This chapter discusses the flaws of Clark’s extended mind hypothesis. Clark’s hypothesis assumes that the nature of the processes internal to an object has nothing to do with whether that object carries out cognitive processing. The only condition required is that the object is coupled with a cognitive agent and interacts with it in a certain way. In making this tenuous connection, Clark commits the most common mistake extended mind theorists make; alleging that an object becomes cognitive once it is (...) connected to a cognitive agent is a “coupling-constitution fallacy.” From this fallacy, many hastily proceed to the conclusion that the object or process constitutes part of the agent’s cognitive apparatus or cognitive processing. (shrink)

Fred Feldman is an important philosopher, who has made a substantial contribution to utilitarian moral philosophy. This collection of ten previously published essays plus a new introductory essay reveal the striking originality and unity of his views. Feldman's version of utilitarianism differs from traditional forms in that it evaluates behaviour by appeal to the values of accessible worlds. These worlds are in turn evaluated in terms of the amounts of pleasure they contain, but the conception of pleasure involved is (...) a novel one and the formulation of hedonism improved. In Feldman's view pleasure is not a feeling but a propositional attitude. He also deals with problems of justice that affect standard forms of utilitarianism. The collection is ideally suited for courses on contemporary utilitarian theory. (shrink)

Fred Miller offers a controversial reappraisal of the Politics, suggesting that nature, justice, and rights are central to Aristotle's political thought. He sheds new light on Aristotle's relation to modern natural rights theorists, and to the current liberalism-communitarianism debate.

Heart rate variability (HRV), the change in the time intervals between adjacent heartbeats, is an emergent property of interdependent regulatory systems that operate on different time scales to adapt to challenges and achieve optimal performance. This article briefly reviews neural regulation of the heart, and its basic anatomy, the cardiac cycle, and the sinoatrial and atrioventricular pacemakers. The cardiovascular regulation center in the medulla integrates sensory information and input from higher brain centers, and afferent cardiovascular system inputs to adjust heart (...) rate and blood pressure via sympathetic and parasympathetic efferent pathways. This article reviews sympathetic and parasympathetic influences on the heart, and examines the interpretation of HRV and the association between reduced HRV, risk of disease and mortality, and the loss of regulatory capacity. This article also discusses the intrinsic cardiac nervous system and the heart-brain connection, through which afferent information can influence activity in the subcortical and frontocortical areas, and motor cortex. It also considers new perspectives on the putative underlying physiological mechanisms and properties of the ultra-low-frequency (ULF), very-low-frequency (VLF), low-frequency (LF), and high-frequency (HF) bands. Additionally, it reviews the most common time and frequency domain measurements as well as standardized data collection protocols. In its final section, this article integrates Porges' polyvagal theory, Thayer and colleagues' neurovisceral integration model, Lehrer et al.'s resonance frequency model, and the Institute of HeartMath's coherence model. The authors conclude that a coherent heart is not a metronome because its rhythms are characterized by both complexity and stability over longer time scales. Future research should expand understanding of how the heart and its intrinsic nervous system influence the brain. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to defend the deductive-nomological model of explanation against a number of criticisms that have been made of it. It has traditionally been thought that scientific explanations were causal and that scientific explanations involved deduction from laws. In recent years, however, this three-fold identity has been challenged: there are, it is argued, causal explanations that are not scientific, scientific explanations that are not deductive, deductions from laws that are neither causal explanations nor scientific explanations, and (...) causal explanations that involve no deductions from laws. The aim of the present essay is to defend the traditional identities, and to show that the more recent attempts at invalidating them fail in their object. More specifically, this essay argues that a Humean version of the deductive-nomological model of explanation can be defended as the correct account of scientific explanation of individual facts and processes, and as the correct account of causal explanations of individual facts and processes. The deductive-nomological model holds that to explain an event E, say that a is G, one must find some initial conditions C, say that a is F, and a law or theory T such that T and C jointly entail E, and both are essential to the deduction. (shrink)

This book consists of an edited collection of original essays of the highest academic quality by seasoned experts in their fields of cognitive science. The essays are interdisciplinary, drawing from many of the fields known collectively as “the cognitive sciences.” Topics discussed represent a significant cross-section of the most current and interesting issues in cognitive science. Specific topics include matters regarding machine learning and cognitive architecture, the nature of cognitive content, the relationship of information to cognition, the role of language (...) and communication in cognition, the nature of embodied cognition, selective topics in visual cognition, brain connectivity, computation and simulation, social and technological issues within the cognitive sciences, and significant issues in the history of neuroscience. This book will be of interest to both professional researchers and newer students and graduate students in the fields of cognitive science—including computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. The essays are in English and are designed to be as free as possible of technical jargon and therefore accessible to young scholars and to scholars who are new to the cognitive neurosciences. In addition to several entries by single authors, the book contains several interesting roundtables where researchers contribute answers to a central question presented to those in the focus group on one of the core areas listed above. This exciting approach provides a variety of perspectives from across disciplines on topics of current concern in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Inter-cultural dialog is frequently treated as either unnecessary or else impossible. It is said to be unnecessary, because we all are the same or share the same ‘human nature'; it is claimed to be impossible because cultures seen as language games or forms or life are so different as to be radically incommensurable. The paper steers a course between absolute universalism and particularism by following the path of dialog and interrogation - where dialog does not mean empty chatter but the (...) exploration of the ‘otherness’ of interlocutors on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Such dialog is the heart of hermeneutics as formulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The paper explores the question whether hermeneutical interpretation can be transferred from textual readings to the domain of cross-cultural encounters. After discussing both the historical development and the basic meaning of contemporary hermeneutics, the paper draws attention to the intimate linkage between interpretive understanding and ‘application’, or ‘practical philosophy.’ Drawing on the insights of Gadamer and some more overtly political thinkers, the paper then shows the relevance of hermeneutics for cross-cultural studies, as an antidote to the looming ‘clash of civilizations.’ It turns to some writings by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to emphasize the necessary linkage between interactive dialog and concrete embodied engagement. Undercutting purely mentalist or ‘idealist’ misconstruals of dialog, this linkage shows the mutual compatibility between Gadamerian hermeneutics and existential phenomenology. Keywords: hermeneutics; dialogue; praxis; cross-cultural understanding; Gadamer; Merleau-Ponty (Published: 10 March 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i1.1937. (shrink)

It is far from obvious that outside of highly specialized domains such as commercial agriculture, the methodology of biometrics—quantitative comparisons over groups of organisms—should be of any use in today’s bioinformatically informed biological sciences. The methods in our biometric textbooks, such as regressions and principal components analysis, make assumptions of homogeneity that are incompatible with current understandings of the origins of developmental or evolutionary data in historically contingent processes, processes that might have come out otherwise; the appropriate statistical methods are (...) those suited to random walks, not normal distributions. A valid methodology would further require that especially close attention be paid to the difference between aspects of processes that are plastic, those that encode their own histories or biographies, and the very small fraction of quantifications that can usefully and realistically be modeled as varying by colored noise around a central tendency that itself has some quantitative meaning. This point of view—that only a vanishingly small fraction of the quantitative information borne by any living organism is worth quantifying—is illustrated by some data on a human birth defect, namely, fetal alcohol syndrome. In a suggestive metaphor, the biometrician is like the pilgrim in Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, uncertain as to whether to measure the mountains or the clouds. The mountains stand for contingent history, the clouds for the subset of the data most closely matching controlled experiments suitable for quantitative biometric summary. Biometrics applies to the clouds, not the mountains. The success of statistical methods comes at the expense of all the theories that we simultaneously hold to be true about the biological materials to which they both pertain. Biometrics is thus complementary to all of the emerging reductionist sciences of biological structure. (shrink)

The claim that scientific explanation is deductive has been attacked on both systematic and historical grounds. This paper briefly defends the claim against the systematic attack. Essential to this defence is a distinction between perfect and imperfect explanation. This distinction is then used to illuminate the differences and similarities between Aristotelian (anthropomorphic) explanations of certain facts and those of classical mechanics. In particular, it is argued that when one attempts to fit classical mechanics into the Aristotelian framework the latter becomes (...) structurally incoherent. It is suggested that this, together with the fact that classical mechanics embodied the first piece of perfect knowledge, accounts, in part at least, for the historical fact of the rapid demise of the Aristotelian patterns as the new science developed. On the basis of this discussion, the inadequacies of the attack on the deductive model on historical grounds by Toulmin come to be seen. (shrink)

The touchstone of these seven original essays is the relationship between polis and praxis - the public-political space and the political action that maintains and is conditioned by that space. The argument flows from Martin Heidegger's lament in his Letter on Humanism that modern philosophers have failed to understand that the essence of "action" is "accomplishment." Dallmayr's lucid essays are a step toward achieving that understanding.Dallmayr assesses and puts into perspective the work of many of the seminal thinkers of the (...) 20th century - Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott - as he takes up such topics as the plausibility of friendship as a model for political relations, the relationship between political praxis and "experience," Heidegger's ontology of freedom, Foucault's treatment of power, and the merits and disadvantages of Habermasian critical theory. The result is a stimulating and original contribution to current political discourse that explores and advocates the manifold possible levels of active political life below and above the level of the State.Fred Dallmayr has established a reputation as a theorist and critic who is equally well attuned to European and American currents of philosophical and political thought. Like Hannah Arendt, he sees the essay as an ideal form for exercises in theorizing en route while venturing beyond traditional categories and philosophical benchmarks. His aim in this book is not a close-knit propositional framework but a set of tentative and partially continuous explorations that are provocative and inviting, like the movements of a musical suite.Fred R. Dallmayr is Packey Dee Professor of Government, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

The 1998 elections were held just about two weeks ago.1 All across the country, Americans went to the polls to vote for Senators, Representatives to the House, Governors, and local officials. In many states they were also given the opportunity to vote on a wide variety of ballot questions, and among these ballot questions several concerned physician assisted suicide.

The imagination opens onto a reconciliation of the past with the future, especially when it is activated as a retrieval of the memories of collective suffering. This is especially the case with the Latin American experience, with its history of military governments and their 'dirty wars' against their civilians. Using Ricoeur's notion of the metaphorical imagination, and drawing on Dussel's work on ethical hermeneutics, this paper argues that, in the act of remembering, other social imaginaries can be created as possibilities (...) that go beyond the concrete present, and which occur from the vantage points of oppressed others. (shrink)

This book is in the tradition that defines the philosophical center of contemporary philosophy of science, the tradition of Carnap, Hempel, and Nagel as supplemented by generous additions from Austin and an Oxfordized Wittgenstein in the style introduced by N. R. Hanson. This tradition has been criticized both from the philosophical left, by Sellars, and from the philosophical right, by Bergmann. Achinstein's work is so squarely in the center that neither Sellars nor Bergmann ever appear in the index. That makes (...) the book the third or fourth generation of a series in that central tradition all of which have been concerned largely with discussing their predecessors in that same tradition. This series is now producing books—Achinstein's is one of them—that have the virtues and the defects of an ingrown aristocracy: finely shaped features; an aloofness with respect to which no doubt is felt that it is justified ; and in their quarrels among themselves the cunning of foxes; but with none of the robust life and vitality of lions that first secured them the right to rule. (shrink)

Although Harry Woolf’s great collective volume Quantification mostly overlooked biology, Thomas Kuhn’s chapter there on the role of quantitative measurement within the physical sciences maps quite well onto the forms of reasoning that actually persuade us as biologists 50 years later. Kuhn distinguished between two contexts, that of producing quantitative anomalies and that of resolving them. The implied form of reasoning is actually C. S. Peirce’s abduction or inference to the best explanation: “The surprising fact C is observed; but if (...) A were true, C would be a matter of course; hence there is reason to suspect that A is true.” This article reviews abduction and the Kuhnian dichotomy in a range of classic examples where quantitative reasoning has ended arguments in the natural sciences. Included are John Snow’s discovery of the cause of cholera, Jean Perrin’s proof that atoms exist, the discovery of the double helix, the Alvarezes’ explanation of the extraterrestrial origin of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and current examples in passive smoking, ulcers, and the anthropogenicity of global warming. Modern biology is a quantitative science to the extent that we operate by “strong inference,” the insistence that our data are surprising on everybody else’s hypotheses but follow as a matter of course from our own, and that we demand numerical consilience whenever we infer across levels of analysis or across disciplines. (shrink)

Clifford Geertz was perhaps the most influential anthropologist of our time, but his influence extended far beyond his field to encompass all facets of contemporary life. Nowhere were his gifts for directness, humor, and steady revelation more evident than in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where for nearly four decades he shared his acute vision of the world in all its peculiarity. This book brings together the finest of Geertz's review essays from the New York Review (...) along with a representative selection of later pieces written at the height of his powers, some that first appeared in periodicals such as Dissent, others never before published. This collection exemplifies Geertz's extraordinary range of concerns, beginning with his first essay for the Review in 1967, in which he reviews, with muffled hilarity, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. This book includes Geertz's unflinching meditations on Western academia's encounters with the non-Western world, and on the shifting and clashing places of societies in the world generally. Geertz writes eloquently and arrestingly about such major figures as Gandhi, Foucault, and Genet, and on topics as varied as Islam, globalization, feminism, and the failings of nationalism. Life among the Anthros and Other Essays demonstrates Geertz's uncommon wisdom and consistently keen and hopeful humor, confirming his status as one of our most important and enduring public intellectuals. (shrink)

The current literature that attempts to bridge between geometric morphometrics (GMM) and finite element analyses (FEA) of CT-derived data from bones of living animals and fossils appears to lack a sound biotheoretical foundation. To supply the missing rigor, the present article demonstrates a new rhetoric of quantitative inference across the GMM–FEA bridge—a rhetoric bridging form to function when both have been quantified so stringently. The suggested approach is founded on diverse standard textbook examples of the relation between forms and the (...) way strains in them are produced by stresses imposed upon them. One potentially cogent approach to the explanatory purposes driving studies of this class arises from a close scrutiny of the way in which computations in both domains, shape and strain, can be couched as minimizations of a scalar quantity. For GMM, this is ordinary Procrustes shape distance; in FEA, it is the potential energy that is stored in the deformed configuration of the solid form. A hybrid statistical method is introduced requiring that all forms be subjected to the same detailed loading designs (the same “probes”) in a manner careful to accommodate the variations of those same forms before they were stressed. The proper role of GMM is argued to be the construction of regressions for strain energy density on the largest-scale relative warps in order that biological explanations may proceed in terms of the residuals from those regressions: the local residual features of strain energy density. The method, evidently a hierarchical one, might be intuitively apprehended as a geometrical approach to a formal allometric analysis of strain. The essay closes with an exhortation. (shrink)

Policy Review, the organ of the conservative Heritage Foundation, devoted their winter 1984 issue to lamenting the failures of the Reagan administration. Publisher M. Stan ton Evans complained that “This has been essentially another Ford Administration, … not much different from any other Republican administration in our lifetime. While the other Senator from Colorado, arch-conservative William Armstrong noted that Reagan had ‘managed to polarize the country over budget cuts that didn't happen.” “He cut the budget,” bemoaned Armstrong, “enough to make (...) the special interests and the press mad, but not enough” to restructure the government. For his part, National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) chair Terry Donlan has complained of the administration failure to move on its social agenda. (shrink)

Modern thinkers regard logic as a purely formal discipline like number theory, and not to be confused with any empirical discipline such as cognitive psychology, which may seek to characterize how people actually reason. Opposed to this is the traditional view that even a formal logic can be cognitively veridical – descriptive of procedures people actually follow in arriving at their deductive judgments (logic as Laws of Thought). In a cognitively veridical logic, any formal proof that a deductive judgment, intuitively (...) arrived at, is valid should ideally conform to the method the reasoning subject has used to arrive at that judgment. More specifically, it should reveal the actual reckoning process that the reasoning subject more or less consciously carries out when they make a deductive inference. That the common logical words used in everyday reasoning – words such as 'and', 'if,''some', 'is''not,' and 'all'– have fixed positive and negative charges has escaped the notice of modern logic. The present paper shows how, by unconsciously recognizing 'not' and 'all' as 'minus-words', while recognizing 'and', 'some', and 'is' as 'plus words', a child can intuitively reckon, for example, 'not (−) all (−) dogs are (+) friendly' as equivalent to 'some (+) dogs aren't (−) friendly': −(−D+F) = +D−F. (shrink)