January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

According to both the traditional model of folk psychology and the social intelligence hypothesis, our folk psychological notions of belief and desire developed in order to make better predictions of behavior, and the fundamental role for our folk psychological notions of belief and desire are for making more accurate predictions of behavior (than predictions made without appeal to folk psychological notions). My strategy in this paper is to show that these claims are false. I argue that we need not appeal (...) to mental states to make predictions of many behaviors, and I will offer a positive account of how we might go about predicting intentional behavior. Finally, I suggest that taken together, the critique of traditional folk psychology along with the alternative account of our predictive practices leads to a new hypothesis. While it may be true that mental state concepts developed in response to social-environmental pressures, I suggest that this pressure was more likely the need to explain behavior, rather than the need to predict it. (shrink)

I suggest a pluralistic account of folk psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of folk psychology is supported by research in developmental and social psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and (...) an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn't endorse, and so could not serve as the target's reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our folk psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits—who the person is—rather than by beliefs and desires—what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed. (shrink)

Andrews Reath presents a selection of his best essays on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on his conception of rational agency and his conception of autonomy. Together the essays articulate Reath's original approach to Kant's views about human autonomy, which explains Kant's belief that objective moral requirements are based on principles we choose for ourselves. With two new papers, and revised versions of several others, the volume will be of great interest to (...) all students and scholars of Kant and of moral philosophy. (shrink)

This essay explains Kant’s idea of autonomy of the will and advances a thesis about how it emerges in his moral conception. Kant defines “autonomy” as “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself…” and argues that the Categorical Imperative is that law. I take the autonomy of the will to mean that the nature of rational volition is the source of the formal principle that authoritatively governs rational volition. I give a sense to this (...) idea by pointing to an argument form found throughout the Groundwork and the second Critique where Kant moves from a conception of rational volition as a faculty to a statement of its formal principle. This idea of autonomy emerges in Kant’s moral conception (at the time he writes the Groundwork) as his solution to the problem of moral theory. Common sense assumes that moral requirements apply with unconditional necessity, and the problem of moral theory is to show how such requirements are possible. Kant’s resolution to this problem is to argue that the necessity of moral requirement is genuine only if based in autonomy of the will, only if based in a “law that arises from one’s will”. (shrink)

The marker approach is taken as best practice for answering the distribution question: Which animals are conscious? However, the methodology can be used to increase confidence in animals many presume to be unconscious, including C. elegans, leading to a trilemma: accept the worms as conscious; reject the specific markers; or reject the marker methodology for answering the distribution question. I defend the third option and argue that answering the distribution question requires a secure theory of consciousness. Accepting the hypothesis all (...) animals are conscious will promote research leading to secure theory, which is needed to create reliable consciousness tests for animals and AIs. Rather than asking the distribution question, we should shift to the dimensions question: How are animals conscious? (shrink)

Kant holds that when an agent acts contrary to a strict moral requirement, all of the resulting bad consequences are imputable to the agent, whether foreseeable or not. Conversely, no bad consequences resulting from an agent's compliance with duty are imputable. This paper analyzes the underlying rationale of Kant's principles for the moral imputation of bad consequences. One aim is to show how Kant treats imputability as a question for practical reason occurring within the context of first-order moral norms, rather (...) than a causal or metaphysical issue. This is because the actions that are candidates for imputation are those picked out as salient by moral norms, and because what is imputable depends on first determining what an agent's moral requirements are. The basic idea behind Kant's principles is that the subject to whom an action or its consequences are imputed is the agent on whose authority the action is undertaken. Bad consequences of an action are imputable to an agent who violates a moral requirement because, in transgressing the limits on action established by morality, the agent acts "on his own authority". Consequences that are unforeseeable or which occur by accident may be imputed by this general principle on these grounds: though the consequences may not have been foreseeable, since the agent was subject to a moral requirement, he had compelling reason to, and thus could have refrained from the action that led to them. Though Kant's principles are generally plausible once their basis is evident, the possibility of bad consequences that are only accidentally connected to a violation of duty indicates the need to set limits on what is imputable. The paper concludes by suggesting that an outcome resulting from a violation of duty is imputable when the requirement under which the agent stands provides a reason to act in ways that will standardly prevent or avoid outcomes of that general kind. Nach Kant werden dem Handelnden, der eine strikte moralische Pflicht verletzt, die schlechten Folgen dieses seines Verhaltens stets zugerechnet, und zwar unabhängig davon, ob diese Folgen nun vorhersehbar waren oder nicht. Umgekehrt: Schlechte Folgen, die aus einem pflichtgemäßen Verhalten hervorgehen, sind nicht zurechenbar. Der Beitrag untersucht das Konzept, das diesen Kantischen Prinzipien für die moralische Zurechnung schlechter Folgen zugrunde liegt. Ein Ziel ist es dabei zu zeigen, wie Kant Zurechenbarkeit nicht als ein metaphysisches oder als ein Problem der Kausalität behandelt, sondern als eine Frage der praktischen Vernunft, die im Zusammenhang mit den moralischen Normen erster Ordnung auftaucht. Dies deshalb, weil die Relevanz der Handlungen, die für die Zurechnung in Frage kommen, in erster Linie von den moralischen Normen herkommt, und weil, was zurechenbar ist, von der vorherigen Bestimmung dessen abhängt, was die moralischen Pflichten des Handelnden sind. Die Grundidee der Kantischen Prinzipien besteht darin, daß das Subjekt, dem eine Handlung oder deren Folgen zugerechnet werden, als Urheber der Handlung betrachtet werden muß. Schlechte Folgen einer Handlung sind einem Handelnden, der eine Pflicht verletzt, deshalb zuzurechnen, weil der Handelnde mit der Überschreitung der von der Moral gesetzten Grenzen "aus eigener Machtvollkommenheit" handelt. Unvorhersehbare oder zufällig eintretende Folgen können unter Zugrundelegung dieses Prinzips aus folgenden Gründen zugerechnet werden: Obwohl die Folgen nicht vorhersehbar gewesen sein mögen, hatte der Handelnde, da er einer moralischen Pflicht unterworfen war, doch einen zwingenden Grund dafür und deshalb auch die Möglichkeit dazu, von der Handlung Abstand zu nehmen, die zu jenen Folgen geführt hat. Wenn Kants Prinzipien, hat man ihre Grundlagen erst einmal verstanden, im allgemeinen auch plausibel sind, ist es doch so, daß die Möglichkeit von schlechten Folgen, die mit einer Pflichtverletzung nur zufälligerweise verknüpft sind, eine Einschränkung der Zurechnung fordert. Der Beitrag schließt mit dem Vorschlag, einen Erfolg, der aus einer Pflichtverletzung resultiert, nur dann zuzurechnen, wenn die moralische Verpflichtung, der der Handelnde unterworfen ist, einen Grund dafür liefert, so zu handeln, daß die Folgen dieses Typs von Handlung normalerweise verhindert oder vermieden werden. (shrink)

We show that the theory of the partial order of computably enumerable equivalence relations (ceers) under computable reduction is 1-equivalent to true arithmetic. We show the same result for the structure comprised of the dark ceers and the structure comprised of the light ceers. We also show the same for the structure of L-degrees in the dark, light, or complete structure. In each case, we show that there is an interpretable copy of (N, +, \times) .

This article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph of Groundwork III. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of the relevant (...) domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument of Groundwork III. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role in Kant’s moral conception. (shrink)

Perhaps because both explanation and prediction are key components to understanding, philosophers and psychologists often portray these two abilities as though they arise from the same competence, and sometimes they are taken to be the same competence. When explanation and prediction are associated in this way, they are taken to be two expressions of a single cognitive capacity that differ from one another only pragmatically. If the difference between prediction and explanation of human behavior is merely pragmatic, then anytime I (...) predict someone’s future behavior, I would at that moment also have an explanation of the behavior. I argue that advocates of both the theory theory and the simulation theory accept the symmetry of psychological prediction and explanation. However, there is very good reason to believe that this hypothesis is false. Just as we can predict the occurrence of some physical phenomena that we have no explanation for, we are also able to make accurate predictions of intentional behavior without having an explanation. Rather than requiring mental state attribution, I argue that the prediction of human behavior is most often accomplished by statistical induction rather than through an appeal to mental states. However, explanations are not given in these terms. (shrink)

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...) program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution ; Enculturation and regulative folk psychology ; and Defenses of pluralism. (shrink)

Dasgupta poses a serious challenge to realism about natural properties. He argues that there is no acceptable explanation of why natural properties deserve the value realists assign to them and are consequently absent of value. In response, this paper defines and defends an alternative non-explanatory account of normativity compatible with realism. Unlike Lewis and Sider, who believe it is sufficient to defend realism solely on realist terms, I engage with the challenge on unfriendly grounds by revealing a tu quoque. Dasgupta (...) and anti-realists face a similar challenge to that directed against realism: one that not only undermines the objection to realism by legitimising non-explanatory normativity but leaves them facing a significant dilemma. (shrink)

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

Historically, Thomas Aquinas has been controversial for his use of Averroistic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Because of his doctrine of simplicity many of argued that this entails a necessitarian view of nature—a debate that would pass through Spinoza, Descartes, and even to this day. Nevertheless, Thomas would prevail, not only to sainthood, but to become the patron of education and the Teacher of the Church. The task in this paper is to demonstrate that, contrary to many current contentions in Protestant, and especially Evangelical (...) circles, Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics remains a suitable, viable, even preferable framework for Christian Theism and, for the purposes of this paper, scientific thought. The specific focus will be on creation metaphysics and the relationship between current science and Christian thought raised by Lydia Jaeger. I will conclude with an example of the ability of radical contingency in Thomas to both satisfy contemporary physics and frame a consistent and coherent Christian Theism. (shrink)

The admiration of the Soviet Union amongst Britain's interwar scientific left is well known. This article reveals a parallel story. Focusing on the biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben and the scientific journalist J.G. Crowther, I show that a number of scientific thinkers began to look west, to the US. In the mid- to late 1930s and into the 1940s, Huxley, Crowther and Hogben all visited the US and commented favourably on Roosevelt's New Deal, in particular its experimental approach to (...) politics (in the form of planning). Huxley was first to appreciate the significance of the experiment; he looked to the Tennessee Valley Authority as a model of democratic planning by persuasion that could also be applied in Britain. Crowther, meanwhile, examined the US through the lens of history of science. InFamous American Men of Science(1937) and in lectures at Harvard University, he aimed to shed light on the flaws in the Constitution which were frustrating the New Deal. Finally, Hogben's interest in the US was related to his long-standing opposition to dialectical materialism, and when he finally saw the US at first hand, he regarded it as a model for how to bring about a planned socialist society through peaceful persuasion. (shrink)

On 5 July 1996 a sheep named Dolly was born in Scotland, the result of the transfer of the nucleus of an adult mammary tissue cell to the enucleated egg cell of an unrelated sheep, and gestation in a third, surrogate mother sheep. Although for the past ten years scientists have routinely cloned sheep and cows from embryo cells, this was the first cloning experiment that apparently succeeded using the nucleus of an adult cell.

Washington University v. Catalona revolves around ownership of tissue samples provided by patients for research purposes, raising significant ethical and legal questions concerning patient rights, current human research practices, and the treatment of samples as capital resources by the research institution.

The view that children's understanding of mind is constructed through social interaction is consistent with other social-constructivist models. We provide examples of similar claims in research on emotion perception, pretense understanding, autobiographical memory, and event knowledge. Identification of common elements from such socio-cultural perspectives may lead to greater theoretical integration and provide a new framework for exploring human development.

Barbara Herman’s The Moral Habitat develops an account of a system of duties – both juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect – that provides the structure f.

Much has been written about the free energy principle (FEP), and much misunderstood. The principle has traditionally been put forth as a theory of brain function or biological self-organisation. Critiques of the framework have focused on its lack of empirical support and a failure to generate concrete, falsifiable predictions. I take both positive and negative evaluations of the FEP thus far to have been largely in error, and appeal to a robust literature on scientific modelling to rectify the situation. A (...) prominent account of scientific modelling distinguishes between model structure and model construal. I propose that the FEP be reserved to designate a model structure, to which philosophers and scientists add various construals, leading to a plethora of models based on the formal structure of the FEP. An entailment of this position is that demands placed on the FEP that it be falsifiable or that it conform to some degree of biological realism rest on a category error. To this end, I deliver first an account of the phenomenon of model transfer and the breakdown between model structure and model construal. In the second section, I offer an overview of the formal elements of the framework, tracing their history of model transfer and illustrating how the formalism comes apart from any interpretation thereof. Next, I evaluate existing comprehensive critical assessments of the FEP, and hypothesise as to potential sources of existing confusions in the literature. In the final section, I distinguish between what I hold to be the FEP—taken to be a modelling language or modelling framework—and what I term “FEP models.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 697-716 [Access article in PDF] "La Mère Humanité":Femininity in the Romantic Socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abbé A.-L. Constant Naomi J. Andrews Humanity, my mother, since you have led me, by so many paths, to conceive this design, support me, inspire me, affirm me. —Pierre Leroux, "Invocation to my Muse." 1It was during the July Monarchy in France, in (...) the era immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848, that the ideology we call socialism became more than an abstraction held by isolated intellectuals and conspirators. 2 A series of individuals, loose-knit associations, and more formal écoles were active during the 1830s and 1840s, developing a varied agenda of social reform, economic cooperation, or association, mystical Christianity, and women's liberation. Roughly lumped under the pejorative rubric of utopian socialism, and perhaps more accurately called romantic socialism, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its diverse goals, but contributed significantly to the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3Socialism at this stage of its development overlapped in many ways with republicanism, both being, to quote one historian of the latter, "an amalgam of responses to the Enlightenment, the 1789 Revoluation and above all economic [End Page 697] change." 4 Many early socialists were also republicans, and socialist ideas influenced the ideology articulated by republicans such as Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Auguste Blanqui. Louis Blanc, perhaps the best-known socialist of the decade surrounding the 1848 revolution, was and is known as a Jacobin socialist. 5From a certain perspective republicanism and socialism shared common origins and assumptions during the July Monarchy. Most socialists had come out of the political milieu of republicanism, whether through the carbonarist movement, opposition political clubs such as Droits de l'Homme and Les Amis du Peuple, or through the influential journalism trade of the Bourbon Restoration and early July Monarchy. Pierre Leroux, for one, had been a co-founder of the widely read journal le Globe, a bastion of liberalism, which he later turned over to the Saint-Simonians upon his conversion to their "church." 6 Although diverse in many ways, the left of this era did share certain core tenets, chief among them opposition to the Orleanist monarchy and, to varying degrees the belief in more democratic rule of the French nation.To say this, however, might erroneously imply a unity that was certainly not a feature of socialism during this period. In fact socialism, despite its near mystical devotion to ideas of unity, was anything but singular during its pre-Marxian phase. The spectrum of socialist thinkers and groups ranged widely. Standing closest to the republicans in their beliefs about politics and the revolutionary tradition were Jacobin socialists, most usually associated with Louis Blanc. Blanc and others articulated a social philosophy that sought "to unite two distinct ideologies: Jacobin democracy and co-operative socialism." 7 Thus Jacobin socialism combined republican political priorities and commitment to national political processes in general and to a centralized state in particular with attention to economic change, to reforming the distribution process along more equitable lines and to putting the situation of working people at the center of political change. In this goal Jacobin socialism reflected, as did other strains of socialism, the economic instability of the era and the emergence of an organized working class movement which followed the aborted revolution of 1830. 8At the other end of the spectrum one might put the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierist École Sociétaire. 9 Vehemently anti-republican, these groups shared [End Page 698] very little with the Jacobin socialists, other than a certain concern with the emerging working class, one of the few consistent features of early socialism. Unlike Jacobin socialists, these groups focused their theories of community at a very low level, having a strongly utopian component to their thinking. As a result, they tended to see national politics as irrelevant to the situation of ordinary people and even as a... (shrink)

While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. (...) The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to the over-imitation hypothesis – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals. (shrink)

Is moral constructivism an account of the basis of the content of morality or of its authority? In fact, different writers have understood constructivism to be addressing different issues. In this paper I argue that Kant should be understood as a constructivist about the content of morality – or better about a limited set of general substantive principles – and as a constititutivist about its authority. After some general remarks in Section 1 about contemporary discussions of constructivism, in Section 2 (...) I discuss Rawls’s understanding of Kant’s constructivism; Rawls takes Kantian constructivism to be a view about the content of morality. In Section 3, I give an overview of Kant’s moral conception as constructivist about the content of morality and as constitutivist about its authority. In Section 4 I address a worry whether certain features of Kant’s constitutivism rest his constructivism on a realist foundation, arguing that they do not. (shrink)

New Jersey's Baby M case has thrust the issue of surrogate motherhood on state legislatures throughout the country. Like artificial insemination in the 1950s and 1960s, this new reproductive technology is evoking legislative responses ranging from horrified prohibition to cautious facilitation.

We examine how degrees of computably enumerable equivalence relations under computable reduction break down into isomorphism classes. Two ceers are isomorphic if there is a computable permutation of ω which reduces one to the other. As a method of focusing on nontrivial differences in isomorphism classes, we give special attention to weakly precomplete ceers. For any degree, we consider the number of isomorphism types contained in the degree and the number of isomorphism types of weakly precomplete ceers contained in the (...) degree. We show that the number of isomorphism types must be 1 or ω, and it is 1 if and only if the ceer is self-full and has no computable classes. On the other hand, we show that the number of isomorphism types of weakly precomplete ceers contained in the degree can be any member of $[0,\omega ]$. In fact, for any $n \in [0,\omega ]$, there is a degree d and weakly precomplete ceers ${E_1}, \ldots,{E_n}$ in d so that any ceer R in d is isomorphic to ${E_i} \oplus D$ for some $i \le n$ and D a ceer with domain either finite or ω comprised of finitely many computable classes. Thus, up to a trivial equivalence, the degree d splits into exactly n classes.We conclude by answering some lingering open questions from the literature: Gao and Gerdes [11] define the collection of essentially FC ceers to be those which are reducible to a ceer all of whose classes are finite. They show that the index set of essentially FC ceers is ${\rm{\Pi }}_3^0$-hard, though the definition is ${\rm{\Sigma }}_4^0$. We close the gap by showing that the index set is ${\rm{\Sigma }}_4^0$-complete. They also use index sets to show that there is a ceer all of whose classes are computable, but which is not essentially FC, and they ask for an explicit construction, which we provide.Andrews and Sorbi [4] examined strong minimal covers of downwards-closed sets of degrees of ceers. We show that if $\left$ is a uniform c.e. sequence of non universal ceers, then $\left\{ {{ \oplus _{i \le j}}{E_i}|j \in \omega } \right\}$ has infinitely many incomparable strong minimal covers, which we use to answer some open questions from [4].Lastly, we show that there exists an infinite antichain of weakly precomplete ceers. (shrink)

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit and one of the first Christian missionaries to China in the modern era. He was a genuine polymath—a translator, cartographer, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. Above all, Ricci was a missionary for the gospel. As we briefly examine his 1603 seminal work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, our hope is that we, as evangelical educators, will perceive some of the deeper principles necessary for our own missionary work among unreached people.

Kantians often talk about the capacity to set ends for oneself through reason and those who do assume that Kant regarded the capacity to set ends as a rational power or a component of practical reason. ‘Natural perfection’, Kant says, ‘is the cultivation of any capacities whatever for furthering ends set forth by reason’, and he refers to ‘humanity’ as the ‘capacity to set oneself any end at all’ or ‘the capacity to realize all sorts of possible ends’.¹ ‘Humanity’ comprises (...) the full range of human rational capacities, one of which is the capacity to adopt a wide variety of ends, including ends that are not morally required by pure practical reason.² Likewise Kant refers to ‘culture’ as ‘the aptitude and skill for all sorts of ends for which he can use nature (internal and external)’, or as ‘the production of the aptitude of a rational being for any ends in general (thus those of his freedom).’³ Christine Korsgaard characterizes ‘humanity’ as follows. (shrink)