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126239.499542
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.
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126255.499688
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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126335.499705
For many years any mention of consciousness in the context of quantum physics was generally restricted to those popular accounts that might be found on the ‘New Age’ or ‘Spiritual’ bookshelves. Certainly, in ‘mainstream’ philosophy of physics, the concept was regarded as de nitely non grata, following Putnam’s ([1961]) and Shimony’s ([1963]) famous set of critiques of the ‘consciousness causes collapse’ solution to the measurement problem in the early 1960s. Recently, however, consciousness has begun to tiptoe back into the limelight, as both explanans and explanandum. Here Shan Gao has collected seventeen contributions from prominent philosophers and physicists (including one Nobel Prize winner), which o er a disparate set of accounts of the role it might play. Following a helpful introductory orientation, these essays are grouped into three sections: ‘Consciousness and Wave Function Collapse’, ‘Consciousness in Quantum Theories’, and ‘Quantum Approaches to Consciousness’, although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness in the placement of some of the papers both within and between these divisions.
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126352.499714
Khalidi favours a mildly revisionist outlook within a non-essentialist yet realist framework—we won’t wholly abandon many concepts inherited from folk psychology, for example. He also a rms a form of nonreductionism about human cognitive kinds in which a distinction in individuation practices explains and justi es many-to-many structure–function mappings: cognitive kinds are externalistically individuated, while neural kinds are not (or ‘not usually’; p. 22, note 13). But the main purpose of the book is to put Khalidi’s causal-nexus account of natural kinds to work in cognitive science as it revises its ontology, in response to neuroscience or whatever else. In what follows I hope to convey my overall assessment that Khalidi’s book is informative, challenging, and awed in philosophically interesting ways.
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126369.499721
Baxter, J. [2023]: ‘Kolja Ehrenstein’s Causal Pluralism in the Life Sciences’, BJPS Review of Books, 2023 The last century of philosophical work has seen a proliferation of competing causal theories: regularity theory, probabilistic causality, counterfactual analyses, interventionism, process theory. It’s common to nd authors expressing the attitude that there is no single, universal theory of causation. Yet, these authors often mean di erent things by the term ‘pluralism’. With this book, Ehrenstein aims to achieve greater clarity and rigor concerning claims of causal pluralism in the philosophy of science literature. Ehrenstein is sceptical of numerous claims of pluralism about causality in the life sciences. He argues that some causal distinctions, such as Mayr’s ultimate and proximate cause, are inherently incoherent and do not amount to a meaningful pluralism. Other claims to pluralism, such as Elliot Sober and Stuart Glennan’s analyses of causal relevance and causal production, are not helpful in resolving the disputes they were purported to address. Still other proposed causal concepts, notably the concepts of permissive and instructive causes, are not genuine cases of causal pluralism.
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126406.499729
Heyes returns us to arguments about the nature and extent of heritable specialization (henceforth, domain speci city) in the cognitive phenotype synthesized in the 1990s by Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 9–16). Evolutionary Psychology integrates evidence about developmental canalization, selective de cits and dissociations, neural localization, inheritance, encapsulation of so-called system 1 from system 2 processes, learning theory, and evolutionary modelling, and argues that domain speci city is the result of genetic evolution. Of course, domain speci city associated with any or all of these ‘markers’ does not entail genetic evolution. However, Evolutionary Psychology links these considerations to the poverty of stimulus argument for innateness to provide an inference to the best explanation that genetic evolution explains domain speci city.
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645435.499742
Whether one realises it or not, chemistry is everywhere. What we eat; the drugs that cure our diseases; the detergents that we use to clean our clothes and houses, to climate change; the discovery of life in distant planets; understanding brain activity; and, photosynthesis- for everything, the study of chemistry is not just relevant but vital.
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775132.499749
Fabian Hundertmark, Bielefeld University
Jakob Roloff, Justus-Liebig-University Gießen
Francesca Bellazzi, University of Oslo, ERC Project Assembling Life (no.101089326)
1. Introduction
In the target post, Dong and Piccinini criticize SE and propose a new goal-contribution account of functions (GCA) (also in Maley, Piccinini 2017; Piccinini, 2020). …
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924409.499756
In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions—predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc.—intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou, and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this talk, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: (i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; (ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.
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942707.499762
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. …
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1453327.499767
The application of Noether’s theorem to the exact SU(3) color symmetry of quantum chromodynamics results in the conservation of the color charge current. This current takes values in SU(3)’s Lie algebra, and it is therefore eight-dimensional. But how can this eight-dimensional space be the right mathematical object for the conservation of the three color charges red, blue, and green and their three corresponding anti-colors? We might have expected a six-dimensional space, or perhaps a nine-dimensional one, but eight is surprising. This paper answers this question through explicit construction of the SU(3) adjoint representation from the two fundamental representations of SU(3). This construction generates principled reasons for interpreting elements of the SU(3) Lie algebra as bearing combinations of color and anti-color. In light of this construction, this paper contrasts mathematical and conceptual features of color charge conservation with electric charge conservation, thereby highlighting some of the challenges and subtleties of interpreting non-Abelian gauge theories.
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1511088.499773
Imagine huge bats roaring in the clear sky, all swooping and screeching and diving around you. As you’re imagining this scene, you have now an experience of something, you are in an intentional state. Your intentional state is one of imagining, rather than one of perceiving or remembering. If you want to gure out what kind of intentional state you’re having, you don’t have to make any inference or to focus on the content of your experience. Your experience of huge bats roaring around you seems to incorporate a pre-re ective sense of the kind of intentional state you’re having.
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1511169.49978
The New Mechanical Philosophy is Stuart Glennan’s most comprehensive treatment of the philosophical worldview he championed well before his audacious title had a recognizable referent. Subsequently, philosophical interest in mechanisms and mechanistic explanation has exploded, in part through Glennan’s e orts, and his knowledgeable and charitable condensation of that literature should be essential reading for would-be mechanists and critics.
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1511280.499787
The debate over whether, and to what extent, psychological explanations can be considered to be ‘autonomous’ is an old one, dating back at least to the 1970s. This new volume, edited by David Kaplan, promises not only to reinvigorate that debate, but also to refocus it, by shifting the emphasis away from an abstract dichotomy between autonomy and reduction, and towards analyses of speci c explanatory practices in the mind and brain sciences. This allows for a more nuanced approach, where di erent levels of explanation are neither wholly autonomous nor entirely integrated, but rather exercise mutual constraints upon one another. Each of the contributors to the volume engages with this theme in some way, either by presenting a particular case study (Strevens, Kaplan, and Aizawa), considering speci c ways in which di erent levels of explanation might constrain one another (Woodward, Egan, and Shagrir and Bechtel), or exploring the implications of a non-reductive approach to theoretical integration (Roth and Cummins, Weiskopf, Murphy, Maley, and Piccinini). This is not to say that there is complete agreement amongst the authors. For example, Weiskopf defends the explanatory autonomy of cognitive models, Egan argues for the autonomy of function-theoretic models, and Aizawa considers examples of multiply realizable (and thus partially autonomous) kinds in the science of colour vision. Even in these latter cases though, the tone is generally conciliatory—every chapter of this volume makes an e ort to move the debate forward rather than simply re-treading old ground, and it is perhaps most valuable for the questions it leaves unanswered, providing invitations for future debate and discussion.
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1511363.499795
Research on the nature and varieties of the format of cognitive representations in philosophy and cognitive science have been partly shaped by analogies to external, public representations. In this paper, we argue that relying on such analogies contributes to framing the question of cognitive formats in problematic, potentially counterproductive ways. We show that cognitive and public representations differ in many of their central features, making analogies to public representations ill-suited to improving our understanding of cognitive formats. We illustrate these points by examining two case studies in which analogies to public representations may have had a negative impact on research: the 80’s-90’s debate about compositionality and cognitive architecture between symbolicists and connectionists; and contemporary discussions about the nature of visual demonstratives. Finally, we outline an alternative, computational account of formats that does not share the shortcomings of appeal to public representations.
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1511392.499802
In the 20th century, the distinction between instinct and learning motivated international debates that reshaped the disciplinary landscape of animal behavior studies. When the dust settled, a new consensus emerged: the development of behavioral traits involves complex interactions between organism, genetic inheritance, and experience with the environment. This insight has spurred some philosophers and scientists to eschew instinct versus learning dichotomies—and instinct concepts in particular—on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I reassess influential 20th century arguments against instinct concepts and instinct vs. learning dichotomies to show that these arguments have limited scope. Then, I use historical case studies to demonstrate the combinatorial flexibility of instinct and learning concepts. Although instinct and learning are often framed as mutually exclusive opposites, scientists continue to combine them in causal physiological accounts of behavior. I conclude by suggesting that instinct concepts help scientists achieve their epistemic aims because of the way they facilitate abductive inferences.
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1511427.499808
Though well established in mammals, the cognitive map hypothesis has engendered a decades-long, ongoing debate in insect navigation studies involving many of the field's most prominent researchers. In this paper, I situate the debate within the broader context of 20th century animal behavior research and argue that the debate persists because competing research groups are guided by different constellations of epistemic aims, theoretical commitments, preferred animal subjects, and investigative practices. The expanded history of the cognitive map provided in this paper shows that more is at stake in the cognitive map debate than the truth value of propositions characterizing insect cognition. What is at stake is the future direction of an extraordinarily productive tradition of insect navigation research stretching back to Karl von Frisch. Disciplinary labels like ethology, comparative psychology, and behaviorism became less relevant at the turn of the 21st century, but as I show, the different ways of knowing animals associated with these disciplines continue to motivate debates about animal cognition. This examination of scienti fic disagreement surrounding the cognitive map hypothesis also has significant consequences for philosophers' use of cognitive map research as a case study.
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1799859.499814
Other Minds emphasizes Godfrey-Smith’s rst-hand experience observing and interacting with cephalopods, especially octopuses and cuttle sh. For the general reader this rst-hand experience establishes his expertise, and also allows him a certain kind of intimacy with his subject that invites the reader on his journey. That journey also provides the book with a narrative thread, from his initial encounter with octopuses, into his growing fascination with them, and then on to his study and theorizing about the inner lives of cephalopods. For philosophers and cognitive scientists, this same narrative intimacy will immediately raise red ags. Has Godfrey-Smith turned into one of those animal minds kooks (or pet owners) whose evident a ection for their subjects robs them of critical distance? ‘The plural of anecdote is not data’, some will say.
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1799886.499821
The bourgeoning literature on the various aspects of models and modelling has recently spawned book-length studies that also aim to function as introductions to philosophical discussion of modelling (for example, Bailer- Jones [2003]; Morgan [2012]; Weisberg [2013]). Axel Gelfert’s How to Do Science with Models: A Philosophical Primer ts squarely into this group. Like its predecessors, it is much more than a philosophical primer, presenting an original contribution to our understanding of scienti c modelling. In particular, Gelfert pays close attention to the plurality of functions of models and their contexts of application, also highlighting the importance of their construction: ‘what models are is crucially determined by their being the result of a deliberate process of model construction’ (p. 20). Accordingly, Gelfert studies several models at length, in order to identify some ‘middle range’ features and strategies that, although not universal, may nevertheless characterize some recurring patterns in the usage of models across disciplines.
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1857759.499828
In this paper we argue that object perception may be affected by what we call “perceptual frames.” Perceptual frames are adaptations of the perceptual system that guide how perceptual objects are singled out from a sensory environment. These adaptations are caused by perceptual learning and realized through bottom-up functional processes such that sensory information is organized in a subject-dependent way leading to idiosyncratic perceptual object representations. Through domain-specific training, perceptual learning, and the acquisition of object-knowledge, it is possible to modulate the adaptive perceptual system such that its ability to represent becomes bespoke. Different perceivers with different perceptual frames may, therefore, receive the same sensory information and perceive different perceptual objects due to the effects of framing. Consequently, we demonstrate the plausibility of this account by surveying empirical data concerning the functions of (1) multisensory integration, (2) amodal completion, and (3) predictive anticipation. Regarding (1), we argue that the perceptual system’s optimization processes employ perceptual frames to facilitate multisensory feature binding. Regarding (2), we argue that amodal completion can occur with or without the help of mental imagery, yet either instance of amodal completion requires perceptual frames. Regarding (3), we demonstrate that perceptually anticipating an object’s motion involves the implementation of perceptual frames. We conclude that framing effects are a matter of perceptual diversity and highlight the need to accommodate unique perspectives in the philosophy and science of perception.
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1857892.499835
Gualtiero Piccinini’s Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account develops a systematic theory of computing systems. On display throughout are virtues familiar from Piccinini’s previous writings on the topic: an admirably straightforward writing style; a synoptic perspective on computation’s varied aspects, as studied within logic, computer science, arti cial intelligence, cognitive science, engineering, neuroscience, and physics; extensive knowledge of computing practice; and a gift for conveying that knowledge in accessible, non-technical terms.
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1857942.499842
I have a vivid memory from my undergraduate degree in psychology: a short video, no longer than ve seconds long, showing the characteristic ‘pinwheel’ activation of orientation-sensitive cells in the primary visual cortex. These cells (clumped into ‘columns’) respond di erentially to the orientation of light in the visual eld. In the video I watched, this responsiveness was rendered in dramatic fashion: responding to a clockwise rotating stimuli, the activation pattern of the cells rotated in near perfect synchrony.
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1857967.499848
Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher’s edited volume, Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry boasts a variety of insightful perspectives on the application of philosophy of science to issues of chemical interest and the application of chemistry to broader debates in philosophy of science. The division of the collection’s sixteen essays into their respective sections is occasionally puzzling, and in a few cases a potential for scholarly dialogue between essays is diminished as a result. So, while there are standout contributions in each section, which are discussed in more detail below, the whole does not transcend the sum of its parts.
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1858095.499855
Multiple realization is rather casually thought by many scientists and philosophers to be the saving grace of scienti c autonomy. How else should we make sense of the nature of abstract and seemingly non-reducible items such as depression, preferences, and institutions? More generally, multiple realizability is sometimes understood to be a mandatory commitment if we want to defend the integrity and realism of a particular non-fundamental science—not least, cognitive science and psychology. Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro are in fact psychological ‘realists’ (p. 184), but have long been multiple realization ‘skeptics’ (p. 135). In their highly valuable The Multiple Realization Book, they maintain that reduction is no threat to psychological realism and critically scrutinize the case for multiple realization.
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2008791.499867
Music can have extrinsic and/or intrinsic meaning. The former is relevant in the case of program music. The latter conforms to pure (absolute) music, i.e. music that can be understood without reference to extrinsic sources. Taking the intrinsic content of music as basic, we must ask about its nature. I propose to identify it with aesthetic emotion. As tonal music is organized by series of chords relative to the context of a tonal scale, the question is how music forms can be mapped onto aesthetic emotions. I propose to ground the analysis on a two-dimensional space of emotions, where one dimension refers to arousal (activity) and the other dimension refers to valence. Relating valence with consonance and arousal with entropic uncertainty leads to an account which directly relates structural and probabilistic aspects of tonal music with its affective content. The present bare-bone semantics of pure music proposes an explicit modeling of the affective response based on an algebraic meaning conception.
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2027750.499873
Some learning strategies that work well when computational considerations are abstracted away from become severely limiting when such considerations are taken into account. We illustrate this phenomenon for agents who attempt to extrapolate patterns in binary data streams chosen from among a countable family of possibilities. If computational constraints are ignored, then two strategies that will always work are learning by enumeration (enumerate the possibilities—in order of simplicity, say—then search for the one earliest in the ordering that agrees with your data and use it to predict the next data point) and Bayesian learning. But there are many types of computable data streams that, although they can be successfully extrapolated by computable agents, cannot be handled by any computable learner by enumeration. And while there is a sense in which Bayesian learning is a fully general strategy for computable learners, the ability to mimic powerful learners comes at a price for Bayesians: they cannot, in general, become highly confident of their predictions in the limit of large data sets and they cannot, in general, use priors that incorporate all relevant background knowledge.
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2031096.499882
Consciousness We Trust o ers a characteristically original and opinionated treatment of the eld. Unusually for a book by a neuroscientist, it draws on and engages extensively with contemporary philosophy. Unusually for an academic monograph, it is a striking admixture of memoir and manifesto. The result is both appealing and accessible. It will be of wide interest to neuroscientists, philosophers, sociologists of science, and simply curious outsiders.
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2031259.499893
This compendium is a ne collection of essays exploring the role of tools in the theory and practice of neuroscience. The book is divided in to ve sections: ‘Research Tools in Relation to Theories’, ‘Research Tools and Epistemology’, ‘Research Tools, Integration, Circuits, and Ontology’, ‘Tools and Integrative Pluralism’, and ‘Tool Use and Development beyond Neuroscience’.
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2031340.4999
This event might strike you as perplexing, but it motivates questions lying at the core of the computational sciences. For example, what does it mean to say that a system like LaMDA computes but a system like the Apennine Mountains does not? Do nervous systems compute? If they do, in virtue of what do they compute? Do they compute in the same way as LaMDA does? And what is the relationship between computing and having a conscious mind?
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2118831.49991
It is well known that Kant distinguishes between two kinds of self-consciousness: transcendental apperception and empirical apperception (or, approximately, inner sense). However, Kant sometimes claims that “I think,” the general expression of transcendental apperception, expresses an indeterminate empirical inner intuition (IEI), which differs in crucial ways from the empirical inner intuition produced by inner sense. Such claims undermine Kant’s conceptual framework and constitute a recalcitrant obstacle to understanding his theory of self-consciousness. This paper analyzes the relevant passages, evaluates the major interpretations of IEI, revisits the notion of pure apperception, and proposes an alternative reading: IEI is a ubiquitous, nonfocal, “obscure,” and empirical inner intuition that is built into all nonintrospective conscious states. This reading can successfully account for the peculiarities of IEI, resolving a major mystery in Kant’s theory of self-consciousness.