In this article, I discuss the concepts of social position and social status, the types of social position, as well as the determinedness of social statuses by the given positions in a new approach. In the first, introductory part of the article, I emphasize that the institutional sociological conception of social position in my approach is relatively closest to the structuralist position conception. In the second part, I introduce two different concepts, labelled social position and social status, and briefly review (...) the social determinedness of social status. In the third part, social positions are typified from the point of view of the two components of social position: on the one hand, from that of social power relations and on the other from that of interest relations. I point out that the different social positions promote the realization of interests to different degrees, that is, they make it possible to attain different social statuses. In a related article, I illustrate the concepts and connections in question with a case study carried out on an industrial shop floor. (shrink)

On the dust jacket of The Subject's Point of View there is a detail from Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Sitting Woman. It is hard to think of a painter who better captures the inner in his work. From the monochrome colour, to the back that faces us, to the door swung open to reveal yet another doorway, we are led to interiority – to the inner. This is a perfect image for a book whose author wants to persuade us to (...) return to the interior – a Cartesian interior.The Cartesian interior has come in for quite a drubbing in philosophy for some considerable time. In the mid-to-late 1970s, a style of argument emerged, designed to challenge this conception of mind and establish in its place an externalist conception of language and of mind. One version of the argument was due to Hilary Putnam and emerged in the context of considerations concerning linguistic meaning; another was due to Tyler Burge and emerged first in the context of considerations concerning the individual in relation to his/her social environment. In his earliest paper, on this topic, Burge wrote of ‘the elderly Cartesian tradition’ where ‘the spotlight is on what exists or transpires “in” the individual – his secret cognition, his innate cognitive structures, his private perceptions and introspections, his grasping of ideas, concepts or forms’. Farkas wants to defend this ‘elderly tradition’, but she does add to it some interesting twists. First and foremost, she places to one side ideas of privacy, of incorrigibility and infallibility. She also wishes to place the issue of dualism to one side. What Farkas concentrates on is privileged access and argues that this is …. (shrink)

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

The notion of specificity in linguistics is notoriously non-specific. We consider here various distinctions within the realm of noun phrase semantics that are relevant to specificity. The common thread uniting these distinctions is the notion of variation in value assignments for the variable introduced by the noun phrase. The distinctions concern the nature of the variation involved. The first part of the paper (Section 2) is devoted to the definite/indefinite divide and proposes a dynamic parameter of 'determinacy of reference' which (...) attempts to capture what is common to uniqueness and.. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality : the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors external to the subject. (...) We may ask whether this concession to content externalism is obligatory. In this paper, I shall argue that it isn’t. I shall suggest that if one is convinced that narrow phenomenal intentionality is legitimate, there is nothing stopping one from claiming that all intentionality is narrow. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that besides knowledge of facts or truths, there is also knowledge of things–for example, we say that we know people or know places. We could call this "objectual knowledge". In this paper, I raise doubts about the idea that there is a sui generis objectual knowledge that is distinct from knowledge of truths.

Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

It is an integral part of the phenomenology of mature perceptual experience that it seems to present to us an experience-independent world. I shall call this feature 'perceptual intentionality'. In this paper, I argue that perceptual intentionality is constructed by the structure of more basic sensory features, features that are not intentional themselves. This theory can explain why the same sensory feature can figure both in presentational and non-presentational experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the intentionality of sensory experiences (...) and the intentionality of thoughts: unlike the former, the latter is not constructed. (shrink)

The central and paradigmatic cases of knowledge discussed in philosophy involve the possession of truth. Is there in addition a distinct type of practical knowledge, which does not aim at the truth? This question is often approached through asking whether states attributed by “know-how” locutions are distinct from states attributed by “know-that”. This paper argues that the question of practical knowledge can be raised not only about some cases of “know-how” attributions, but also about some cases of so-called “know-wh” attributions; (...) and that certain features of this practical knowledge-wh put pressure on the standard analysis of know-wh. (shrink)

Hallucinations occur in a wide range of organic and psychological disorders, as well as in a small percentage of the normal population According to usual definitions in psychology and psychiatry, hallucinations are sensory experiences which present things that are not there, but are nonetheless accompanied by a powerful sense of reality. As Richard Bentall puts it, “the illusion of reality ... is the sine qua non of all hallucinatory experiences” (Bentall 1990: 82). The aim of this paper is to find (...) out what lends an experience ‘a sense of reality’: what features are required for an experience to feel ‘real’, in the relevant sense? I will investigate the claim that phenomenological features are largely responsible for a sense of reality, and will find this claim wanting. My suggestion is that a sense of reality is created and sustained by the larger nexus of the subject's beliefs. (shrink)

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have received in the literature, characterizing what is common to all of them and what is specific to each is still an elusive task. This paper investigates the first three determiners in this list, (...) attempting to provide a semantic characterization that accounts for their distribution. (For pertinent discussion of issues that overlap to some extent with those taken up below, see Kamp and Bende-Farkas 2002, and for a discussion of the French versions of some and a certain, see Jayez and Tovena (this volume).) The Ds that concern us here share two characteristics: (i) they are indefinite, and (ii) they are existential when not in the scope of any operator or quantifier. As seen in [1], they may occur as pivots in existential there constructions, and therefore all three form weak DPs. (shrink)

The content of the externalist thesis about the mind depends crucially on how we define the distinction between the internal and the external. According to the usual understanding, the boundary between the internal and the external is the skull or the skin of the subject. In this paper I argue that the usual understanding is inadequate, and that only the new understanding of the external/internal distinction I suggest helps us to understand the issue of the compatibility of externalism and privileged (...) access. (shrink)

According to the Extended Mind thesis, the mind extends beyond the skull or the skin: mental processes can constitutively include external devices, like a computer or a notebook. The Extended Mind thesis has drawn both support and criticism. However, most discussions—including those by its original defenders, Andy Clark and David Chalmers—fail to distinguish between two very different interpretations of this thesis. The first version claims that the physical basis of mental features can be located spatially outside the body. Once we (...) accept that the mind depends on physical events to some extent, this thesis, though not obvious, is compatible with a large variety of views on the mind. The second version applies to standing states only, and has to do with how we conceive the nature of such states. This second version is much more interesting, because it points to a potential tension in our conception of minds or selves. However, without properly distinguishing between the two theses, the significance of the second is obscured by the comparative triviality of the first. (shrink)

Most discussions in epistemology assume that believing that p is a necessary condition for knowing that p. In this paper, I will present some considerations that put this view into doubt. The candidate cases for knowledge without belief are the kind of cases that are usually used to argue for the so-called ‘extended mind’ thesis.

Abstract: This paper introduces and analyses the doctrine of externalism about semantic content; discusses the Twin Earth argument for externalism and the assumptions behind it, and examines the question of whether externalism about content is compatible with a privileged knowledge of meanings and mental contents.

Abstract: How exactly should the relation between a veridical perception and a corresponding hallucination be understood? I argue that the epistemic notion of ‘indiscriminability’, understood as lacking evidence for the distinctness of things, is not suitable for defining this relation. Instead, we should say that a hallucination and a veridical perception involve the same phenomenal properties. This has further consequences for attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of phenomenal properties in terms of indiscriminability, and for considerations (...) about the phenomenal sorites. (shrink)

In the extensive literature on the semantics of noun phrases, the most commonly encountered paramters of classification concern the semantic type of their denotation, the distinction between familiarity and novelty, meant primarily to differentiate definites from indefinites, the strong/weak distinction, or that between quantificational and non−quantificational noun phrases, as well as, most recently, that between choice−functional and non−choice−functional DPs (Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999).

One of the main driving forces in the era of cyber-physical systems is the introduction of massive sensor networks into manufacturing processes, connected cars, precision agriculture, and so on. Therefore, large amounts of sensor data have to be ingested at the server side in order to generate and make the “twin digital model” or virtual factory of the existing physical processes for predictive simulation and scheduling purposes usable. In this paper, we focus on our ultimate goal, a novel software container-based (...) approach with cloud agnostic orchestration facilities that enable the system operators in the industry to create and manage scalable, virtual IT platforms on-demand for these two typical major pillars of CPS: server-side framework for sensor networks and configurable simulation tool for predicting the behavior of manufacturing systems. The paper discusses the scalability of the applied discrete-event simulation tool and the layered back-end framework starting from simple virtual machine-level to sophisticated multilevel autoscaling use case scenario. The presented achievements and evaluations leverage on the synergy of the existing EasySim simulator, our new CQueue software container manager, the continuously developed Occopus cloud orchestrator tool, and the latest version of the evolving MiCADO framework for integrating such tools into a unified platform. (shrink)

On a Cartesian conception of the mind, I could be a solitary being and still have the same mental states as I currently have. This paper asks how the lives of other people fit into this conception. I investigate the second-person perspective—thinking of others as ‘you’ while engaging in reciprocal communicative interactions with them—and argue that it is neither epistemically nor metaphysically distinctive. I also argue that the Cartesian picture explains why other people are special: because they matter not just (...) for the effect that they have on us. (shrink)

1 The notion of specicity has played a signicant role in linguistic theory both in the elds of semantics and, increasingly, in work on syntax/semantics interface., Abbott, Kripke, Fodor and Sag, Higginbotham and Enc among many others; see also Pesetsky, Szabolcsi and Zwarts, Diesing, Dobrovie- Sorin, E. Kiss, Mahajan, and Chung for work where specicity is discussed in connection with syntactic matters.) Specicity is interesting for the student of semantics because it is crucially relevant to establishing varieties of reference. For (...) the syntactician, the notion of specicity comes up when attempting to account for the use of various case markers on DOs in languages as diverse as Romanian, Turkish, and Hindi, or when attempting to account for the full spectrum of judgments concerning weak island violations and the interpretation of multiple wh-questions. The rst point I will argue for is that there are several distinct notions of specicity that should be kept apart. More specically, I will argue that there are at least three. The discussion inevitably leads to Fodor and Sag's ambiguity claim, which in turn leads to the issue of the possible scopes of indenite noun phrases versus the possible scope of quanticational noun phrases. Section 3 will establish the relevant empirical generalizations concerning simple indenites and distributives, and Section 4 captures them within a non-congurational theory of scope proposed in Farkas and Farkas. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of whether know-how can be regarded as a form of non-propositional intentionality.

We investigate ideals of the form {A⊆ω: Σn∈Axnis unconditionally convergent} where n∈ωis a sequence in a Polish group or in a Banach space. If an ideal onωcan be seen in this form for some sequence inX, then we say that it is representable inX.After numerous examples we show the following theorems: An ideal is representable in a Polish Abelian group iff it is an analytic P-ideal. An ideal is representable in a Banach space iff it is a nonpathological analytic P-ideal.We (...) focus on the family of ideals representable inc0. We characterize this property via the defining sequence of measures. We prove that the trace of the null ideal, Farah’s ideal, and Tsirelson ideals are not representable inc0, and that a tallFσP-ideal is representable inc0iff it is a summable ideal. Also, we provide an example of a peculiar ideal which is representable inℓ1but not in ℝ.Finally, we summarize some open problems of this topic. (shrink)

The focus of the original argument for the Extended Mind thesis was the case of beliefs. It may be asked what other types of mental features can be extended. Andy Clark has always held that consciousness cannot be extended. This paper revisits the question of extending consciousness.

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide (...) quantifiers, the semantics of which crucially involves relations between sets of entities. We provide empirical arguments that this insight should not be captured by adding choice/Skolem functions to classical first-order logic, but in a semantics that follows Independence-Friendly Logic, in which scopal relations involving existentials are part of the recursive definition of truth and satisfaction. These scopal relations are resolved automatically as part of the interpretation of existentials. Additional support for this approach is provided by dependent indefinites, a cross-linguistically common class of special indefinites that can be straightforwardly analyzed in our semantic framework. (shrink)

The paper rst lays out a non-congurational approach to scope ambiguities in which scope dependencies are treated as dependencies between evaluation indices of variables. The notions of dependent and domain variables are dened naturally in this framework. These concepts are then used to account for the distribution and interpretation of determiner reduplication in Hungarian, a phenomenon that has not received much attention so far.1 1. Introduction This paper contributes to the study of the semantics of indenites in natural language by (...) introducing on the scene a new type of indenite, called dependent. We meet it in Hungarian, where one may reduplicate certain determiners, as illustrated in [1]-[3]. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the issue of the explanatory gap that is supposed to open when considering identity statements between physical and mental phenomena. I show that the question asked in the original formulation of the explanatory gap was this: ʻwhy this phenomenal character, rather than any other, is attached to this physiological process?ʼ I argue that this question can be answered, because there is a natural fit between the phenomenal character of experiences and their functional roles. For example, (...) pains feel inherently unpleasant, and that explains why they cause avoidance behaviour, and the felt location and intensity of pain indicates the location and extent of damage to the body. I discuss some other possible gaps in our understanding the relationship between the mental and the physical, and conclude that the fit between functional role and phenomenal character goes a long way, though probably not the whole way, to closing the explanatory gap. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish between conscious mental episodes and standing mental states — those mental features like beliefs, desires or intentions, which a subject can have even if she is not conscious, or when her consciousness is occupied with something else. This paper presents a view of standing mental states according to which these states are less real than episodes of consciousness. It starts from the usual view that states like beliefs and desires are not directly present to the (...) mind, but are posited to explain thought and behaviour. Ascriptions of these states are attempts to model a subject’s “Worldview”: the totality of their cognitive, conative and affective dispositions. When ascribing standing states, we often significantly simplify the complexity of the Worldview. This simplification is a feature of models in general. The Worldview is also distinguished from the “Habitus” — the totality of dispositions that are associated with character traits. As with the Worldview, modelling the Habitus should be treated as a useful simplification of a very complex reality. It is argued that although these models have some similarities with fictions, these similarities are outweighed by the dissimilarities. (shrink)

We investigate which filters onωcan contain towers, that is, a modulo finite descending sequence without any pseudointersection. We prove the following results:Many classical examples of nice tall filters contain no towers.It is consistent that tall analytic P-filters contain towers of arbitrary regular height.It is consistent that all towers generate nonmeager filters, in particular Borel filters do not contain towers.The statement “Every ultrafilter contains towers.” is independent of ZFC.Furthermore, we study many possible logical implications between the existence of towers in filters, (...) inequalities between cardinal invariants of filters $,${\rm{co}}{{\rm{f}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$,${\rm{no}}{{\rm{n}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$, and${\rm{co}}{{\rm{v}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$), and the existence of Luzin type families, that is, if${\cal F}$is a filter then${\cal X} \subseteq {[\omega ]^\omega }$is an${\cal F}$-Luzin family if$\left\{ {X \in {\cal X}:|X \setminus F| = \omega } \right\}$is countable for every$F \in {\cal F}$. (shrink)

The aim of this series is to make exploratory work that employs new linguistic data, extending the scope or domain of current theoretical proposals, available to a wide audience. These monographs will provide an insightful generalization..

The subject of mental processes or mental states is usually assumed to be an individual, and hence the boundaries of mental features – in a strict or metaphorical sense – are naturally regarded as reaching no further than the boundaries of the individual. This chapter addresses various philosophical developments in the 20th and 21st century that questioned this natural assumption. I will frame this discussion by fi rst presenting a historically infl uential commitment to the individualistic nature of the mental (...) in Descartes’ theory. I identify various elements in the Cartesian conception of the mind that were subsequently criticized and rejected by various externalist theories, advocates of the extended mind hypothesis and defenders of embodied cognition. Then I will indicate the main trends in these critiques. (shrink)

Since the onset of the digital revolution, humankind has experienced an unprecedented acceleration of changes triggered by technological advancements. Frequently used digital media have unquestionably penetrated our everyday life, shaping human cognition in multiple ways. The rise of artificial intelligence, which coevolved with a new, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, has amplified these effects, contributing new ways of affecting human society, in terms of efficient human-machine interaction and knowledge generation and accumulation, at an exponential rate. Simultaneously, cultural shifts driven by (...) globalization and social media have fostered new modes of communication, identity formation, and knowledge dissemination on a global scale. Understanding the intricate dynamics of techno-cultural evolution and its influence on cognition is essential for comprehending the contemporary society and preparing it for the future challenges. We need to adapt for the current and future information environments and digital landscapes, improving human resilience to new technologies and addressing core human vulnerabilities. Thanks to human flexibility, enabled by neural plasticity, that may be feasible, ideally combined with alleviation of known negative effects of digital technologies. (shrink)

We study cardinal invariants connected to certain classical orderings on the family of ideals on ω. We give topological and analytic characterizations of these invariants using the idealized version of Fréchet-Urysohn property and, in a special case, using sequential properties of the space of finitely-supported probability measures with the weak* topology. We investigate consistency of some inequalities between these invariants and classical ones, and other related combinatorial questions. At last, we discuss maximality properties of almost disjoint families related to certain (...) ordering on ideals. (shrink)

It is usual to distinguish between two kinds of doxastic attitude: standing or dispositional states, which govern our actions and persist throughout changes in consciousness; and conscious episodes of acknowledging the truth of a proposition. What is the relationship between these two kinds of attitude? Normally, the conscious episodes are in harmony with the underlying dispositions, but sometimes they come apart and we act in a way that is contrary to our explicit conscious judgements. Philosophers have often tried to explain (...) these situations in largely doxastic terms, by identifying one or other of the attitudes as our ‘real’ beliefs. This chapter argues that this is not generally realistic and we should appeal to a wider range of psychological attitudes. Such an account would be best supported by a picture of the unconscious mind which does not sharply separate the doxastic from the conative and the affective. (shrink)

We study the following natural strong variant of destroying Borel ideals: $\mathbb {P}$ $+$ -destroys $\mathcal {I}$ if $\mathbb {P}$ adds an $\mathcal {I}$ -positive set which has finite intersection with every $A\in \mathcal {I}\cap V$. Also, we discuss the associated variants $$ \begin{align*} \mathrm{non}^*(\mathcal{I},+)=&\min\big\{|\mathcal{Y}|:\mathcal{Y}\subseteq\mathcal{I}^+,\; \forall\;A\in\mathcal{I}\;\exists\;Y\in\mathcal{Y}\;|A\cap Y| \omega $ ; (4) we characterise when the Laver–Prikry, $\mathbb {L}(\mathcal {I}^*)$ -generic real $+$ -destroys $\mathcal {I}$, and in the case of P-ideals, when exactly $\mathbb {L}(\mathcal {I}^*)$ $+$ -destroys $\mathcal {I}$ ; (...) and (5) we briefly discuss an even stronger form of destroying ideals closely related to the additivity of the null ideal. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis research examines how fake identities on social media create and sustain antagonistic and racist discourses. It does so by analysing 11 Danish Facebook pages, disguised as Muslim extremists living in Denmark, conspiring to kill and rape Danish citizens. It explores how anonymous content producers utilise Facebook’s socio-technical characteristics to construct, what we propose to term as, platformed antagonism. This term refers to socio-technical and discursive practices that produce new modes of antagonistic relations on social media platforms. Through a discourse-theoretical (...) analysis of posts, images, ‘about’ sections and user comments on the studied Facebook pages, the article highlights how antagonism between ethno-cultural identities is produced on social media through fictitious social media accounts, prompting thousands of user reactions. These findings enhance our current understanding of how antagonism and racism are constructed and amplified within social media environments. (shrink)