Showing papers in "The Philosophical Review in 2001"

Conceptual analysis and reductive explanation

Abstract: Is conceptual analysis required for reductive explanation? If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, does reductive explanation of the phenomenal fail? We say yes (Chalmers 1996; Jackson 1994, 1998). Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker say no (Block and Stalnaker 1999). A number of issues can be distinguished: (1) Is there an a priori entailment from microphysical truths to ordinary macroscopic truths? (2) If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, does reductive explanation of the phenomenal fail? (3) If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, is physicalism about the phenomenal false? (4) Is there an a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths? We hold that the first three questions should be answered positively (with some qualifications to be outlined). Block and Stalnaker hold that the first three questions should be answered negatively. Their central strategy is to argue for a negative answer to the first question, and to use this conclusion to argue for a negative answer to the second and third questions. They argue that truths about water and about life, for example, are not entailed a priori by microphysical truths, but that this is no bar to the reductive explanation and physical constitution of water and of life. In this paper, we will address Block and Stalnaker's arguments for a negative answer to the first three questions, while remaining neutral on the fourth. We will proceed by first giving an independent defense of a positive answer to the first question. This makes the ensuing reply to Block and Stalnaker more straightforward, and also makes the discussion accessible to those unfamiliar with the literature.

A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger

Abstract: Beginning with a confrontation in 1929 in Switzerland, Michael Friedman examines how the work of three pivotal philosophers evolved and intertwined over several years, ultimately giving rise to two very different schools of thought -- analytic philosophy and continental. The author explores the clashes that set them apart as they developed their own radical new ideas.

The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds

Abstract: 1. A Brief Introduction 2. The Standard Formulation of Quantum Mechanics 3. The Theory of the Universal Wave Function 4. The Bare Theory and Determinate Experience 5. Selecting a Branch 6. Many Worlds 7. Many Minds 8. Many Histories 9. The Determinate-Experience Problem Appendices References Index

What's within? Nativism Reconsidered

Abstract: This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind rather than acquired Fiona Cowie argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different-and probably inconsistent-theses about the mind Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into our brains at birth This "faculties hypothesis" finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky Cowie, marshaling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a crisp and timely critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition Also in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible of scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious Cowie addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process Cowie challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues convincingly that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable What's Within? is a clear and provocative achievement in the study of the human mind

The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time

Abstract: 1. The Possibility of Metaphysics 2. Objects and Identity 3. Identity and Unity 4. Time and Persistence 5. Persistence and Substance 6. Substance and Dependence 7. Primitive Substances 8. Categories and Kinds 9. Matter and Form 10. Abstract Entities 11. Facts and the World 12. The Puzzle of Existence Bibliography Index

A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith

Abstract: PrefaceAbbreviationsCh 1Introduction3Pt IThe Nature of Judgment21Ch 2Aesthetic Judgment23Ch 3Moral Judgment32Ch 4Judgment and Freedom64Pt IIThe Politics of Judgment89Ch 5Proper Pleasures91Ch 6The Wealth of Nations (I): Judgment120Ch 7The Wealth of Nations (II): Virtue and Independence140Ch 8The Wealth of Nations (III): Helping the Poor161Ch 9Kant's Politics, Rawls's Politics (I): The Public Use of Judgment184Ch 10Kant's Politics, Rawls's Politics (II): Talent, Industry, and Luck215Pt IIIThe Freedom of Judgment241Ch 11A Third Concept of Liberty243Notes279Index329

Problems from kant

Abstract: This rigorous examination of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason provides a comprehensive analysis of the major metaphysical and epistemological questions of Kant's most famous work. Author James Van Cleve presents clear and detailed discussions of Kant's positions and arguments on these themes, as well as critical assessments of Kant's reasoning and conclusions. Expansive in its scope, Van Cleves study covers the overall structure of Kant's idealism, the existence and nature of synthetic a priori knowledge, the epistemology of geometry, and the ontological status of space, time, and matter. Other topics explored are the role of synthesis and the categories in making experience and objects of experience possible, the concepts of substance and causation, issues surrounding Kant's notion of the thing in itself, the nature of the thinking self, and the arguments of rational theology. A concluding chapter discusses the affinities between Kant's idealism and contemporary antirealism, in particular the work of Putnam and Dummett. Unlike some interpreters, Van Cleve takes Kant's professed idealism seriously, finding it at work in his solutions to many problems. He offers a critique in Kant's own sense-a critical examination leading to both negative and positive verdicts. While finding little to endorse in some parts of Kant's system that have won contemporary favor (for example, the deduction of the categories) Van Cleve defends other aspects of Kant's thought that are commonly impugned (for instance, the existence of synthetic a priori truths and things in themselves). This vital study makes a significant contribution to the literature, while at the same time making Kant's work accessible to serious students.

Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight?

Abstract: Introduction How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engage- ments with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea (which I shall call the Assumption of Experience-Based Control) is hos- tage to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale (1995) argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the online guidance of visuo- motor action, on the other. This "dual visual systems" hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experi- ence-Based Control. More importantly, it provides (I shall argue) fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the func- tional role of conscious visual experience.

Real realism the galilean strategy

Abstract: This essay aims to disentangle various types of anti-realism, and to disarm the considerations that are deployed to support them. I distinguish empiricist versions of anti-realism from constructivist versions, and, within each of these, semantic arguments from epistemological arguments. The centerpiece of my defense of a modest version of realism – real realism – is the thought that there are resources within our ordinary ways of talking about and knowing about everyday objects that enable us to extend our claims to unobservable entities. This strategy, the Galilean strategy, is explained using the historical example of the telescope.

Conceptual role semantics for moral terms

Abstract: One of the central questions of metaethics is semantical. An answer to this semantical question would be an account of the meaning of moral statements. There are three main approaches to this semantical question that are most familiar in contemporary metaethics: (i) noncognitivism or expressivism, (ii) noncircular conceptual analysis, and (iii) the causal theory of reference. In this paper, I shall present a new approach to this question, an approach that I call "conceptual role semantics for moral terms." In conclusion, I shall try to indicate briefly why my approach is preferable to those three more familiar alternatives. First, however, I shall say something about this semantical question, and why it matters to the rest of metaethics.

The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition

Abstract: Introduction 1 Heidegger on Modern Philosophy and the Transcendental Subject 2 Kant: Subjectivity and Apperception 3 Husserl: Subjectivity and Intentionality 4 The Self in the Transcendental Tradition 5 Conclusion: The Paradox of Subjectivity

Demonstrative Concepts and Experience

Abstract: Some or all of the material in this paper was presented to audiences at Stanford, Berkeley, Birkbeck, Princeton, and the International Society for Phenomenological Study at Asilomar. I am grateful to all of these audiences for the opportunity to present the material and for helpful comments on it. I have also had fruitful discussions about this material with and/or comments on it from Bill Brewer, Liz Camp, Cheryl Chen, Paul Coppock, Hubert Dreyfus, Eddie Cushman, Mark Greenberg, Gil Harman, MarkJohnston, Alva N6e, Mark Okrent, Christopher Peacocke, Philip Pettit, John Searle, Roger Shepard, Scott Soames, Dmitri Tymoczko, and two anonymous reviewers for the Philosophical Review. I would like to thank Bill Brewer in particular for a series of very fruitful and informative e-mails on the topic. I hope and expect that my criticisms of his and McDowell's views will be taken in the constructive vein in which they are intended. Financial support for this research was provided in part by the James S. McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences and by Princeton University through a Supplemental Support Award for Honorific Fellowship Recipients. I would like to thank both of these institutions. Finally, as always, I'm especially grateful for help and support from Cheryl Chen. 'To say that the content of the experience is characterized in conceptual terms is to say that the content of the experience is constituted entirely by concepts possessed by the subject of the experience. These concepts precisely capture, therefore, both the substance of, and the level of detail in, the experience. The principle proponent of this view is John McDowell. He first articulates the position explicitly in McDowell 1994, especially Lecture III and Afterword, Part II. He defends the view further in McDowell 1998, where he takes on some criticisms leveled by Christopher Peacocke in Peacocke 1998. (I have criticized Peacocke's view, and offered a different analysis of the issues, in Kelly 2001; Peacocke has responded to this criticism in Peacocke 2001.) Bill Brewer argues for a position very similar to McDowell's in his recent book Brewer 1999, especially in chapter 5. And a related view is defended in Sedivy 1996. As we will see, a central issue in McDowell's presentation of the view has to do with the connection between perception and memory. Other relevant discussions of this relation occur in Martin 1992, Raffman 1995, and Jolley and Watkins 1998. The general issue also seems to be discussed in Heck 2000, which, unfortunately, appeared too late for me to be able to take it into account in this paper.

A Tale of Two Effects

Abstract: [Introduction] In recent years, there has been a philosophical cottage industry producing arguments that our concept of causation is not univocal: that there are in fact two (or more) concepts of causation, corresponding to distinct species of causal relation. Papers written in this tradition have borne titles like "Two Concepts of Cause" (Sober 1985) and "Two Concepts of Causation" (Hall forthcoming). With due apologies to Charles Dickens, I hereby make my own contribution to this genre.

Changing the cartesian mind: Leibniz on sensation, representation and consciousness

Abstract: What did Leibniz have to contribute to the philosophy of mind? To judge from textbooks in the philosophy of mind, and even Leibniz commentaries, the answer is: not much. That may be because Leibniz's philosophy of mind looks roughly like a Cartesian philosophy of mind. Like Descartes and his followers, Leibniz claims that the mind is immaterial and immortal; that it is a thinking thing (and is never not thinking); that it is a different kind of thing from body and obeys its own laws; and that it comes stocked with innate truth-tracking intellectual ideas and an epistemically troubling habit of forming confused sensory ideas on the occasion of external corporeal events. Nothing is new. Of course, Leibniz adds unconscious perceptions to the mind in the form of his famous petites perceptions, and he offers a unique solution to the problem of mind-body interaction in the form of his infamous pre-established harmony. In the overall scheme of things, however, these look like minor alterations in a philosophy of mind that the Cartesians had been advocating for some fifty years. Or so it appears. Leibniz is not, in fact, a Cartesian philosopher of mind. In the opening of the New Essays on Human Understanding, his spokesman announces in no uncertain terms: "I should tell you the news that I am

New Essays on the Rationalists

Abstract: Introduction PART I - MATTER AND SUBSTANCE 1. Space and Subtle Matter in Descartes's Metaphysics 2. Descartes on Nothing in Particular 3. "If a Body Meets a Body": Descartes on Body-Body Causation 4. Descartes's Extended Substances 5. Spinoza's Extended Substance: Cartesian and Leibnizian Reflections 6. Leibniz's Constructivism and Infinitely Folded Matter 7. Locke and Leibniz and the Debate over Species PART II - FREEDOM AND NECESSITY 8. Descartes on Spontaneity, Indifference, and Alternatives 9. The Range of Leibnizian Compatibilism 10. The Necessity of Finite Modes and Geometrical Containment in Spinoza's Metaphysics 11. Spinoza's Necessitarianism Reconsidered PART III - MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS 12. A Spectator at the Theater of the World 13. Distinctness 14. Causation and Similarity in Descartes 15. Teleology in Spinoza and Early Modern Rationalism 16. "For They Do Not Agree In Nature With Us": Spinoza on the Lower Animals 17. Leibniz on Consciousness and Self-Consciousness 18. The Illusory Nature of Leibniz's System Bibliography Index

On the Coherence of Pyrrhonian Skepticism

Abstract: In writing this essay, I have incurred great debts to two distinguished philosophers: Benson Mates, having agreed only to alert this complete stranger to any manifest blunders, entered instead into an extensive correspondence dense with penetrating insights; John Cooper read the penultimate draft with meticulous care and offered acute suggestions. I am deeply indebted as well to the Review's editors and referees for virtually collaborative efforts of the highest order that prompted further improvements. As always, I have benefited early and late from Roger Wertheimer's peerless eye for every sort of infirmity that can afflict philosophical work. In quoting from Outlines of Pyrrhonism I rely throughout on Mates's translation in The Skeptic Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), which I refer to hereafter as SW.

The Formal-Structural View of Logical Consequence

Abstract: The Formal-Structural View of Logical Consequence Gila Sher The Philosophical Review, Vol. 110, No. 2. (Apr., 2001), pp. 241-261. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108%28200104%29110%3A2%3C241%3ATFVOLC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G The Philosophical Review is currently published by Cornell University. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/sageschool.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Fri Nov 2 22:04:07 2007

Scanlon's Contractualism: Critical Notice of T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other

Abstract: The central idea of T. M. Scanlon's "contractualism" has been well known to ethical theorists since Scanlon 1982. In What We Owe to Each Other it has grown into a comprehensive and impressively developed theory of the nature of right and wrong-or at least of what Scanlon regards as the most important of the "normative kinds" that go under the names of 'right' and 'wrong' (12).1 Rejecting aggregative consequentialism, Scanlon aims to articulate principles of right and wrong for individual action in such a way that the interests of each affected person are taken fairly into account. What We Owe to Each Other is a wonderful book, one that deserves the attention of every serious student of ethical theory, especially in the details of its analyses and arguments, which are developed with originality, imagination, and exemplary, fair-minded attention to the phenomena and the spirit of moral life. Though I will be voicing qualms and disagreements about some aspects of Scanlon's theory, I believe that the general pattern of thinking about what we owe each other that he recommends is a good one-illuminating and likely to lead to good decisions in most concrete cases. My discussion begins in section 1 with what I take to be the central topic of the book: the nature of right and wrong, insofar as that is understood in terms of what we owe to each other. One of the main concepts of the theory is that of a reason, and sections 2 and 3 are devoted to issues about reasons. In section 41 discuss Scanlon's claim that what we owe to each other takes priority over all other reasons for action.