Browsing by Subject "Philosophy of mind"
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Item Building nothing out of something(2011-05) Wright, Briggs Marvin; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark); Koons, Robert C.; Pautz, Adam; Tye, Michael; Varzi, Achille; Zimmerman, DeanThe notion of absence is pervasive throughout and central to human language and thought. Such thought and talk is often taken quite seriously. Much has been done to motivate treating absences as genuine entities, things as real as the tables and chairs we encounter in everyday life. Unfortunately, not nearly as much attention has been paid to the question of what kinds of things absences could be if indeed there were such things. In this dissertation, I take up the metaphysical question involving the nature of absences, and I also carefully consider the ontological question of whether any kind of case can be made for reifying absences. Along the way, I develop a novel metaphysical account of absences, and examine various considerations from the realms of causation, perception, and truthmaking that putatively support treating absences as bona fide entities.Item Children's beliefs about what it means to have a mind(2004) Davis, Debra Lee; Woolley, JacquelineChildren’s understanding of the mind and mental states has been studied extensively by Theory of Mind researchers. Important aspects of understanding the mind involve general beliefs about what the mind is, what it can do, and what sort of entities have minds. In two studies I investigated the types of attributes children and adults believe an object or entity must have in order to claim that the object or entity has a mind. In Study 1, children and adults were asked about physical, mental and emotional characteristics of a number of entities, including intelligent artifacts (e.g., robots and computers), social entities (e.g., people and animals) and inanimate objects (e.g., flowers). They were also asked whether each of these entities is alive, and whether each has a mind, brain and heart. Adults were asked the same questions in the form of a questionnaire. Similarities and differences between how social entities, intelligent artifacts and inanimate objects are conceptualized were evaluated. Specifically, patterns of responses were analyzed to determine which characteristics are most strongly vi associated with having a mind and a brain. The presence of a mind was most strongly associated with emotion, physical states, intentional behavior, advanced mental states, senses and sensations. The brain was most strongly associated with senses, sensations, physical states, intentional behavior, basic mental acts and advanced mental acts. In Study 2, children were presented with twelve unfamiliar “people, animals or things,” each of which was presented as having between one and three mind-related characteristics (cognitive, emotional, and interactive). For example, they may have been told that a mippit can think (cognitive) and feel happy (emotional). Children were asked whether each entity is alive, and whether each has a mind, brain and heart. Patterns of responses were analyzed to determine which attributes are most strongly associated with having a mind and a brain. It was found that children consider cognition, emotion and interaction as indicators of the presence of a mind and brain.Item The intellectual given(2010-05) Bengson, John Thomas Steele; Sosa, David, 1966-; Bealer, George; Dancy, Jonathan; Pautz, Adam; Sainsbury, Mark; Tye, MichaelSome things we know just by thinking about them: for example, that identity is transitive, that three are more than two, that wantonly torturing innocents is wrong, and other propositions which simply strike us as true when we consider them. But how? This essay articulates and defends a rationalist answer which critically develops a significant analogy between intuition and perception. The central thesis is that intuition and perception, though different, are at a certain level of abstraction the same kind of state, and states of this kind are, by their very nature, poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justified and even knowledgeable belief without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as given. The essay proceeds in three stages. Stage one advances a fully general and psychologically realistic account of the nature of intuition, namely, as an intellectual presentation of an apparent truth. Stage two provides a modest treatment of the epistemic status of intuition, in particular, how intuition serves as a source of immediate prima facie justification. Stage three outlines a response to Benacerraf-style worries about intuitive knowledge regarding abstract objects (e.g., numbers, sets, and values); the proposal is a constitutive, rather than causal, explanation of the means by which a given intuition connects a thinker to the fact intuited.Item Is physicalism "really" true?: an empirical argument against the universal construal of physicalism(2009-12) Smith, Paul H., 1952-; Bonevac, Daniel A., 1955-; Juhl, Cory; Kane, Robert; Puthoff, Harold E.; Sosa, David; Utts, JessicaPhysicalism as universally construed is the thesis that everything in the world is either physical or a consequence of physical facts. Certain consequences of physicalism for free will, religion, and so on make it unpalatable to some. Physicalism should not be dismissed merely on its unpalatability. Nonetheless, we should be very sure it is true before accepting it uncritically (as much of science and philosophy now do). Physicalism is a contingent thesis, taken as true on the basis of strong inductive evidence and an inference-to-the-best-explanation that specifies it as the best theory over any of its competitors to provide an ontological account of the universe. So long as there is no contrary evidence to the claims of physicalism, then it stands relatively uncontested. I argue that there is a body of well-attested empirical evidence that falsifies universally-construed physicalism by violating an essential assumption of the theory – causal closure of the physical domain. I present a detailed account of this closure-violating evidence. So that those who are unfamiliar with the body of evidence on offer may judge its validity, I include brief summations of experimental designs, findings, and analyses, plus some controversies pertaining to the data and their resolutions. I then argue why this body of empirical evidence should count against universal physicalism, argue for the evidence’s scientific legitimacy, and discuss criticisms which have been lodged against it, then explain why these criticisms lack force. I conclude that the evidence I present is sufficient to falsify the universal construal of physicalism as supported by today’s and by foreseeable future understandings of the physical world. I acknowledge, though, that nothing can be guaranteed against an indefinite “wait-and-see” argument for some implausible “fully-realized” physics that may be able to reconcile the evidence I propose with such a fully-completed formulation of physicalism. I suggest that if this is the best physicalists can come up with, then their position is weak and the inference-to-the-best-explanation that until now supported universal physicalism should be turned around to tell against the theory.Item Normativism and mental causation(2007-05) Tiehen, Justin Thomas, 1977-; Sosa, David, 1966-This dissertation defends a certain view of the mind/body relation, according to which although there is a sense in which everything is physical, there is also a sense in which mental phenomena are irreducible to physical phenomena. The reason for this irreducibility, according to the position defended in this work, is that the mental has a certain normative character which the physical lacks. The central thesis defended in the first part of the work is the claim, advanced by Donald Davidson among others, that the mental realm is governed by constitutive principles of rationality. I both attempt to explain what this means precisely and provide arguments as to why we should think that it is true. Having defended the thesis, I then turn to show that it entails that certain mental phenomena are normative. If the normative is generally irreducible to the non-normative -- as I argue there is good reason to hold -- it then follows as a special case that the mental phenomena in question are irreducible to any (non-normative) physical phenomena. Is this form of antireductionism scientifically respectable? In the second part of the dissertation I attempt to establish that it is by showing that the view can be reconciled with a physicalistically acceptable account of mental causation. Focusing on the causal exclusion problem advanced by Jaegwon Kim among others, I critically discuss both reductive and certain nonreductive solutions to the problem that have been advanced by various philosophers. I then propose my own nonreductive solution to the problem, and attempt to draw out some of the consequences of this solution both for physicalism and for the nature of normativity.