Southern Journal of Philosophy 

About: Southern Journal of Philosophy is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Contemporary philosophy & Analytic philosophy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0038-4283. Over the lifetime, 1765 publications have been published receiving 12013 citations. The journal is also known as: The Southern journal of philosophy.

The constituent structure of connectionist mental states: a reply to fodor and pylyshyn

Abstract: The primary purpose of this article is to reply to the central point of (1988) critique of connectionism. The direct reply to their critique comprises Section 2 of this paper. In short, I argue that Fodor and Pylyshyn are simply mistaken in their claim that connectionist mental states lack the necessary constituent structure, and that the basis of this mistake is a failure to appreciate the significance of distributed representations in connectionist models. Section 3 is a broader response to the bottom line of their critique, which is that connectionists should re-orient their work towards implementation of the classical symbolic cognitive architecture. I argue instead that connectionist research should develop new formalizations of the fundamental computational notions that have been given one particular formal shape in the traditional symbolic paradigm.

Groupthink versus The Wisdom of Crowds: The Social Epistemology of Deliberation and Dissent

Abstract: Trust in the practice of rational deliberation is widespread and largely unquestioned. This paper uses recent work from business contexts to challenge the view that rational deliberation in a group improves decisions. Pressure to reach consensus can, in fact, lead to phenomena such as groupthink and to suppression of relevant data. Aggregation of individual decisions, rather than deliberation to a consensus, surprisingly, can produce better decisions than those of either group deliberation or individual expert judgment. I argue that dissent is epistemically valuable, not because of the discussion it can provoke (Mill's and Longino's view about the benefit of dissent), but because dissenting positions often are associated with particular data or insights that would be lost in consensus formation. Social epistemologists can usefully pay attention to various methods of aggregation of individual opinion for their effectiveness at realizing epistemic goals.

Will the real empathy please stand up? a case for a narrow conceptualization

Abstract: A longstanding problem with the study of empathy is the lack of a clear and agreed upon definition. A trend in the recent literature is to respond to this problem by advancing a broad and all-encompassing view of empathy that applies to myriad processes ranging from mimicry and imitation to high-level perspective taking. I argue that this response takes us in the wrong direction and that what we need in order to better understand empathy is a narrower conceptualization, not a broader one. I propose that empathy be conceptualized as a complex, imaginative process through which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other differentiation. I defend my view through an examination of three processes: emotional contagion, a process of self-oriented perspective taking that I call “pseudo-empathy,” and empathy proper. Drawing on recent findings in social neuroscience, I highlight the differences among these processes and discuss conceptual, empirical, and normative reasons for keeping them theoretically and conceptually distinct.