We often lament our limited nature as human beings. Supernatural is certainly no stranger to this theme and often contrasts the many weaknesses of man to the awesome power of angels, demons, and otherworldly creatures. It should be enough to show that angels can reasonably be atheists by showing two things. First, the best arguments in favor of the existence of God are no better if Anna and Cas think about them, and second, that these angels are also in no (...) better position than we are to deny what is perhaps the strongest argument against the existence of God. The cosmological argument for the existence of God begins with a couple of observations about the universe. The first is pretty obvious‐“things exist.” The second is that everything that exists was caused to exist as it is. (shrink)

Temor y Temblor, de Kierkegaard, escrito bajo el seudónimo de Johannesde silentio, nos ofrece una recreaciónpoética de la historia bíblica de Abraham. Johannes alaba a Abraham como el más eminente caballero de la fe, pero nuestro análisis encuentra que las caracterizaciones que hace de Abraham, como decidido y al mismo tiempo angustiado por el sacrificio de Isaac, entran en conflicto y se mantienen sin resolver. Esto, sumado a la reconocida ignorancia de Johannes en cuestiones de fe, hace que la representación (...) de la fe en Temor y Temblor no sea convincente. Sólo en sus obras tardías Kierkegaard concilia estas dificultades introduciendo una condición "metaestable" de la fe. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. The authors offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject.

This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world (...) and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work. (shrink)

We argue that narratives are central to the success of historical reconstruction. Narrative explanation involves tracing causal trajectories across time. The construction of narrative, then, often involves postulating relatively speculative causal connections between comparatively well-established events. But speculation is not always idle or harmful: it also aids in overcoming local underdetermination by forming scaffolds from which new evidence becomes relevant. Moreover, as our understanding of the past’s causal milieus become richer, the constraints on narrative plausibility become increasingly strict: a narrative’s (...) admissibility does not turn on mere logical consistency with background data. Finally, narrative explanation and explanation generated by simple, formal models complement one another. Where models often achieve isolation and precision at the cost of simplification and abstraction, narratives can track complex changes in a trajectory over time at the cost of simplicity and precision. In combination both allow us to understand and explain highly complex historical sequences. (shrink)

Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...) patterns of living that contextualize behavior. (shrink)

Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, (...) we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well-developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them. (shrink)

This text offers a reflection on the nature and significance of narrative in human communication.

Paleobiologists often provide simple narratives to explain complex, contingent episodes. These narratives are sometimes ‘one-shot hypotheses’ which are treated as being mutually exclusive with other possible explanations of the target episode, and are thus extended to accommodate as much about the episode as possible. I argue that a provisional preference for such hypotheses provides two kinds of productive scaffolding. First, they generate ‘hypothetical difference-makers’: one-shot hypotheses highlight and isolate empirically tractable dependencies between variables. Second, investigations of hypothetical difference-makers provision explanatory (...) resources, the ‘raw materials’ for constructing more complex—and likely more adequate—explanations. Provisional preferences for simple, one-shot hypotheses in historical science, then, is defeasibly justified on indirect—strategic—grounds. My argument is made in reference to recent developments regarding the K–Pg extinction. (shrink)

Historical scientists frequently face incomplete data, and lack direct experimental access to their targets. This has led some philosophers and scientists to be pessimistic about the epistemic potential of the historical sciences. And yet, historical science often produces plausible, sophisticated hypotheses. I explain this capacity to generate knowledge in the face of apparent evidential scarcity by examining recent work on Thylacoleo carnifex, the ‘marsupial lion’. Here, we see two important methodological features. First, historical scientists are methodological omnivores, that is, they (...) construct purpose-built epistemic tools tailored to generate evidence about highly specific targets. This allows them to produce multiple streams of independent evidence and thus maximize their epistemic reach. Second, investigative scaffolding: research proceeds in a piece-meal fashion, information only gaining evidential relevance once certain hypotheses are well supported. I illustrate scaffolding in a discussion of the nature of functional ascription in paleobiology. Frequently, different senses of ‘function’ are not discriminated during paleobiological investigation—something which can mar adaptationist investigations of extant organisms. However, I argue that, due to scaffolding, conflating senses of ‘function’ can be the right thing to do. Coarse-grained functional hypotheses are required before it is clear what evidence could discriminate between more fine-grained ones. I draw on omnivory and scaffolding to argue that pessimists make a bad empirical bet. It is a bad idea to bet against the epistemic fortunes of such opportunistic and resourceful scientists, especially when we have reason to think we will systematically underestimate the amount of evidence ultimately available to them. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore for their comments and for the opportunity to think again about some important questions. Before I respond.

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that (...) this formulation is unhelpful. (shrink)

Black males have been characterized as violent, misogynist, predatory rapists by gender theorists dating back to mid-nineteenth–century ethnologists to contemporary intersectional feminists. These caricatures of Black men and boys are not rooted in any actual studies or empirical findings, but the stereotypes found throughout various racist social scientific literatures that held Black males to be effeminate while nonetheless hyper-masculine and delinquent. This paper argues that contemporary gender theories not only deny the peculiar sexual oppression of racialized outgroup males under patriarchy, (...) but theories like intersectional invisibility actually perpetuates the idea that racialized males are disposable. To remedy the imperceptibility of sexual oppression and violence under the male category, the author gives an historical account of the development of racist (anti-Black) misandry throughout the centuries and proposes a theory of phallicism to describe the seemingly contradictory constructions of Black men as sexually predatory as in the case of the rapist, but nonetheless sexually vulnerable and raped under patriarchy. (shrink)

What can we learn from fiction? I argue that we can learn about the consequences of a certain course of action by projecting ourselves, in imagination, into the situation of the fiction's characters.

Teresa believes in God. Maggie’s wife believes that the Earth is flat, and also that Maggie should be home from work by now. Anouk—a cat—believes it is dinner time. This dissertation is about what believing is: it concerns what, exactly, ordinary people are attributing to Teresa, Maggie’s wife, and Anouk when affirming that they are believers. Part I distinguishes the attitudes of belief that people attribute to each other (and other animals) in ordinary life from the cognitive states of belief (...) theoretically posited by (some) cognitive scientists. Part II defends the view that to have an attitude of belief is to live—to be disposed to act, react, think, and feel—in a pattern that an actual belief attributor identifies with taking the world to be some way. Drawing on scientific, scholarly, and literary sources of evidence, How Beliefs are like Colors provides a framework for research on belief across the humanities and sciences of the mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent attempt at (...) such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion... (shrink)

Gregory Currie defends the view that works of fiction guide the imagination, and then considers whether fiction can also guide our beliefs. He makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction, as it is easy to be too optimistic about the psychological insights of authors, and empathy is hard to acquire while not always morally advantageous.

Imagine: A 15-year-old girl has sex with a 20-year-old man. It is her first sexual experience. Her first time having intercourse. She remembers that “he basically took it from me,” but feels an affection for the person and the event. She was not at the age of consent, but describes the experience as “just pleasure.” Was this rape or simply a man ushering a young girl into womanhood? Now imagine her as a 15-year-old boy and him to be a 20-year-old (...) woman. She “took it from him,” but he recalls it was pleasurable. Was he forced into sexual relations with an adult before the age of consent? Was he raped? Can he actually be raped?It is often difficult to conceptualize male bodies as being victims of sexual violence, and... (shrink)

Ethnographic analogy, the use of comparative data from anthropology to inform reconstructions of past human societies, has a troubled history. Archaeologists often express concern about, or outright reject, the practice—and sometimes do so in problematically general terms. This is odd, as the use of comparative data in archaeology is the same pattern of reasoning as the ‘comparative method’ in biology, which is a well-developed and robust set of inferences which play a central role in discovering the biological past. In pointing (...) out this continuity, I argue that there is no ‘special pleading’ on the part of archaeologists in this regard: biologists must overcome analogous epistemic difficulties in their use of comparative data. I then go on to emphasize the local, empirically tractable ways in which particular ethnographic analogies may be licensed. (shrink)

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity that leaves (...) the intentions of the author behind needs to explain how and why this differs so fundamentally from ordinary conversational interpretation, where the only decent models we have are ones that depend crucially on the recovery of intention. Anyone who thinks that imaginative literature has anything to tell us about time had better have a position on how earlier and later relate to past and future. Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a role in literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is. Philosophical questions about the arts also go naturally with other kinds of philosophical questions: we can't think constructively about representation in art without thinking about representation; text, meaning, reference and existence get similarly drawn into the conversation. Some ideas that philosophers of art deal with emerge from other disciplines. In literary theory an enormous amount of attention has been lavished on tracing the sources of unreliability in narrative. Is the result adequate to the details of the particular works we call unreliable? Contemporary film theory is generally hostile to the fiction/documentary distinction. Are there in fact any grounds for this? This book of thirteen connected essays examines questions of all these kinds. It ranges from the semantics of proper names, through the pragmatics of literary and filmic interpretation, to the aesthetic function of stone age implements. Some of the essays have not been published before; some that have are here substantially revised. (shrink)

Re-analysis of the data provided in the target article reveals a lack of evidence for a strong, universal relationship between parasite stress and the variables relating to sociality. Furthermore, even if associations between these variables do exist, the analyses presented here do not provide evidence for Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) proposed causal mechanism.

Can we be realists about a general category but pluralists about concepts relating to that category? I argue that paleobiological methods of delineating species are not affected by differing species concepts, and that this underwrites an argument that species concept pluralists should be species category realists. First, the criteria by which paleobiologists delineate species are ‘indifferent’ to the species category. That is, their method for identifying species applies equally to any species concept. To identify a new species, paleobiologists show that (...) interspecies processes, such as phenotypic plasticity, sexual dimorphism, or ontogenetic diversity, are a worse explanation of the variance between specimens than intraspecies processes. As opposed to operating under a single or plurality of species concepts, then, paleobiologists use abductive inferences, which would be required regardless of any particular species concept. Second, paleobiologists are frequently interested in large-scale, long-term morphological patterns in the fossil record, and resolving the fine-grained differences which result from different species concepts is irrelevant at those scales. I argue that this claim about paleobiological practice supports what I call ‘indifference realism’ about the species category. The indifference realist argues that when legitimate investigation is indifferent to a plurality of concepts, we should be realists about the category those concepts pertain to. (shrink)

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both (...) forms of enquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude towards frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical enquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement, and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Despite the recent rise in articles by American philosophers willing to deal with race, the sophistication of American philosophy's conceptualizations of American racism continues to lag behind other liberal arts fields committed to similar endeavors. Whereas other fields like American studies, history, sociology, and Black studies have found the foundational works of Black scholars essential to "truly" understanding the complexities of racism, American philosophy-driven by the refusal of white philosophers to acknowledge and incorporate the foundational works of Black scholars at (...) the turn of the century, as well as the relevant insights of contemporary race theorists-remains in a very real sense underdeveloped .. (shrink)

Motor imagery typically involves an experience as of moving a body part. Recent studies reveal close parallels between the constraints on motor imagery and those on actual motor performance. How are these parallels to be explained? We advance a simulative theory of motor imagery, modeled on the idea that we predict and explain the decisions of others by simulating their decision-making processes. By proposing that motor imagery is essentially off-line motor action, we explain the tendency of motor imagery to mimic (...) motor performance. We close by arguing that a simulative theory of motor imagery gives (modest) support to and illumination of the simulative theory of decision-prediction. (shrink)