Fundamentalism has been widely reckoned as one among many other watchful social phenomena currently. There are two general approaches to it. The first is from those who perceive fundamentalism as a movement of militant piety found almost in any religion, and therefore fundamentalism cannot necessarily be identified with a violent movement. The second is from those who categorize fundamentalism as a political movement with an objective of worldly power, and therefore it is susceptible to turning into a violent movement. In (...) investigating the two views closely, I attempt to put forward a couple of hypothetical inquiries. Is fundamentalism a common phenomenon and common feature found in almost any religion? The answer is yes. Is fundamentalism identical to violent movement? The answer is no. Is fundamentalism then impossibly and utterly unrelated to violent movements? The answer is no. If fundamentalism is unidentical with violent movements but not a few fundamentalists can also turn to be perpetrators of what is called religious violence or violence in the name of religion, then what arguments can be set forth to ensure that fundamentalism cannot be overlooked anymore as one among many other major social problems of our age? This article aims to examine fundamentalism through epistemological and axiological criticism, and to investigate that to a certain range fundamentalism is a form of religious cognitive and behavioral bias, and both as a militant piety and as a political movement fundamentalism should at best be approached from their interplayed relation. (shrink)

Religious fundamentalism continues to be an enormous concern in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy since the atrocity involved numerous extremist groups, including religious fundamentalist ones. This horrible tragedy has brought in all citizens of the globe mindful of the existential threat of these organizations. Their existence sparks an immense discourse in various fields, including in the academic field that centres around the query of ‘what drives them to act mercilessly and inhumanely.’ Aside from political matters, their extremism is shaped (...) by their method of approach to the doctrines or dogmas, teachings, ideologies, and religious traditions of faith they espouse. The methodology used by fundamentalists in approaching their religious texts and traditions is one of the major issues confronting religious fundamentalism. That methodology refers to the authoritative method, which entails two notable inquiries. Why do fundamentalists consider their religious doctrines or dogmas to be infallible or unquestionable? Why do they presume that all other knowledge and values are subordinate to their religious texts? This philosophical analysis seeks to investigate and evaluate the flaws of the authoritative method within fundamentalism by contrasting it with the Deweyan experimental or scientific method and bridging the two methods with the ‘reflective method’ the author postulates. (shrink)

I suggest that most discussions of intentional systems have overlooked an important aspect of living organisms: the intrinsic goal-directedness inherent in the behaviour of living eukaryotic cells. This goal directedness is nicely displayed by a normal cell’s ability to rearrange its own local material structure in response to damage, nutrient distribution or other aspects of its individual experience. While at a vastly simpler level than intentionality at the human cognitive level, I propose that this basic capacity of living things provides (...) a necessary building block for cognition and high-order intentionality, because the neurons that make up vertebrate brains, like most cells in our body, embody such capacities. I provisionally dub the capacities in question “nano-intentionality”: a microscopic form of “aboutness”. The form of intrinsic intentionality I propose is thoroughly materialistic, fully compatible with known biological facts, and derived non-mysteriously through evolution. Crucially, these capacities are not shared by any existing computers or computer components, and thus provide a clear, empirically-based distinction between brains and currently existing artificial information processing systems. I suggest that an appreciation of this aspect of living matter provides a potential route out of what may otherwise appear to be a hopeless philosophical quagmire confronting information-processing models of the mind. (shrink)

I argue that core aspects of musical rhythm, especially "groove" and syncopation, can only be fully understood in the context of their origins in the participatory social experience of dance. Musical meter is first considered in the context of bodily movement. I then offer an interpretation of the pervasive but somewhat puzzling phenomenon of syncopation in terms of acoustic emphasis on certain offbeat components of the accompanying dance style. The reasons for the historical tendency of many musical styles to divorce (...) themselves from their dance-based roots are also briefly considered. To the extent that musical rhythms only make sense in the context of bodily movement, researchers interested in ecologically valid approaches to music cognition should make a more concerted effort to extend their analyses to dance, particularly if we hope to understand the cognitive constraints underlying rhythmic aspects of music like meter and groove. (shrink)

An argument opposing the unrestricted use of quantification in modal logic has been put forward by Quine. Central to this argument are the two phrases, The Morning Star, The Evening Star.One form of the argument is obtained by considering the following two statements: It is necessary that the Morning Star is identical with the Morning Star. It is not necessary that the Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star.

Philosophical ability, so that the principles chosen for formalization are not trivial or absurd.

Saul Kripke is one of the most original and creative philosophers writing today. His work has had a tremendous impact on the direction that philosophy has taken in the last thirty years and continues to dominate some of its most fundamental aspects. Given Kripke's importance it is perhaps surprising that there is no introduction to his philosophy available to the general student. This book fills that gap. As much of Kripke's work is highly technical, the book's central aim is to (...) provide clear exposition of Kripke's ideas in a form that is understandable to a beginning readership as well as a commentary on them that more advanced students will find useful. The book begins with a discussion of Kripke's early work on modal logic, which provides the foundation for many of his later philosophical contributions, before examining in detail Kripke's central ideas and arguments contained in Naming and Necessity. In further chapters, Kripke's work on semantic paradoxes and his theory of truth are outlined as well as his controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein's famous private language argument. Kripke's ideas are situated alongside those of his precursors and some of the most important and interesting responses to them are explored. The reader is thus able to appreciate the path-breaking nature of Kripke's contributions, how they have challenged fundamentally traditional interpretations, and how they have sparked some of the most important philosophical debates of recent years. (shrink)

Whether pattern-parsing mechanisms are specific to language or apply across multiple cognitive domains remains unresolved. Formal language theory provides a mathematical framework for classifying pattern-generating rule sets (or “grammars”) according to complexity. This framework applies to patterns at any level of complexity, stretching from simple sequences, to highly complex tree-like or net-like structures, to any Turing-computable set of strings. Here, we explored human pattern-processing capabilities in the visual domain by generating abstract visual sequences made up of abstract tiles differing in (...) form and color. We constructed different sets of sequences, using artificial “grammars” (rule sets) at three key complexity levels. Because human linguistic syntax is classed as “mildly context-sensitive,” we specifically included a visual grammar at this complexity level. Acquisition of these three grammars was tested in an artificial grammar-learning paradigm: after exposure to a set of well-formed strings, participants were asked to discriminate novel grammatical patterns from non-grammatical patterns. Participants successfully acquired all three grammars after only minutes of exposure, correctly generalizing to novel stimuli and to novel stimulus lengths. A Bayesian analysis excluded multiple alternative hypotheses and shows that the success in rule acquisition applies both at the group level and for most participants analyzed individually. These experimental results demonstrate rapid pattern learning for abstract visual patterns, extending to the mildly context-sensitive level characterizing language. We suggest that a formal equivalence of processing at the mildly context sensitive level in the visual and linguistic domains implies that cognitive mechanisms with the computational power to process linguistic syntax are not specific to the domain of language, but extend to abstract visual patterns with no meaning. (shrink)

In this commentary on Berwick and Chomsky's “Why Only Us,” I discuss three key points. I first offer a brief critique of their scholarship, notably their often unjustified dismissal of previous thinking about language evolution. But my main focus concerns two arguments central to the book's thesis: the irrelevance of externalization to language evolution and the discontinuity between human conceptual representations and those of other animals. I argue against both stances, using cognitive data from nonhuman species to show that externalization (...) is not irrelevant to understanding the biology of language, and that many human conceptual structures have clear animal homologs. (shrink)

A system of natural deduction rules is proposed for an idealized form of English. The rules presuppose a sharp distinction between proper names and such expressions as the c, a (an) c, some c, any c, and every c, where c represents a common noun. These latter expressions are called quantifiers, and other expressions of the form that c or that c itself, are called quantified terms. Introduction and elimination rules are presented for any, every, some, a (an), and the, (...) and also for any which, every which, and so on, as well as rules for some other concepts. One outcome of these rules is that Every man loves some woman is implied by, but does not imply, Some woman is loved by every man, since the latter is taken to mean the same as Some woman is loved by all men. Also, Jack knows which woman came is implied by Some woman is known by Jack to have come, but not by Jack knows that some woman came. (shrink)

Historical language change (), like evolution itself, is a fact; and its implications for the biological evolution of the human capacity for language acquisition () have been ably explored by many contemporary theorists. However, Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) revolutionary call for a replacement of phylogenetic models with glossogenetic cultural models is based on an inadequate understanding of either. The solution to their lies before their eyes, but they mistakenly reject it due to a supposed Gene/;culture co-evolution poses a series of (...) difficult theoretical and empirical problems that will be resolved by subtle thinking, adequate models, and careful cross-disciplinary research, not by oversimplified manifestos. (shrink)