Jerry Fodor has argued that the multiple realizability argument, as discussed in his original “Special Sciences” article, “refutes psychophysical reductionism once and for all.” I argue that his argument in “Special Sciences” does no such thing. Furthermore, if one endorses the physicalism that most supporters of the “Special Sciences” view endorse, special science laws must be reducible, in principle. The compatibility of MR with reduction, however, need not threaten the autonomy of the special sciences.

The starting-point of this paper is one of the most disastrous pieces of advocacy in modern legal history. In October 1960, Penguin Books were prosecuted under Section 2 of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for publishing an unexpurgated edition ofLady Chatterley's Lover.On the first day of the trial, Mr. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Senior Treasury Counsel, did his best to wreck his case on the strength of one remark. He had previously tried to show that he was himself a man of the (...) world: ‘Let me emphasize this on behalf of the prosecution: do not approach this matter in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct, mid-Victorian manner’. He now proceeded to work this out in practice: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?’. (shrink)

The multiple realizability thesis (MRT) is an important philosophical and psychological concept. It says any mental state can be constructed by multiple realizability (MR), meaning in many distinct ways from different physical parts. The goal of our study is to find if the MRT applies to the mental state of consciousness among animals. Many things have been written about MRT but the ones most applicable to animal consciousness are by Shapiro in a 2004 book called The Mind Incarnate and by (...) Polger and Shapiro in their 2016 work, The Multiple Realization Book. Standard, classical MRT has been around since 1967 and it says that a mental state can havevery manydifferent physical realizations, in a nearly unlimited manner. To the contrary, Shapiro’s book reasoned that physical, physiological, and historical constraints force mental traits to evolve in just a few, limited directions, which is seen as convergent evolution of the associated neural traits in different animal lineages. This is his mental constraint thesis (MCT). We examined the evolution of consciousness in animals and found that it arose independently in just three animal clades—vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod mollusks—all of which share many consciousness-associated traits: elaborate sensory organs and brains, high capacity for memory, directed mobility, etc. These three constrained, convergently evolved routes to consciousness fit Shapiro’s original MCT. More recently, Polger and Shapiro’s book presented much the same thesis but changed its name from MCT to a “modest identity thesis.” Furthermore, they argued against almost all the classically offered instances of MR in animal evolution, especially against the evidence of neural plasticity and the differently expanded cerebrums of mammals and birds. In contrast, we argue that some of these classical examples of MR are indeed valid and that Shapiro’s original MCT correction of MRT is the better account of the evolution of consciousness in animal clades. And we still agree that constraints and convergence refute the standard, nearly unconstrained, MRT. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding (...) to arguments for fatalism, can account for the utility of total knowledge of the future, and can help in providing an account of the semantics of the English progressive. On the view developed, the future is mutable in the following sense: perhaps, once, it was true that you would never come to read a paper defending the mutability of the future. And then the future changed. And now you will. (shrink)

Teleological accounts of sensory normativity treat normal functioning for a species as a standard: sensory error involves departure from normal functioning for the species, i.e. sensory malfunction. Straightforward reflection on sensory trade-offs reveals that normal functioning for a species can exhibit failures of accuracy. Acknowledging these failures of accuracy is central to understanding the adaptations of a species. To make room for these errors we have to go beyond the teleological framework and invoke the notion of an ideal observer from (...) vision science. The notion of an ideal observer also sheds light on the important distinction between sensory malfunction and sensory limitation. (shrink)

As Christians, we are called to think about the fundamental values that shape and guide our economic behavior and the economic structures of our society. This article focuses on the ways in which the problem of predatory lending, or usury, allows us to examine our most basic Christian values and principles and think about how they might serve as a moral foundation for reshaping our economic structures and transactions.

This Introduction has three sections, on "logical fatalism," "theological fatalism," and the problem of future contingents, respectively. In the first two sections, we focus on the crucial idea of "dependence" and the role it plays it fatalistic arguments. Arguably, the primary response to the problems of logical and theological fatalism invokes the claim that the relevant past truths or divine beliefs depend on what we do, and therefore needn't be held fixed when evaluating what we can do. We call the (...) sort of dependence needed for this response to be successful "dependence with a capital 'd'": Dependence. We consider different accounts of Dependence, especially the account implicit in the so-called "Ockhamist" response to the fatalistic arguments. Finally, we present the problem of future contingents: what could "ground" truths about the undetermined future? On the other hand, how could all such propositions fail to be true? (shrink)

This short communication explores the idea of “stream of consciousness” and considers some of the ways in which scientific writing relies – even or perhaps especially insofar as it does not signal this fact – on the resources of literary language and literary thinking. Particular attention is given to notions of literal and figurative or metaphorical language, including “hydrological” and “ontic” metaphor. A crucial figure is simile (the “like”), discussed here in relation to the Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like (...) to Be a Bat?”, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt’s Consciousness Demystified, and Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Neuroethics cannot restrict itself to the domain of technology and the human. The deconstruction of anthropocentrism, already underway in literary modernism, calls for responsibility in relation to non-human as well as human life-forms. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway provides rich and multifarious resources for exploring these issues. Woolf’s novel is considered as a kind of literary water music, in which sense and feeling is not limited to the human, and distinctions between consciousness and the environment are susceptible to dissolution. Woolf’s work is concerned with a conception of stream of consciousness as telepathic fluidity, as “merging minds” but without restitution of the individual or collective. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this book is to present some of the key economic concepts that have guided economic thinking in the last century and to identify which of these concepts will continue to direct economic thought in the coming decades. This book is written in an accessible manner and is intended for a wide audience with little or no formal training in economics. It should also interest economists who want to reflect on the direction of the discipline and to (...) learn concepts and achievements in other subfields. The author imparts his enthusiasm for the economic way of reasoning and its wide applicability. Through the abundant use of illustrations and examples, the author makes concepts understandable and relevant. Topics covered include game theory, the new institutional economics, market failures, asymmetric information, endogenous growth theory, general equilibrium, rational expectations, and others. (shrink)

In a recent number Mr. O. J. Todd has discussed the clumsy scansion of a line in a Delphic oracle, and has called fresh attention to the problem of the Pythia's prophesyings in verse. The chief difficulty consists in the differences between the indications on this subject as given by our various sources. The conventional phrases in most authors from Pindar and Herodotus until late periods describe the responses as uttered by the Pythia herself. This picture seems to imply (...) that the Pythia originated the verse form of the oracle. But this view would take no account of the existence of the official known as the προφήτης whose business was evidently to deliver the response to the inquirer. (shrink)

While theories of rationality and decision making typically adopt either a single-powertool perspective or a bag-of-tricks mentality, the research program of ecological rationality bridges these with a theoretically-driven account of when different heuristic decision mechanisms will work well. Here we described two ways to study how heuristics match their ecological setting: The bottom-up approach starts with psychologically plausible building blocks that are combined to create simple heuristics that fit specific environments. The top-down approach starts from the statistical problem facing the (...) organism and a set of principles, such as the bias– variance tradeoff, that can explain when and why heuristics work in uncertain environments, and then shows how effective heuristics can be built by biasing and simplifying more complex models. We conclude with challenges these approaches face in developing a psychologically realistic perspective on human rationality. (shrink)

Todd and Rabern (2021) mount an argument that – contra both Thomason’s (1970) supervaluationism and MacFarlane’s (2014) relativism – an “open future” view is incompatible with the principle they call “Retro-closure”, according to which today’s rain implies that yesterday it was true that it would rain a day later. In a recent piece, MacFarlane replies. This paper has two aims. First, I argue that MacFarlane’s response to Todd and Rabern is unsuccessful on its own terms. Second, I attempt (...) to clarify Todd and Rabern’s overall argument, and explain how MacFarlane’s replies should be construed within the overall dialectic. The intended result: if you want an "open future", then one's best option is a modified Peirceanism (Todd 2021); if one wants Retro-closure, one's best option is one on which there is a determinate "Thin Red Line" (a view sometimes called "Ockhamism"). However, one cannot have what supervaluationism and relativism both promise, viz., a view that preserves both. (shrink)

Self-regulation refers to the self's ability to control its own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Through self-regulation, we consciously control how much we eat, whether we give in to impulse, task performance, obsessive thoughts, and even the extent to which we allow ourselves recognition of our emotions. This work provides a synthesis and overview of recent and long-standing research findings of what is known of the successes and failures of self-regulation. People the world over suffer from the inability to control their (...) finances, their weight, their emotions, their craving for drugs, their sexual impulses, and more. The United States in particular is regarded by some observers as a society addicted to addiction. Therapy and support groups have proliferated not only for alcoholics and drug abusers but for all kinds of impulse control, from gambling to eating chocolate. Common to all of these disorders is a failure of self-regulation, otherwise known as "self-control." The consequences of these self-control problems go beyond individuals to affect family members and society at large. In Losing Control, the authors provide a single reference source with comprehensive information on general patterns of self-regulation failure across contexts, research findings on specific self-control disorders, and commentary on the clinical and social aspects of self-regulation failure. Self-control is discussed in relation to what the "self" is, and the cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors that impinge on one's ability to control one's "self." Discusses the importance of the concept of self-regulation to general issues of autonomy and identity Encompasses self-control of thoughts, feelings, and actions Contains a special section on the control of impulses and appetites First book to integrate recent research into a broad overview of the area. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. (...) This subversion of academia — disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy — is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Erik. J. Olsson, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 15 Candice Lyons Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space In the fall of 1867—just two years after the conclusion of the American Civil War—former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, finding herself in dire financial straits, traveled incognito to New York. She hoped to sell select pieces from her famed wardrobe (...) in order to supplement her income, which was, at the time, rather meager. Accompanying the recently widowed socialite was her self-described “modiste” and “confidante ” Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved African American dressmaker who had been “intimately associated” with Lincoln for years.1 Despite the various measures undertaken to ensure the scheme’s success, including attempts to extort monied East Coast Republicans and strategic appeals to the press, it ultimately proved fruitless. Political nemeses seized on the opportunity to publicly mock Lincoln, who was seen as an “extravagant and improper” social climber, for her “pecuniary embarrassment,” treating the public auction of her clothing as a spectacle akin to the World Fair.2 Eventually, the former First Lady was forced to retreat to her home in Chicago, leaving Keckley behind to tend to her affairs. 1. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015): Location no. 406, 54, 53. 2. Carolyn Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath,” African American Review 34 (2000): 20; Keckley, Behind the Scenes, Location no. 1321. 16 Candice Lyons This decision, however, left the ordinarily sought-after seamstress in dire straits of her own, given that the time she was compelled to dedicate to what would come to be known as “The Old Clothes Scandal ” necessitated closing down her then-thriving business in Washington, DC.3 This, coupled with the fact that indemnification for her services was not forthcoming from Mrs. Lincoln, was likely at least partially at the root of Keckley’s decision to publish her now-infamous memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years A Slave and Four Years in the White House in 1868.4 Keckley explained that she penned her autobiographical text in a bid to “defend [her]self” and Lincoln against charges of impropriety following the New York incident. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the book’s release had the exact opposite effect: Keckley’s literary disclosures were met with scorn, regarded by large swaths of white Americans, including some of the same people who had been most vocal in their condemnation of Mary Todd Lincoln, as constituting a set of socially impermissible transgressions of class, race, and gender. Sales of the book were subsequently suppressed, Keckley’s relationship with Lincoln (who had been caught off guard by the text’s release) came to an abrupt end, and there was even a brief, parodic pamphlet produced, titled Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis, which cast the entire ordeal as a sort of (racist) cautionary tale.5 Given the clear disdain held for Lincoln by people across the political spectrum at the time, it can be difficult to make sense of the visceral reaction prompted by Keckley’s airing of the controversial figure’s dirty laundry (pun intended). Considering the ways Behind the Scenes implicitly challenged the fixity of hierarchical distinctions between Black and white, employee and employer, however, repudiation of the work might be understood as inevitable. Further, given the “intimate” and ambiguous nature of Lincoln and Keckley’s relationship, the book may also 3. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. 4. The text’s infamy is in part attributable to its anomalous structure, which rendered it distinct from many of the era’s other book-length slave narratives ; whereas monographs such as Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl centered on the author’s experience of and eventual escape from slavery, Keckley’s work deals only briefly with these matters, primarily concerning itself with the intimate affairs of the author’s (white) employer. 5. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. Candice... (shrink)

We analyze the logical form of the domain knowledge that grounds analogical inferences and generalizations from a single instance. The form of the assumptions which justify analogies is given schematically as the "determination rule", so called because it expresses the relation of one set of variables determining the values of another set. The determination relation is a logical generalization of the different types of dependency relations defined in database theory. Specifically, we define determination as a relation between schemata of first (...) order logic that have two kinds of free variables: (1) object variables and (2) what we call "polar" variables, which hold the place of truth values. Determination rules facilitate sound rule inference and valid conclusions projected by analogy from single instances, without implying what the conclusion should be prior to an inspection of the instance. They also provide a way to specify what information is sufficiently relevant to decide a question, prior to knowledge of the answer to the question. (shrink)

This paper explores issues that arise between Adorno and Marcuse over the potentials and implications of Freudian theory. These concern whether it is possible to expound a non-repressive relationship between what Freud calls the life and death drives, on the one hand, and the ego, on the other, that does not collapse into abstract utopianism or clear heteronomy. After detailing the theory of instincts and ego formation that early critical theory draws from Freud, I argue that neither Adorno nor Marcuse (...) is successful in articulating the possibility of such a non-repressive form of subjectivity: Adorno produces a powerful conception of freedom as non-reductive, communicative reconciliation between ego and instinctual nature, but remains committed to a Freudian conception of the interplay between elements of the psyche that makes it difficult to see how reconciliation could be actualized therein. Marcuse, on the other hand, develops a conception of liberation that largely abandons the ideal of ego autonomy by rendering the ego a spectator to the unfurling of instinctual impulses. In the concluding section, I argue that a more judicious evaluation of the death drive’s contribution to critical thought could clear space for a rapprochement between Adorno and Marcuse, and a more successful incorporation of Freud into critical theory. (shrink)

Canadian capitalism has entered a period of intensified volatility. Rooted in persistent profitability problems, it is facing several challenges, including economic stagnation, a household-debt driven real-estate and construction boom, and an increasingly fragile financial system. Drawing on a classical Marxist framework of capitalist crisis, this article explores the dynamics of instability in Canada and the response of the capitalist state, which centres on increased efforts to export oil and gas to China, thereby deepening conflict with Indigenous land defenders, and a (...) redoubling of the assault on workers to increase the rate of exploitation. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Professor Goodman was correct in thinking that there is a problem concerning counterfactual conditionals, but that it is somewhat different from the problem he thought it to be, and is one that is even more basic. I will also try to show that this problem is distinct from Hume's "problem" of induction, and that additional assumptions have to be made for counterfactual induction beyond those required for other kinds of induction.

Sound propagation within certain non-relativistic condensed matter models obeys a relativistic wave equation despite such systems admitting entirely non-relativistic descriptions. A natural question that arises upon consideration of this is, “do devices exist that will experience the relativity in these systems?” We describe a thought experiment in which ‘acoustic observers’ possess devices called sound clocks that can be connected to form chains. Careful investigation shows that appropriately constructed chains of stationary and moving sound clocks are perceived by observers on the (...) other chain as undergoing the relativistic phenomena of length contraction and time dilation by the Lorentz factor, \, with \ the speed of sound. Sound clocks within moving chains actually tick less frequently than stationary ones and must be separated by a shorter distance than when stationary to satisfy simultaneity conditions. Stationary sound clocks appear to be length contracted and time dilated to moving observers due to their misunderstanding of their own state of motion with respect to the laboratory. Observers restricted to using sound clocks describe a universe kinematically consistent with the theory of special relativity, despite the preferred frame of their universe in the laboratory. Such devices show promise in further probing analogue relativity models, for example in investigating phenomena that require careful consideration of the proper time elapsed for observers. (shrink)

We examine the impact of a unilateral carbon tax in developed countries, focusing on the expected size of carbon leakage and the effects on leakage of border tax adjustments. We start by analyzing the problem using a simple two-country, three-good general equilibrium model to develop intuitions. We then simulate the expected size of the effects using a new, open-source, computable general equilibrium model. We analyze the extent of emissions reductions from a carbon tax in countries that made commitments under the (...) Kyoto Protocol, the expected carbon leakage, and the effects of border tax adjustments on carbon leakage, all relative to our baseline projections for emissions. We also perform extensive sensitivity tests on the parameters of the CGE model. Finally, we consider the effects of imperfect border tax adjustments on leakage, such as global or regional schedules of border taxes. (shrink)

To understand the possible forms of extraterrestrial intelligence, we need not only astrobiology theories about how life evolves given habitable planets, but also evolutionary psychology theories about how intelligence emerges given life. Wherever intelligent organisms evolve, they are likely to face similar behavioral challenges in their physical and social worlds. The cognitive mechanisms that arise to meet these challenges may then be copied, repurposed, and shaped by further evolutionary selection to deal with more abstract, higher-level cognitive tasks such as conceptual (...) reasoning, symbolic communication, and technological innovation, while retaining traces of the earlier adaptations for solving physical and social problems. These traces of evolutionary pathways may be leveraged to gain insight into the likely cognitive processes of ETIs. We demonstrate such analysis in the domain of search strategies and show its application in the domains of emotional aversions and social/sexual signaling. Knowing the likely evolutionary pathways to intelligence will help us to better search for and process any alien signals from the search for ETIs and to assess the likely benefits, costs, and risks of humans actively messaging ETIs. (shrink)

Human life history is unique among primates, most notably the extraordinary length of infant dependency and the formation of long-term pair-bonds. Men and women are motivated to remain pair-bonded to maintain the distribution of male-provisioned resources to a woman and her offspring, or to protect offspring from infanticide. Men and women can employ several strategies to retain their mate and prevent their partner from defecting from the relationship, including individual mate retention (behaviors performed alone) and coalitional mate retention (behaviors performed (...) by a close ally). The current research investigates whether men and women with children perform more frequent mate retention behaviors than men and women without children. Participants (n = 1003) currently in a heterosexual romantic relationship completed a survey, reporting whether they had genetic children with their current romantic partner and how frequently they performed various mate retention behaviors. The results indicate that men (n = 262) and women (n = 234) who share genetic children with their current partner performed more frequent individual mate retention behaviors and requested more frequent coalitional mate retention behaviors than men (n = 280) and women (n = 227) who do not share genetic children with their current partner. The results are interpreted as they relate to hypotheses concerning the evolution of pair-bonding in humans, and mate retention behaviors more generally. Limitations of the current research are discussed, and profitable avenues for future research in this domain are suggested. (shrink)

Phillips & Silverstein argue that a range of cognitive disturbances in schizophrenia result from a deficit in cognitive coordination attributable to NMDA receptor dysfunction. We suggest that the viability of this hypothesis would be further supported by explicit implementation in a computational framework that can produce quantitative estimates of the behavior of both healthy individuals and individuals with schizophrenia.

Blair proposes that fluid intelligence, working memory, and executive function form a unitary construct: fluid cognition. Recently, our group has utilized a combined correlational–experimental cognitive neuroscience approach, which we argue is beneficial for investigating relationships among these individual differences in terms of neural mechanisms underlying them. Our data do not completely support Blair's strong position. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Schmitt recognized that research is needed to identify other factors associated with sex ratio and with sociosexuality that may explain cross-cultural variation in sexual behavior. One such factor may be the risk of sperm competition. Sperm competition theory may lead us to a more complete explanation of cultural variation in sexual behavior.