In “On Begging the Systematicity Question,” Wayne Davis criticizes the suggestion of Cummins et al. that the alleged systematicity of thought is not as obvious as is sometimes supposed, and hence not reliable evidence for the language of thought hypothesis. We offer a brief reply.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing’s having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT’s consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical system can be conscious while a physical duplicate of it is not conscious. Thus, by a common and reasonable conception of intrinsicality, IIT’s consciousness (...) is not intrinsic. It is then argued that to avoid the implication that consciousness is not intrinsic, IIT must abandon its Exclusion Postulate, which prohibits overlapping conscious systems. Indeed, theories of consciousness that attribute consciousness to physical systems, should embrace the view that some conscious systems overlap. A discussion of the admittedly counterintuitive nature of this solution, along with some medical and neuroscientific realities that would seem to support it, is included. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a novel difficulty for teleosemantics, viz., its inability to account for what we call unexploited content—content a representation has, but which the system that harbors it is currently unable to exploit. In section two, we give a characterization of teleosemantics. Since our critique does not depend on any special details that distinguish the variations in the literature, the characterization is broad, brief and abstract. In section three, we explain what we mean by unexploited content, and (...) argue that any theory of content adequate to ground representationalist theories in cognitive science must allow for it.1 In section four, we show that teleosemantic theories of the sort we identify in section two cannot accommodate unexploited content, and are therefore unacceptable if intended as attempts to ground representationalist cognitive science. Finally, in section five, we speculate that the existence and importance of unexploited content has likely been obscured by a failure to distinguish representation from indication, and by a tendency to think of representation as reference. (shrink)

In addition to his famous Chinese Room argument, John Searle has posed a more radical problem for views on which minds can be understood as programs. Even his wall, he claims, implements the WordStar program according to the standard definition of implementation because there is some ‘‘pattern of molecule movements’’ that is isomorphic to the formal structure of WordStar. Program implementation, Searle charges, is merely observer-relative and thus not an intrinsic feature of the world. I argue, first, that analogous charges (...) involving other concepts (motion and meaning) lead to consequences no one accepts. Second, I show that Searle’s treatment of computation is incoherent, yielding the consequence that nothing computes anything: even our standard personal computers fail to run any programs on this account. I propose an alternative account, one that accords with the way engineers, programmers, and cognitive scientists use the concept of computation in their empirical work. This alternative interpretation provides the basis of a philosophical analysis of program implementation, one that may yet be suitable for a computational theory of the mind. (shrink)

I argue that if minds supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of things like brains, then typical human brains host many minds at once. Support comes from science-nonfiction realities that, unlike split-brain cases, have received little direct attention from philosophers. One of these realities is that some patients are functioning (albeit impaired) and phenomenally conscious by all medical and commonsense accounts despite the fact that they have undergone a hemispherectomy: an entire brain hemisphere has been fully detached. Another is the (...) Wada test, in which a patient has each hemisphere anesthetized, one after the other, while the other hemisphere is awake and functioning—again, phenomenally conscious by any standard. I will argue that hemispherectomies, Wada tests, and related procedures each present cases in which the minds that exist after the detachment (or anesthetization) of a hemisphere are surviving minds which must be associated with the surviving (or un-anesthetized) hemisphere. I will argue that such surviving minds existed before the medical procedure, instantiated by the then-intact hemisphere that was due to survive the loss of its complementary hemisphere. If so, then the typical subject has at least three minds: a “left hemisphere mind”, a “right hemisphere mind”, and a “whole brain mind”. But the argument generalizes to cases in which smaller portions of the brain are lost, yielding a great number of additional minds, some overlapping. Some important ethical implications are raised and briefly examined. (shrink)

Loss of the Y‐chromosome is a common feature of species with chromosomal sex determination. However, our understanding of why some lineages frequently lose Y‐chromosomes while others do not is limited. The fragile Y hypothesis proposes that in species with chiasmatic meiosis the rate of Y‐chromosome aneuploidy and the size of the recombining region have a negative correlation. The fragile Y hypothesis provides a number of novel insights not possible under traditional models. Specifically, increased rates of Y aneuploidy may impose positive (...) selection for (i) gene movement off the Y; (ii) translocations and fusions which expand the recombining region; and (iii) alternative meiotic segregation mechanisms (achiasmatic or asynaptic). These insights as well as existing evidence for the frequency of Y‐chromosome aneuploidy raise doubt about the prospects for long‐term retention of the human Y‐chromosome despite recent evidence for stable gene content in older non‐recombining regions. (shrink)

A ghost is a supernatural being that is typically described as capable of appearing to, speaking to, and even doing harm to a person. But it is also described as a being that you cannot touch or affect in the usual ways. Lots of things seem weird at first, but humans don't think of them as supernatural. It's easy to see how material things interact with each other. After all, they are, by their very essence as things filling space, things (...) that cannot merge into each other. Descartes' view is not just a philosophical speculation; it is also a scientific hypothesis. Although Descartes' reasons for dualism are based primarily in deep philosophical meditation, his reason for identifying the pineal gland as the seat of the soul is based in his investigation of the human brain where Descartes finds an anatomical explanation for some obvious facts about human perception. (shrink)

The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the (...) thought that John loves Mary can think the thought that Mary loves John, where the latter thought is a systematic variant of the former. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the presence and value of danger in outdoor and adventurous activities and sports in safety-conscious societies, especially in relation to the education of children and youth. Based on an original analysis of the relation between the concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’, we offer an account of the relation between challenge, adventure, risk and danger, and emphasise the importance of teaching risk recognition, risk assessment, risk management and risk avoidance to children and youth, without the necessity of exposing (...) them to jeopardy in dangerous situations. Our conclusion is that ‘Safe Danger’ describes what educators should seek, namely: the educational benefits of the challenges set by risk-taking and the demands of risk-facing, including those in adventurous situations, which are obtainable in the absence of significant danger, and which contribute to risk education. The educational value of adventurous and outdoor pursuits lies elsewhere than in the opportunities that they present for danger-facing, for example in their promotion of self-reliance, confidence, ability to team-work, and especially in their promotion of risk education, as an integral aspect of everyday life planning, as preparation for the day’s adventurous challenges, and as an instrument of task completion. (shrink)

Using Reidenbach and Robin‘s ( Journal of Business Ethics 7, 871–879, 1988) multi-criteria ethics instrument, we carried out the first empirical test of Robertson and Crittenden‘s (Strategic Management Journal 24, 385–392, 2003) cross-cultural map of moral philosophies to examine what ethical criteria guide business people in Russia and the U.S. in their intention to behave. Competing divergence and convergence hypotheses were advanced. Our results support a convergence hypothesis, and reveal a common emphasis on relativism. Americans are also influenced by the (...) justice criterion while Russians tend to emphasize utilitarianism. (shrink)

Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations. Chapter one explores the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey. Chapter two exposits Deweyan ideas of embodiment, the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, and aesthetically expressive meaning underdeveloped in Wittgenstein. Chapter three introduces the method of practical epistemological analysis and a model of situated epistemic relations to investigate the learning of body (...) techniques in dinghy sailing. The concluding chapter introduces a model of situated artistic relations to investigate the learning of artistic techniques of self-expression in the Swedish sloyd classroom. (shrink)

Positive monotone modal logic is the negation- and implication-free fragment of monotone modal logic, i.e., the fragment with connectives and. We axiomatise positive monotone modal logic, give monotone neighbourhood semantics based on posets, and prove soundness and completeness. The latter follows from the main result of this paper: a duality between so-called \-spaces and the algebraic semantics of positive monotone modal logic. The main technical tool is the use of coalgebra.

We consider subintuitionistic logics as an extension of positive propositional logic with a binary modality, interpreted over ordered and unordered monotone neighborhood frames, with a range of frame conditions. This change in perspective allows us to apply tools and techniques from the modal setting to subintuitionistic logics. We provide a Priestley-style duality, and transfer results from the (classical) logic of monotone neighborhood frames to obtain completeness, conservativity, and a finite model property for the basic logic, extended with a number of (...) axioms. (shrink)

Against the background of the Deweyan tradition of Democracy and Education, we discuss problems of complexity and reductionism in education and educational philosophy. First, we investigate some of Dewey’s own criticisms of reductionist tendencies in the educational traditions, theories, and practices of his time. Secondly, we explore some important cases of reductionism in the educational debates of our own day and argue that a similar criticism in behalf of democracy and education is appropriate and can easily be based on Deweyan (...) terms. Thirdly, we draw some more general conclusions about complexity and reductionism as challenges for democracy and education. Among other things, we argue that powerful social tendencies of capitalist competition and social Darwinism support reductionisms in education and put the democratic project at risk. The tensional relation between democracy and capitalism constitutes a major challenge for educational philosophy in our own time as much as in Dewey’s. (shrink)

This paper defends philosophical phenomenology against a hostile review in the previous issue of this journal. It tries to explain what philosophical phenomenology is, and the possibilities for its empirical application; whilst also showing that Eichberg’s method is idiosyncratic, problematic and not interested in philosophical phenomenology at all. It presents the phenomenological concept of phenomenon, which is neither concrete nor abstract, and contrasts it to Eichberg’s understanding of empirical concrete phenomena. Finally, the paper scrutinises Eichberg’s empirical method, which has deep (...) problems of its own, and in any case, finds unsuitable its characterisation as ‘phenomenology’. (shrink)

Re-working the Gramscian idea of the ‘organic’ intellectual from the cultural-political sphere to Higher Education (HE), suggests the need to develop critical and questioning ‘counter hegemonic’ ideas and behaviour in community education students. Connecting this reworking to the Habermasian theory of communicative action, suggests that these students also need to learn how to be constructive in developing such knowledge. Working towards critical and constructive capacities is particularly relevant for students who learn through acting in practice settings where general principles and (...) purposes acquired in the academy need to be interpreted in response to the unique demands of specific situations. From a Gramscian perspective, enabling students to develop the qualities of organic intellectuals means that lecturers have a duty to teach critical knowledges which the student will be unfamiliar with and unlikely to possess. If teaching is not to become simply didactic, however, there is also a need to acknowledge Habermas’s contention that all knowledge is contingent. This does not mean that knowledge is merely relative, subjective, or essentially interest serving, as some postmodernists would have it. In Habermasian terms, knowledge is developed through a rigorous process of contesting validity claims according to procedures appropriate to discipline areas. In these procedures, contestation occurs to the point where there is general agreement about the best current understanding, until such time as this is overtaken by ideas with a better claim. The danger is that over commitment to contestation in the classroom undermines subject knowledge and ultimately the authority of the educator. Speaking Habermas to Gramsci, and vice versa, helps socially and politically committed educators to construct a space in which didactic and discursive moments purposefully alternate. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between farmland investment and environmental uncertainty. It examines how farmland investors seek to “render land investible” in spite of drought, groundwater depletion, and changing regulations. To do so, we analyze a single case study: the purchase of 8000 acres of dry rangeland in California’s Cuyama Valley by the Harvard University endowment for use in creating an irrigated vineyard. Drawing from interviews with Cuyama Valley farmers and community members, participant observation at community meetings, and public document (...) analysis, we make two primary contributions to understandings of uncertain resource materiality in farmland investment. First, this case reveals that investors can turn environmental uncertainty into an advantage, exploiting both the temporal uncertainties associated with resource management under climate change and the spatial uncertainties inherent to all subsurface resources. We argue that the material and legal uncertainties of groundwater access provide investors with a potentially lucrative opening to assert their preferred land imaginaries and improve their property values. In the Cuyama Valley they did so through both participation in groundwater governance and the establishment of water-related infrastructure on their property. Second, this case highlights that the asset-making processes involved in farmland investment may be as much vertical as they are horizontal. The need to map and measure the uncertain vertical dimension of land creates an outsized role for scientific expertise in farmland assetization. (shrink)

Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-orientated view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychology research. Instead of characterising abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and learning that evolve through time and explain what enables progress in them. Four themes are highlighted: variability, mechanisms that create transitions to higher levels of knowledge, interrelations between changes in the short-term scale of microdevelopment and (...) the crucial effect of context. Learning and development are analysed in and out of school, in the individual's activities and through social interaction, in relation to simple and complex problems and in everyday behaviour and novel tasks. With contributions from the foremost researchers in the field Microdevelopment will be essential reading for all interested in cognitive and developmental science. (shrink)

Farmers markets have traditionally served as a space for farmers to sell directly to consumers. Recently, many FMs in the US and other regions have experienced a renaissance. This article compares the different value sets embedded in the rules and norms of two metropolitan FM regions—Minneapolis, Minnesota and in Vienna, Austria. It uses a values-based framework that reflects the relationships among FM operating structures and their values reflected by the key FM participants—i.e., farmer/vendors, consumers and market managers. The framework allows (...) us to focus on two very contrasting value sets of metropolitan FM regions in presenting and discussing the values found and embedded in the two metropolitan market regions; illustrating how the values found are embodied as rules and norms in each FM region; considering the alignment or not of FM participant values with their corresponding FM values; and the differences and commonalities as well as the benefits and challenges of the two market regions. In contrasting metropolitan FMs we explain that FM value sets are complex and differ among and within FM participant groups and are dependent on their respective OS. We show that contrasting two metropolitan FM regions can be useful in understanding beneficial and disadvantageous relationships between the values and structures of, and in FMs, and specifically in examining institutional impediments such as governance. Thus we illustrate the possibilities and limitations of values for and within metropolitan FMs. (shrink)

Game semantics extends the Curry–Howard isomorphism to a three-way correspondence: proofs, programs, strategies. But the universe of strategies goes beyond intuitionistic logics and lambda calculus, to capture stateful programs. In this paper we describe a logical counterpart to this extension, in which proofs denote such strategies. The system is expressive: it contains all of the connectives of Intuitionistic Linear Logic, and first-order quantification. Use of Lairdʼs sequoid operator allows proofs with imperative behaviour to be expressed. Thus, we can embed first-order (...) Intuitionistic Linear Logic into this system, Polarized Linear Logic, and an imperative total programming language.The proof system has a tight connection with a simple game model, where games are forests of plays. Formulas are modelled as games, and proofs as history-sensitive winning strategies. We provide a strong full completeness result with respect to this model: each finitary strategy is the denotation of a unique analytic proof. Infinite strategies correspond to analytic proofs that are infinitely deep. Thus, we can normalise proofs, via the semantics. (shrink)

For medical interventions there is a gap between what clinical scientific research has established as likely to carry clinical benefit and what the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has judged as cost-effective. This gap is the affordability gap. It is created by a value judgement made by NICE and affirmed by the Secretary of State for Health. This value judgement operates to affect other value judgements made in actual clinical situations where at least one choice of treatment falls into (...) the affordability gap. This paper considers how the creation of this affordability gap impacts upon actual clinical decisions. It explores these issues in the context of the choice between a drug-eluting stent and a bare metal stent for elective coronary angioplasty. It also argues that the option of an NHS procedure with a top-up fee to cover the cost of the affordability gap is a genuine one; that this option could improve clinical outcomes; that it is morally acceptable; and that the rules that prevent the utilization of this option should be relaxed. (shrink)

A rich collection of critical essays, authored by philosophers and practicing artists, examining Deleuze and Guattari's engagement with a broad range of art forms.

This is just a brief description of the people involved and activities that occurred during a full-day pre-conference event that included a winery tour, a luncheon, apanel discussion of management systems, and a wine tasting. We completed a facility tour at Gallo’s Frei Ranch Winery that highlighted the environmental performance opportunities that exist for wine production. The rest of the day’s schedule was held at MacMurray Ranch. There was a panel that featured presentations and discussions about Gallo of Sonoma’s sustainability (...) management systems, the Benziger Family Winery’s Biodynamic vineyard practices, and the application of environmental management systems in the wine industry and other industries. (shrink)

This paper raises concerns about the tenor of 21st century interaction by identifying a tendency whereby relatively innocuous, canonically private communication is transformed into public communication deemed offensive enough to attract institutional or legal sanction. To understand examples of this tendency, it applies Goffman’s architecture of interaction to email communication and proposes the notion of situational transformation to encapsulate reframing processes involving footing, face and participation framework. Through these processes (to which, it is shown, the email medium is especially vulnerable) (...) and a discourse of civility, the private becomes public and opposition becomes offence. (shrink)

We explore some aspects of the elusive idea of a "teachable moment" with a special emphasis on the role of emotion, intuition, and imagination as well as intuition, paradox and possibility. The teachable moment occurs when students and teachers genuinely share an interest in better understanding something, some situation, or, in the case discussed, some text, and wish to inquire into the object of mutual concern together. Some of the aesthetic elements of John Dewey's theory of inquiry serve as a (...) way to gain insight into the "logic" of creating and sustaining teachable moments. (shrink)

We concentrate on four questions among the many posed by this special collection of papers on Pragmatism and the Hispanic world. They are, first, what took pragmatism beyond the borders of the United States and into the Hispanic world? Next, what are the ideas of Dewey that have had the greatest impact on Hispanic culture? Third, what are the past and present obstacles that has kept the Hispanic world from using pragmatism to deal with many of their educational and social (...) problems? Finally, why does pragmatism still hold great promise and potential for the Hispanic world? (shrink)

The Australian Health Ethics Committee’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (1999) expanded the health and medical focus of preceding statements by including all disciplines of research. The Statement purports to promote a uniformly high ethical standard for this expanded range of research, and is endorsed by, inter alia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.High ethical standards should apply to all research involving humans. However, (...) uniformity in the review processes of disparate research endeavours is not a necessary condition for uniformly high ethical standards. Bringing the ethical review of all research under a model which has developed within the context of health and medical research ethics for over thirty years may be inappropriate and at times incoherent. The language, methods, nature and products of research in areas such as the Humanities are often very different from those of health, medical and other sciences.The Behavioural and Social Sciences Ethics Review Committee at The University of Queensland (UQ) had, since the mid-1980s, considered that the guidelines of the time did, in fact, cover all aspects of human experimentation. We describe the ways in which this position was implemented, how issues raised by the new wording in the National Statement have been recently managed by UQ’s research ethics committees, and point to outstanding questions. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)