This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic philosophy of mind. The fifteen essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness. Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links which can be made between the two. The first (...) section of the book argues the point that knowledge consists of beliefs with the right objective connection to facts; two essays discuss this conception of knowledge's implications for naturalism. The next section articulates a view of perception, attempting to distinguish conceptual states from phenomenal states. A naturalized philosophy of mind, and thus a naturalized epistemology, is articulated in the third section. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students, and will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology. (shrink)

Several years ago I came across a marvelous little paper in which Hector-Neri Castaneda shows that standard versions of act utilitarian l ism are formally incoherent. I was intrigued by his argument. It had long seemed to me that I had a firm grasp on act utilitarianism. Indeed, it had often seemed to me that it was the clearest and most attractive of normative theories. Yet here was a simple and relatively uncontrover sial argument that showed, with only some trivial (...) assumptions, that the doctrine is virtually unintelligible. The gist of Castaneda's argument is this: suppose we understand act utilitarianism to be the view that an act is obligatory if and only if its utility exceeds that of each alternative. Suppose it is obligatory for a certain person to perform an act with two parts - we can call it 'A & B'. Then, obviously enough, it is also obligatory for this person to perform the parts, A and B. If act utilitarianism were true, we appar ently could infer that the utility of A & B is higher than that of A, and higher than that of B (because A & B is obligatory, and the other acts are alternatives to A & B). (shrink)

A theory of information is developed in which the informational content of a signal (structure, event) can be specified. This content is expressed by a sentence describing the condition at a source on which the properties of a signal depend in some lawful way. Information, as so defined, though perfectly objective, has the kind of semantic property (intentionality) that seems to be needed for an analysis of cognition. Perceptual knowledge is an information-dependent internal state with a content corresponding to the (...) information producing it. This picture of knowledge captures most of what makes knowledge an important cpistcmological notion. It also avoids many of the problems infecting traditional justificational accounts of knowledge (knowledge as [justified, true belief those (unlike knowledge) having a content that can be either true or false (e.g., belief) – are described in terms of the way internal (presumably neural) structures acquire during learning a certain information-carrying role. The content of these structures (whether true or false) is identified with the kind of information they were developed to carry. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to measurement theory for non-specialists and puts measurement in the social and behavioural sciences on a firm mathematical foundation. Results are applied to such topics as measurement of utility, psychophysical scaling and decision-making about pollution, energy, transportation and health. The results and questions presented should be of interest to both students and practising mathematicians since the author sets forth an area of mathematics unfamiliar to most mathematicians, but which has many potentially significant applications.

Table of Contents 1 Policy-making, prediction and the theory of international behaviour 5 2 Social science, naturalism and scientific realism 33 3 Theory, observation and law 63 4 Natural causation, social action and international politics 87 5 Prediction, theory and policy-making 126 6 Explaining agreement and disagreement in the natural sciences and social sciences 172 7 Conclusions 207.

In this paper, I present my solutions to two closely related questions about pleasure. One of these questions is fairly well known. The second question seems to me to be at least as interesting as the first, but it apparently hasn't interested quite so many philosophers.

Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis is most often applied to multicellular animals and the complexity of their macroscopic environments to explain how cognition evolved. We think that the ECT may be less suited to explain the origins of the animal bodily organization, including this organization’s potentiality for dealing with complex macroscopic environments. We argue that acquiring the fundamental sensorimotor features of the animal body may be better explained as a consequence of dealing with internal bodily—rather than environmental complexity. To press and (...) elucidate this option, we develop the notion of an animal sensorimotor organization that derives from an internal coordination account for the evolution of early nervous systems. The ASMO notion is a reply to the question how a collection of single cells can become integrated such that the resulting multicellular organization becomes sensitive to and can manipulate macroscopic features of both the animal body and its environment. In this account, epithelial contractile tissues play the central role in the organization behind complex animal bodies. In this paper, we relate the ASMO concept to recent work on epithelia, which provides empirical evidence that supports central assumptions behind the ASMO notion. Second, we discuss to what extent the notion applies to basic animal architectures, exemplified by sponges and jellyfish. We conclude that the features exhibited by the ASMO are plausibly explained by internal constraints acting on and within this multicellular organization, providing a challenge for the role the ECT plays in this context. (shrink)

Act-utilitarianism and other theories in normative ethics confront the implementability problem: normal human agents, with normal human epistemic abilities, lack the information needed to use those theories directly for the selection of actions. Two Level Theories have been offered in reply. The theoretical level component states alleged necessary and sufficient conditions for moral rightness. That component is supposed to be true, but is not intended for practical use. It gives an account of objective obligation. The practical level component is offered (...) as an implementable system for the choice of actions by agents lacking some relevant information. It gives an account of subjective obligation. Several different ways of developing Two Levelism are explained and criticized. Five conditions that must be satisfied if the practical level principle is to be a good match for a given theoretical level principle are stated. A better form of Two Levelism is presented. (shrink)

The Sphex story is an anecdote about a female digger wasp that at first sight seems to act quite intelligently, but subsequently is shown to be a mere automaton that can be made to repeat herself endlessly. Dennett and Hofstadter made this story well known and widely influential within the cognitive sciences, where it is regularly used as evidence that insect behavior is highly rigid. The present paper discusses the origin and subsequent empirical investigation of the repetition reported in the (...) Sphex story. The repetition was first observed by Henri Fabre in 1879, and the last empirical study I found was published in 1985. In contrast to the story's clear message, the actual results have always been equivocal: the endless repetition is not standard. In addition, this repetition itself has become a minor aside in the literature on digger wasps when put in the perspective of many other examples of adaptiveness and flexibility. Nevertheless, the story and its message have to this day persevered within the cognitive sciences. For some reason, the counterevidence has been neglected time and again. The paper closes by presenting two different but compatible hypotheses that could explain why humans keep repeating this particular anecdote. (shrink)

In this essay, Seddon provides a brief rejoinder to Long's reply to his review of the monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. Despite his criticisms, Seddon maintains that reading Long's monograph will pay rewards for all those interested in the history of philosophy as it impacts Ayn Rand's thought.

Le Monde's financial analyst Paul Fabra captured the essence of the Western “Alliances'” difficulties in an article describing European reactions to Carter and Reagan economic policies. Under Carter he noted, the U.S. initially followed an expansionary policy of low interest rates and increased public spending driving the dollar downward. The cheaper dollar increased both American exports to Europe and European complaints about American competition. Reagan reversed course and the Europeans had a different, though equally intense set of grievances. “The fact (...) is,” concluded Fabra, “Europe is uncomfortable with a strong or weak dollar.” He might have said a strong or weak America. (shrink)

R. Emmett Tyrrell, the editor of the neo-conservative monthly The American Spectator, has been justly denounced as a “mean-spirited punk” by fellow writers from The Nation and The New Republic. Tyrrell, a knock-down version of H.L. Mencken, writing without the master's verve or wit, is indeed a pretentious and thoroughly unpleasant fellow whose book The Liberal Crack-Up is given over to a nuke-the-whales humor, i.e., an extended and generally senseless tirade against feminists, peaceniks, environmentalists, etc. It is all the more (...) disturbing, then, to see that in one lucid moment, the chapter on “Whatever Happened to Liberalism,” Tyrrell makes some worthwhile points. (shrink)

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines (...) the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

For Martin Heidegger the story of Western philosophy ended basically in egocentrism or the metaphysics of “subjectivity”; however, he acknowledged the possibility of another path in Greece: that of pre-Socratic thinking. Yet, there is a further path he did not acknowledge: the tradition of Orthodox philosophy and theology. The paper focuses on some key works of the prominent contemporary Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras, for a long time professor in Athens. Taking over the notions of “Being” and ontology, Yannaras construes them (...) not as ontic “substances” amenable to epistemic knowledge, but as guideposts to “relational” or participatory experience. His early text On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Aeropagite explores the affinity between the German thinker and the Orthodox stress on “apophaticism.” For Yannaras, apophaticism profoundly reorients philosophical inquiry; it also has important implications for human “personhood” and “freedom.” Far from denoting individuation, personhood for him means a face standing out toward others, just as freedom transcends self-will in the direction of a relational event. By way of conclusion, I probe the status of relational “community.” For Yannaras, I ask, is community a concretely achieved way of life ; or does it point more apophatically to a future advent? (shrink)

In comments originally presented at the ISUS conference at Dartmouth College in 2005, Elinor Mason and Alastair Norcross raised a number of objections to various things I said in Pleasure and the Good Life. One especially interesting objection concerns one of my central claims about the nature of pleasure. I distinguished between sensory pleasure and attitudinal pleasure. I said that a feeling counts as a sensory pleasure if the one who feels it takes intrinsic attitudinal pleasure in the fact that (...) he is then feeling it. I also said that attitudinal pleasure is a propositional attitude that does not intrinsically involve any particular 'feelings'. On my view, a person can take attitudinal pleasure in things at a time even though he does not feel any pleasurable feelings at that time. In their comments, Mason and Norcross expressed doubts about my account of attitudinal pleasure. In my reply, I try to answer those doubts. (shrink)

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)