsistência. Uma maneira coerente de misturar os esquemas do “continente” e do “projetor” é apontada; no entanto, tal combinação não suporta as exigências gerais, encontradas na literatura, para qualquer tipo de fala puramente interna, que esteja contida, mas não projetada. A reflexão consciente pode, em todos os casos, depender da projeção, com reflexo na imagem - visual, audível, até tátil e sentida - situada apenas no lado distante do que pode ser esquematicamente compreendido como o horizonte sensorial onde, no espaço-tempo e agora, nossas expectativas imaginativas apóiam o reconhecimento das coisas presentes e atuais. (shrink)

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in (...) the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future”. By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis-topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

Individuals’ propensity not to override the first answer that comes to mind is thought to be a crucial cause behind many failures in reasoning. In the present study, we aimed to explore the strategies used and the abilities employed when individuals solve the cognitive reflection test, the most widely used measure of this tendency. Alongside individual differences measures, protocol analysis was employed to unfold the steps of the reasoning process in solving the CRT. This exploration revealed that there are several (...) ways people solve or fail the test. Importantly, 77% of the cases in which reasoners gave the correct final answer in our protocol analysis, they started their response with the correct answer or with a line of thought which led to the correct answer. We also found that 39% of the incorrect responders reflected on their first response. The findings indicate that the suppression of the first answer may not be the only crucial feature of reflectivity in the CRT and that the lack of relevant knowledge is a prominent cause of the reasoning errors. Additionally, we confirmed that the CRT is a multi-faceted construct: both numeracy and reflectivity account for performance. The results can help to better apprehend the “whys and whens” of the decision errors in heuristics and biases tasks and to further refine existing explanatory models. (shrink)

In a seminal article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Søren Holm and Tuja Takala analysed two protechnology arguments in bioethics: the hopeful principle and the automatic escalator. They showed how these arguments relate to problematic arguments such as the precautionary principle and the empirical slippery slope argument, and argued that they should be used with great caution. The present article investigates the recent debate on proton beam therapy, where the hopeful principle and the automatic escalator are identified. However, the (...) debate reveals a series of other arguments that deserve similar caution. An analysis of these arguments indicates that the roots of their fallacies are to be found in the ignorance of the uncertainties about risks and benefits and an overly optimistic attitude towards technology and progress. The point is not to argue against proton therapy, but rather to point out that flawed arguments for new technologies, such as proton therapy, can actually hamper their implementation instead of promoting it. Patients deserve the best technology available, not only on the basis of the best available evidence, but also on the basis of the best arguments. (shrink)

Context: In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. Problem: Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this (...) historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. Method: This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. Results: In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. Implications: As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. (shrink)

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 prohibits most forms of discrimination on the basis of genetic information in health insurance and employment. The findings cited as justification for the act, the almost universal political support for it, and much of the scholarly literature about genetic discrimination, all betray a confusion about what is really at issue. They imply that genetic discrimination is wrong mainly because of genetic exceptionalism: because some special feature of genetic information makes discrimination on the basis (...) thereof wrong. I suggest, to the contrary, that the best arguments against genetic discrimination assume that health care is an entitlement . I do this by examining two different exceptionalist arguments for genetic nondiscrimination, showing that they do not furnish good reasons for prohibiting genetic discrimination unless one supposes that health care is an entitlement. (shrink)

The APA has recently taken steps to address concerns related to teaching and supporting philosophers and students who come from less privileged backgrounds. I want to add to this project by fleshing out some concrete ways that philosophy professors contribute to the challenges faced by first-generation and financially disadvantaged philosophers and students. I hope that in making these behaviors explicit, it may be easier for faculty to acknowledge and overcome them.

This article examines the Kantian thesis of the a priori nature of our knowledge of space. Because it makes the representation of objects possible as external to us and all others, and consequently, as distinct and individualized, space (whatever its structure may be) claims the status as necessary condition and as apriori possibility of all knowledge. However, in the light of various physical, psychological and philosophical considerations, it seems that the particular structure allocated by Kant to space (i.e. uniqueness, infinity, (...) continuity, homogeneity, isotropy, Euclidean character and three-dimensional character) is neither necessary nor a priori but is rather contingent and dependent on experience. For this reason a pragmatist relativization of the transcendental approach appears to be necessary: the structure of space which makes knowledge possible is not apriori in an absolute sense, but rather, it is determined within the context of a certain practice, which is characterized by a certain mode of interaction with the environment and reveals particular empirical constraints to which this spatial structure must fit. (shrink)

“Medicalization” has been a contentious notion since its introduction centuries ago. While some scholars lamented a medical overreach into social domains, others hailed its promise for social justice advocacy. Against the backdrop of a growing commitment to health equity across the nation, this article reviews historical interpretations of medicalization, offers an application of the term to non-biologic risk factors for disease, and presents the case of housing the demonstrate the great potential of medicalizing poverty.

Reading Kevin Hart’s creative hermeneutic of the ‘basileic’ reduction in his latest book, Kingdoms of God, naturally leads me to consider another eminent linguistic phenomenologist who continually occupies my thoughts. Although I have been reading Hart now for about 25 years, I have been reading Paul Ricoeur for a decade longer than that, and it is his theory of poetic discourse that my mind keeps tenaciously associating with Hart’s perspectives on parable. Granted, Hart never mentions Ricoeur in Kingdoms of God—unless (...) my careful reading is not so careful and I missed it! In Trespass of the Sign, however, he does note Ricoeur’s significance as a hermeneutical philosopher, specifically his emphasis on the distinction between the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Also, in an article on John Caputo’s postsecular philosophy of ‘religion without religion,’ Hart makes a brief comment on Ricoeur’s apparent Hegelianism with reference to a general theory of revelation as nonreligious and nontheistic. Still, nowhere that I know of does he extensively address Ricoeur’s fascinating discourse theory regarding metaphor, mimesis, narrative, and parable. If great minds think alike, then Hart and Ricoeur are, indeed, great minds, for, truly, Ricoeur’s reflections on parables and the Kingdom offer an intriguing gloss on Hart’s parabolic ‘basileiology.’ Translating Hart into Ricoeur, therefore, is, in my mind, an easy and profitable exercise that may well enhance the provocative character of Hart’s basileic reduction. Such a translation is the central purpose of this essay. (shrink)

At the moment in Britain and elsewhere the debate inside and outside of Parliament on various medical issues which are essentially moral never ends. Everybody has his own point of view--or principles. But what emerges for society to adopt can often be called in lay terminology 'compromise'. Professor Mitchell argues in this paper that a moral consensus is possible and indeed ought to be achieved, as today the medical practitioner can no longer make his decision only in accordance with the (...) strict code of ethics of the medical profession. The task of the philosopher, says Professor Mitchell, is to interpret the actions and attitudes demanded by modern medical practice. (shrink)

This paper argues that self-consciousness and associated psychic consciousness emerges as a consequence of a recursive selfdirecting on itself of the cognitive centre in the human brain. The neural mechanisms and circuits underlying self-consciousness appeared and developed during biological evolution as an adaptation that increased the fitness of our social ancestors, chances of their survival, and reproduction. These mechanisms/circuits strengthened the efficiency of individuals in various social relations, enabled separation of 'I' from 'he/she' or 'them' and the formation of firstand (...) higher-order theory of mind, stimulated development of complex, recursive language, facilitated forming temporary coalitions directed to achieve a particular goal, helped to establish social hierarchies, and increased coherence and cooperativity of a social group. The reciprocal reinforcement of the development of the neural network in the brain underlying self-consciousness and of the network of various social relations and aspects was a self-driving process, one of positive feedbacks abundant in anthropogenesis. (shrink)

"This title was first published in 2003.Developments in genetic science are opening up new possibilities for human beings; both the creation and the shaping of human life are now possible in the laboratory. As these techniques develop, questions are increasingly asked about how far everything that is scientifically possible should - morally, legally and socially - be pursued. Whilst much attention and policy-making has focussed on the development of regulation of technologies affecting human reproduction, regulation where plants and animals are (...) concerned is much more limited. In this book, developments in genetics are addressed in the broad sense by an international range of contributors. This includes not only issues such as eugenics and the modification of the human embryo, but also the genetic modification of plants and animals in the pursuit of commerce, agriculture and biomedical research. This book is published in association with the Society for Applied Philosophy"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)