Check out this recently released book by Dan Hutto and Erik Myin. The book will be reviewed by the very excellent Tom Froese for The Journal of Mind & Behavior. Stay tuned.
Speaking of enactivism see this special issue of Constructivist Foundations dedicated to Neurophenomenology.
Constructivist Foundations must rate as one of the best open access journals I have come across.
Here’s a new paper by Nivedita Gangopadhyay et al., Nivedita being a contributor to this special issue as well which I’ll feature over the coming weeks.
Hofstadter’s (and Sander’s) latest.
Keep an eye out for this forthcoming book by the very excellent Smith scholar Jack Weinstein who also happens to be contributing to Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith.
I want to plug this very excellent paper by my chum and occasional collaborator, Chris Onof:
In ‘The conscious mind’, David Chalmers (1996) develops a multifaceted argument to show that the phenomenal nature of conscious experience is not reducible to functional properties of a physical substance. For Chalmers, this conclusion is inevitable if one is to ‘take seriously’ the justified belief that we are phenomenally conscious (what he calls ‘phenomenal realism’). The argument turns, in particular, on the logical possibility of zombies that share their physical/functional relational properties (hereafter P/F properties) with us, but experience no phenomenal properties (hereafter Φ-properties). It can be summarized as:
1 Zombies are conceivable (‘epistemic gap’)
2 If zombies are conceivable, they are (metaphysically) possible
3 Zombies are possible (‘ontological gap’)
4 Φ-properties do not logically supervene upon the P/F realm.
5 There are non-P/F properties.This conclusion is generally taken to mean that physicalism is false.
(2) has been the most debated premise (e.g., Tye, 1995, Levine, 1993, Loar, 1997, Papineau, 2002)2, but the more fundamental divide is with those philosophers who reject premise (1) (e.g., Dennett, 1991, 2005, Churchland, 1996). The grounds for rejecting premise (1) amount to the claim that it is a misunderstanding of the phenomenal which gives rise to the belief that zombies are possible. And the error, it is argued, is analogous to that made by vitalists who claim that a system could have all the appropriate biochemical properties without being alive. The mistake is to assume there is something ineffable (Dennett, 1988) that remains unaccounted for, once a description of what it is to be conscious has been given in terms of P/F properties. The claim is therefore that the phenomenal can and must be conceptualized in terms of functional features of a physical system. I shall not examine these various criticisms, but take premises (1) and (2) are true, and assume that the argument is valid as it stands.
Note that Chalmers’s PD includes the following additional claim. If the property of psychological awareness (hereafter Ψ-awareness) characterizes ‘a state wherein we have access to some information, and can use that information in the control of behavior’ (Chalmers, 1996, p. 28), properties of Ψ-awareness are assumed to logically supervene upon P/F properties. They are therefore independent of Φ-properties. This supervenience claim is however not fundamental to PD; I shall indicate where I make use of it.
A key feature of PD is that it rests upon the assumption that we have a justified belief that we are phenomenally conscious. This has implications for the relation between Ψ-properties and Φ-properties. For it requires that we have cognitive access to, i.e., that we be Ψ-aware of the contents of our Φ experience (Chalmers, 1996, p. 221). This does not imply that ‘to have an experience is automatically to know about it’ (ibid., p. 197). Rather, ‘we have the ability to notice our experiences’ (ibid., p. 221), i.e., to make the contents of our Φ experience into the object of a cognitive belief. Such a belief corresponds to what Chalmers calls a second-order phenomenal judgment, such as the judgment that my Φ experience is currently that of a red object. This is a judgment about the content of the first-order phenomenal judgment ‘It’s red’.
Such phenomenal judgments and their verbal expression lead to difficulties that Chalmers discusses at some length. One of these concerns the issue of self-knowledge. Φ-properties are irrelevant to the causal explanation of behavior, on the assumption of the closure of the physical realm3: this is the quasi-epiphenomenalism of Chalmers’s position.4 And Chalmers notes the difficulties raised by this quasi-epiphenomenalist position: ‘for second- and third-order phenomenal judgments (…), explanatory irrelevance seems to raise real problems’ (ibid., p. 182). Indeed, given the zombie has identical behavior to mine, he therefore makes the same claims about being Φ-conscious (causal closure of the physical realm), and, on the assumption of logical supervenience of Ψ upon P/F properties, he forms the same phenomenal judgments5 as I do. How do I know, therefore, that I am not a zombie? Chalmers answers that it is precisely because I haveΦ experience. This provides the epistemic warrant for my belief. Such a warrant characterizes the epistemology of conscious experience. Below, I shall identify a logically possible situation which raises problems for this epistemology.
Here is the intro to Don’s paper:
This essay concerns the role of economics in the interdisciplinary study of social cognition. Increasingly many economists believe that economics has such a role. Most who hold this opinion do so because they think that, to some extent, important parts of microeconomics should collapse into psychology. They think this in part because they are convinced that most human motivation has turned out to be irreducibly social, whereas traditional microeconomics depended for maintenance of its distance from psychology on modeling people as if their social relations were incidental rather than constitutive. Bruni (2005) is a representative instance of the newer view.
The perspective I will defend here agrees that economics can and should contribute to the understanding of social cognition. Economics is an important part of a complementary suite of cognitive and behavioral sciences that accomplish more together than they could do in isolation. However, I do not believe that any part of economics should be collapsed into psychology, and I reject the widespread opinion that economics for much of its history ‘went wrong’ by ignoring the social dimension of value.
I will aim to do three things in the paper. First, I will describe the origins of the widespread misperception. As will be seen, both the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and the later interanimation of cognitive science and social theory are important parts of this story (see also Angner & Loewenstein, forthcoming). Then I will explain why I think the perception is confused. Finally I will indicate why all of this matters: economics can make its distinctive and important contribution to our understanding of social cognition (and social behavior) only if it is recognized to have a different role from that of psychology. Economics is not equivalent to the psychology of valuation, though there is (of course) such a psychology, which is partly social, and economics helpfully informs it. It would reduce confusion, I believe, if much of what is now called ‘behavioral economics’ were referred to as ‘psychology of valuation’ instead.The confusions I aim to dispel are historical in origin. Thus much of the essay will be about what economists call ‘history of thought’. Let me therefore note that my motives are not the historian’s. That is, I am not concerned per se with the way in which historical thinkers represented their own intentions and views to themselves. I am instead concerned with how we should critically regard previous episodes of reasoning in light of what we think we have learned that participants in these past episodes did not know. To illustrate with a simple example: the question ‘Why did Copernicus set the scientific revolution in motion?’ is not a question for the intellectual biographer, because Copernicus never imagined he was doing any such thing; but it is a perfectly good question for the historian of science who knows how events turned out and what led to what.
So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible (p. 66).
Graham Gee and Grégoire Webber’s article now available in the Modern Law Review.
manwithoutqualities 