Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, as when people say "Admittedly I did X, but I wasn't conscious of it." It is argued that "unconscious" varieties of mental states, processes, or events---even perception---can be analyzed entirely in terms of the possession, exercise, acquiring, or loss, of dispositions, whereas conscious mental states involve the same dispositional items, temporally conjoined with at least one of a variety of appropriate experiences. The "temporal conjunction" (...) relationship between behavior and "appropriate" experiences turns out to be much looser than recent causal or functional theories of mental concepts have allowed; the views of e.g., David Armstrong and Daniel Dennett are critically discussed. (shrink)

"This book constitutes the proceedings of the 1994 European Workshop on Logics in Artificial Intelligence, held at York, UK in September 1994. The 24 papers presented were selected from a total of 79 submissions; in addition there are two abstracts of invited talks and one full paper of the invited presentation by Georg Gottlob. The papers point out that, with the depth and maturity of formalisms and methodologies available in AI today, logics provide a formal basis for the study of (...) the whole field of AI. The volume offers sections on nonmonotonic reasoning, automated reasoning, logic programming, knowledge representation, and belief revision."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE. (shrink)

In dealing with excerpts from Terence in the Servian Commentary on Virgil I deferred consideration of the material found only in the enlarged Commentary, on the ground that, if any difference of quality or character should appear in this material, it must be kept distinct from the work of Servius.

Human pain experience and expression evolved to serve a range of social functions, including warning others, eliciting care, and influencing interpersonal relationships, as well as to protect from physical danger. Study of the relatively specific, involuntary, and salient facial display of pain permits examination of these roles, extending our appreciation of pain beyond the prevalent narrow focus on somatosensory mechanisms.

Supported decision-making has been promoted at a policy level and within international human rights treaties as a way of ensuring that people with disabilities enjoy the right to legal capacity on an equal basis with others. However, little is known about the practical issues associated with implementing supported decision-making, particularly in the context of dementia. This study aimed to understand the experiences of people with dementia and their family members with respect to decision-making and their views on supported decision-making. Thirty-six (...) interviews were undertaken with fifty-seven participants across three states in Australia. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used as the methodological approach, with relational autonomy as a theoretical perspective. We identified two overarching themes relating to participants’ experiences with decision-making: “the person in relationship over time” and “maintaining involvement.” Participant views on the practical issues associated with supported decision-making are addressed under the themes of “facilitating decision-making,” “supported decision-making arrangements,” “constraints on decision-making,” and “safeguarding decision-making.” While participants endorsed the principles of supported decision-making as part of their overarching strategy of “maintaining involvement” in decision-making, they recognized that progressive cognitive impairment meant that there was an inevitable transition toward greater involvement of, and reliance upon, others in decision-making. Social and contextual “constraints on decision-making” also impacted on the ability of people with dementia to maintain involvement. These themes inform our proposal for a “spectrum approach” to decision-making involvement among people living with dementia, along with recommendations for policy and practice to assist in the implementation of supported decision-making within this population. (shrink)

Although there is a long-standing international debate concerning the privatization and corporatization of health services, there has been relatively little systematic analysis of the ways these types of reform manifest. We examine the impact of privatization and corporatization on public hospitals, and in particular on hospitals’ autonomy and accountability, with two aims: to uncover the key themes in the literature, and to consider implementation issues. The review of 2,319 articles was conducted using content analysis and a discussion of selected key (...) issues. Several major themes appear in the privatization and corporatization literature, including their use as tools in health systems reform, and the role of governments in sponsoring the processes. We show that much of the underlying argument is ideological rather than evidence based. Those who promote versions of privatization or corporatization claim that decreased government involvement in the management of hospitals leads inter alia to benefits such as greater efficiency, better quality services, and increased choice for patients. Those who argue against say that increased privatization leads to deleterious outcomes such as decreased equity, compromised efficiency and poorer quality of care. The evidence is often weak and at times conflicting. Privatization and corporatization are difficult to implement, and at best produce mixed results, and their impact seems to depend more on the motivation of the evaluator than the standard of the results. These debates are of a type that is to a large extent only resolvable ideologically. (shrink)

Leibniz's conceptual containment theory says that singular propositions of the form a is F are true when the complete concept of being a contains the concept of being F. In this paper, I provide a new semantics for first-order logic built around this idea. The semantics resolves longstanding problems for Leibniz's theory and can represent, without possible worlds, both hyperintensional distinctions among properties and a certain kind of presumably impossible situation that standard approaches cannot represent. The semantics also captures the (...) strong soundness and completeness of classical first-order logic. (shrink)

This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...) available to the classical theist for dealing with the challenge of Platonism. It probes in detail the diverse views on the reality of abstract objects and their compatibility with classical theism. It contains a most thorough discussion, rooted in careful exegesis, of the biblical and patristic basis of the doctrine of divine aseity. Finally, it challenges the influential Quinean metaontological theses concerning the way in which we make ontological commitments. (shrink)

The superfunctionality claim is that phenomenal experiences are more than functional (objective, causal) relations. This is one of the most widely used but least attacked claims in the anti-physicalist literature on consciousness. Coupled with one form of structuralism, the view that science only explains functional relations, the superfunctionality claim entails that science will not explain phenomenal experience. The claim is therefore essential to many anti-physicalist arguments. I identify an open question argument for the superfunctionality claim that expresses an intuition deserving (...) of explanation. Using the experience of fear as an example, I show that this intuition cannot distinguish between whether conscious experiences are more than functional relations, or whether instead they are just very complex (including, constituted by very complex functional relations). I give reasons to suspect that the latter is more likely the case. This renders physicalism safe from the superfunctionality claim. This also provides a challenge to the proponents of the superfunctionality claim: they should explain why paradigmatically mysterious phenomenal experiences are correlated with extensive and complex physical correlates. (shrink)

It might be objected to penal substitutionary theories that punishing Christ could not possibly meet the demands of divine retributive justice. For punishing another person for my crimes would not serve to remove my guilt. The Anglo-American system of justice, in fact, does countenance and even endorse cases in which a substitute satisfies the demands of retributive justice. Moreover, Christ’s being divinely and voluntarily appointed to act not merely as our substitute but as our representative enables him to serve as (...) our proxy before God, so that when he is punished, we are punished, to the satisfaction of divine justice. (shrink)

In this post the author defends a pathology based approach to the philosophy of mind.

I will consider what literature might add to moral thought and understanding as distinct from moral philosophy as it is commonly understood. My argument turns on a distinction between two conceptions of moral thought. One in which the point of moral thought is that it should issue in moral judgement leading to action; the other in which it is concerned also with what Iris Murdoch calls ‘the texture of a man’s being or the nature of his personal vision’. Drawing on (...) this second conception and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, I argue that the question ‘what ought I to do?’ can itself distort moral understanding—that this question may undermine the connection between understanding human life and living a human life. I then argue that insofar as literature is concerned with what is possible within a human life, it has a distinct contribution to make to moral thought, in particular to our reflections on the nature of moral thought itself. (shrink)

The implementation of sustainable development goals forces the leaders of organizations to develop cognitive and behavioural capacities to manage the resulting complexity. These abilities can be associated with authentic leadership. Reflective approaches are recognized as showing promise for developing this type of leadership. However, they are rarely used in the context of university training. This article compares two learning approaches that target leadership development in master’s level students. It emerges that experiential learning through collaborative action games would help to develop (...) certain components of authentic leadership more than coaching. (shrink)