bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Action
Authors: Hornsby Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning beings who make their impact in the natural causal world, and concerns addressed in ethics and legal philosophy about human freedom and responsibility. ‘Action theory’ springs from concerns of both sorts; but in the first instance it attempts only to provide a detailed account that may help with answering the metaphysical questions.

Action theorists usually start by asking ‘How are actions distinguished from other events?’. For there to be an action, a person has to do something. But the ordinary ‘do something’ does not capture just the actions, since we can say (for instance) that breathing is something that everyone does, although we don’t think that breathing in the ordinary way is an action. It seems that purposiveness has to be introduced – that someone’s intentionally doing something is required.

People often do the things they intentionally do by moving bits of their bodies. This has led to the idea that ‘actions are bodily movements’. The force of the idea may be appreciated by thinking about what is involved in doing one thing by doing another. A man piloting a plane might have shut down the engines by depressing a lever, for example; and there is only one action here if the depressing of the lever was (identical with) the shutting down of the engines. It is when identities of this sort are accepted that an action may be seen as an event of a person’s moving their body: the pilot’s depressing of the lever was (also) his moving of his arm, because he depressed the lever by moving his arm.

But how do bodies’ movings – such events now as his arm’s moving – relate to actions? According to one traditional empiricist account, these are caused by volitions when there are actions, and a volition and a body’s moving are alike parts of the action. But there are many rival accounts of the causes and parts of actions and of movements. And volitional notions feature not only in a general account of the events surrounding actions, but also in accounts that aim to accommodate the experience that is characteristic of agency.
Mind, bundle theory of
Authors: Candlish Stewart
Published: September 2018

This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ (A Treatise of Human Nature I, IV, §VI). The theory begins by denying Descartes’s Second Meditation view that experiences belong to an immaterial soul; its distinguishing feature is its attempt to account for the unity of a single mind by employing only relations among the experiences themselves rather than their attribution to an independently persisting subject. The usual objection to the bundle theory is that no relations adequate to the task can be found. But empirical work suggests that the task itself may be illusory.

Many bundle theorists follow Hume in taking their topic to be personal identity. But the theory can be disentangled from this additional burden.
Dualism
Authors: Rosenthal David M.
Published: September 2018

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being’s mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers find more acceptable, human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties are not physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory.

Several considerations appear to support dualism. Mental phenomena are strikingly different from all others, and the idea that they are nonphysical may explain just how they are distinctive. Moreover, physical reality conforms to laws formulated in strictly mathematical terms. But, because mental phenomena such as thinking, desiring and sensing seem intractable to being described in mathematical terms, it is tempting to conclude that these phenomena are not physical. In addition, many mental states are conscious states – states that we are aware of in a way that seems to be wholly unmediated. And many would argue that, whatever the nature of mental phenomena that are not conscious, consciousness cannot be physical.

There are also, however, reasons to resist dualism. People, and other creatures with mental endowments, presumably exist wholly within the natural order, and it is generally held that all natural phenomena are built up from basic physical constituents. Dualism, however, represents the mind as uniquely standing outside this unified physical picture. There is also a difficulty about causal relations between mind and body. Mental events often cause bodily events, as when a desire causes an action, and bodily events often cause mental events, for example in perceiving. But the causal interactions into which physical events enter are governed by laws that connect physical events. So if the mental is not physical, it would be hard to understand how mental events can interact causally with bodily events. For these reasons and others, dualism is, despite various reasons advanced in its support, a theoretically uncomfortable position.
Emotions, nature of
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2018

What is an emotion? This basic question was posed by William James in 1884, and it is still the focus for a number of important arguments in the philosophy of mind and ethics. It is, on the face of it, a quest for a definition, but it is also a larger quest for a way of thinking about ourselves: how should we think about emotions – as intrusive or as essential to our rationality, as dangerous or as indispensable to our humanity, as excuses for irresponsibility or, perhaps, as themselves our responsibilities? Where do emotions fit into the various categories and ‘faculties’ of the mind, and which of the evident aspects of emotion – the various sensory, physiological, behavioural, cognitive and social phenomena that typically correspond with an emotion – should we take to be essential? Which are mere accompaniments or consequences?

Many philosophers hold onto the traditional view that an emotion, as a distinctively mental phenomenon, has an essential ’subjective’ or ’introspective’ aspect, although what this means (and how accessible or articulate an emotion must be) is itself a subject of considerable dispute. Many philosophers have become sceptical about such subjectivism, however, and like their associates in the social sciences have turned the analysis of emotions to more public, observable criteria – to the behaviour that ’expresses’ emotion, the physiological disturbances that ‘cause’ emotion, the social circumstances and use of emotion language in the ascription of emotions. Nevertheless, the seemingly self-evident truth is that, whatever else it may be, an emotion is first of all a feeling. But what, then, is a ’feeling’? What differentiates emotions from other feelings, such as pains and headaches? And how does one differentiate, identify and distinguish the enormous number of different emotions?
Mind, identity theory of
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: September 2018

We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity theory of mind holds that the intimate connection is identity: the mind is the brain, or, more precisely, mental states are states of the brain. The theory goes directly against a long tradition according to which mental and material belong to quite distinct ontological categories – the mental being essentially conscious, the material essentially unconscious. This tradition has been bedevilled by the problem of how essentially immaterial states could be caused by the material world, as would happen when we see a tree, and how they could cause material states, as would happen when we decide to make an omelette.

A great merit of the identity theory is that it avoids this problem: interaction between mental and material becomes simply interaction between one subset of material states, namely certain states of a sophisticated central nervous system, and other material states. The theory also brings the mind within the scope of modern science. More and more phenomena are turning out to be explicable in the physical terms of modern science: phenomena once explained in terms of spells, possession by devils, Thor’s thunderbolts, and so on, are now explained in more mundane, physical terms. If the identity theory is right, the same goes for the mind. Neuroscience will in time reveal the secrets of the mind in the same general way that the theory of electricity reveals the secrets of lightning. This possibility has received enormous support from advances in computing. We now have at least the glimmerings of an idea of how a purely material or physical system could do some of the things minds can do.

Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked of the identity theory. How could states that seem so different turn out to be one and the same? Would neurophysiologists actually see my thoughts and feelings if they looked at my brain? When we report on our mental states what are we reporting on – our brains?
Imagination
Authors: O'Leary-Hawthorne J.
Published: September 2018

‘Imagination’ and ‘imagine’ enjoy a family of meanings, only some of which imply the use of mental imagery. If I ask you to imagine a red flower, I will likely be inviting you to form an image. But if, for example, I say that I imagine that I will go to the party after taking a nap, I am not obviously giving voice to mental imagery. A variety of questions has arisen concerning imagination in its various forms, of which the following four are central. How do internal acts of imagining come to be about particular external objects and states of affairs, actual and non-actual? How are perceptual acts similar to and different from the central cases of imagining? To what extent does routine perception and cognition use similar cognitive resources to creative imagination? Are there any cognitive pursuits in which imagination can play a justificatory role?
Intentionality
Authors: Crane Tim
Published: September 2018

Intentionality is the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes (and others) exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always directed on, or at, something: if you hope, believe or desire, you must hope, believe or desire something. Hope, belief, desire and other mental states which are directed at something, are known as intentional states. Intentionality in this sense has only a peripheral connection to the ordinary ideas of intention and intending. An intention to do something is an intentional state, since one cannot intend without intending something; but intentions are only one of many kinds of intentional mental states.

The terminology of intentionality derives from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and was revived by Brentano in 1874. Brentano characterized intentionality in terms of the mind’s direction upon an object, and he also claimed that it is the intentionality of mental phenomena that distinguishes them from physical phenomena. These ideas of Brentano’s provide the background to twentieth-century discussions of intentionality, in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions. Among these discussions, we can distinguish two general projects. The first is to characterize the essential features of intentionality. For example, is intentionality a relation? If it is, what does it relate, if the object of an intentional state need not exist in order to be thought about? The second is to explain how intentionality can occur in the natural world. How can biological creatures be in states that exhibit intentionality? The aim of this second project is to explain intentionality in nonintentional terms.
Memory
Authors: Deutscher Max
Published: September 2018

Memory is central to every way in which we deal with things. One might subsume memory under the category of intellect, since it is our capacity to retain what we sense, enjoy and suffer, and thus to become knowing in our perception and other activities. As intelligent retention, memory cannot be distinguished from our acquisition of skills, habits and customs – our capabilities both for prudence and for deliberate risk. As retention, memory is a vital condition of the formation of language.

Amnesia illustrates dramatically the difference between memory as retention of language and skills, and memory as the power to recollect and to recognize specific things. In amnesia we lose, not our general power of retention, but recall of facts – the prior events of our life, and our power to recognize people and places. Amnesiacs recognize kinds of things. They know it is a wristwatch they are wearing, while unable to recognize it as their own.

This recall of events and facts which enables us to recognize things as our own, is more than just the ability to give correctly an account of them. One might accurately describe some part of one’s past inadvertently, or after hypnosis, or by relying on incidental information. Thus, present research on memory both as retention and as recall of specific episodes, attempts to characterize the connection which persists between experience and recall. Neurological or computer models of connectivity owe something to traditional notions of a memory trace, but emphasize also the re-tracing of original memories by later experience and by intervening episodes of recall.
Personal identity
Authors: Garrett Brian
Published: September 2018

What is it to be the same person today as one was in the past, or will be in the future? How are we to describe cases in which (as we might put it) one person becomes two? What, if anything, do the answers to such questions show about the rationality of the importance we attach to personal identity? Is identity really the justifier of the special concern which we have for ourselves in the future? These are the concerns of this entry.

In order to answer the question about the persistence-conditions of persons we must indulge in some thought experiments. Only thus can we tease apart the strands that compose our concept of personal identity, and thereby come to appreciate the relative importance of each strand. There are plausible arguments against attempts to see the relation of personal identity as constitutively determined by the physical relations of same body, or same brain. I can survive with a new body, and a new brain. But it does not follow; nor is it true, that a person’s identity over time can be analysed exclusively in terms of psychological relations (relations of memory, belief, character, and so on). To the contrary, the most plausible view appears to be a mixed view, according to which personal identity has to be understood in terms of both physical and psychological relations. This is the view which can be extracted from our core (that is, minimally controversial) set of common-sense beliefs about personal identity.

The possibility of the fission of persons– the possibility that, for example, a person’s brain hemispheres might be divided and transplanted into two new bodies – shows that the mixed view has to incorporate a non-branching or uniqueness clause in its analysis. The concept of personal identity, contrary to what we might first be inclined to believe, is an extrinsic concept (that is, whether a given person exists can depend upon the existence of another, causally unrelated, person).

Some philosophers have recently tried to forge an important connection between theories of personal identity and value theory (ethics and rationality). The possibility of such a connection had not previously been investigated in any detail. It has been argued that, on the correct theory of personal identity, it is not identity that matters but the preservation of psychological relations such as memory and character. These relations can hold between one earlier person and two or more later persons. They can also hold to varying degrees (for example, I can acquire a more or less different character over a period of years). This view of what matters has implications for certain theories of punishment. A now reformed criminal may deserve less or no punishment for the crimes of their earlier criminal self. Discussions of personal identity have also provided a new perspective on the debate between utilitarianism and its critics.
Reasons and causes
Authors: Smith Michael
Published: September 2018

Imagine being told that someone is doing something for a reason. Perhaps they are reading a spy novel, and we are told that their reason for doing so is that they desire to read something exciting and believe that spy novels are indeed exciting. We then have an explanation of the agent’s action in terms of the person’s reasons. Those who believe that reasons are causes think that such explanations have two important features. First, they enable us to make sense of what happens. Reading a spy novel is the rational thing for an agent to do if they have that particular desire and belief. Second, such explanations tell us about the causal origins of what happens. They tell us that the desires and beliefs that allow us to make sense of actions cause those actions as well.

The idea that reasons are causes has evident appeal. We ordinarily suppose that our reasons make a difference to what we do. In the case just described, for example, we ordinarily suppose that had the agent had appropriately different desires and beliefs then they would have acted differently: had the person desired to read something romantic instead of exciting, or had the person believed that spy novels are not exciting, a spy novel would not have been chosen. But if what they desire and believe makes a difference to what they do then the desires and beliefs that are those reasons must, it seems, be the cause of the person’s actions.

Despite its evident appeal, however, the view that reasons are causes is not without its difficulties. These all arise because of the manifest differences between explanations in terms of reasons and causal explanations.
Secondary qualities
Authors: McGinn Colin
Published: September 2018

Primary qualities are generally defined as those properties that objects have independently of being perceived. Standard examples would include properties of shape, weight, position, electric charge, atomic structure. These properties characterize the way the world is in itself, separately from mind. Secondary qualities, by contrast, are defined as those properties that incorporate sensory responses in their conditions of application, so that the idea of a perceiver is built into their nature. It is more controversial which properties, if any, belong to this category, since not all philosophers agree that the standard alleged examples of secondary qualities – colours, sounds, tastes, smells, feels – are really correctly so classified. Some thinkers hold that objects have only primary qualities. Let us note the significance of the question, concentrating on the case of colour, which is the one most frequently discussed.

Objects appear to have both shape and colour in equal measure, but is this really how things are? Depending upon how we answer this question, we get very different pictures of the relation between appearance and reality. If both sorts of property are equally out there, equally objective, then what appears to us in perception is reality itself. When we see a material object we see something that exists independently of our seeing it, and we see the object as it is whether or not there are (or even could be) any perceivers. But if the colour of the object is inherently dependent upon our sensory responses, then the question arises as to whether what we see is really in some way itself mental. If colour is a secondary quality, in other words, do we see things as they really are? What is it that bears colour if colours are in some way mentally constituted? Do we indeed see anything at all, as distinct from introspecting the features of our own subjective states?
Sense-data
Authors: Gallois Andre
Published: September 2018

A philosophical theory of perception must accommodate this obvious fact: when someone perceives, or seems to perceive something, how things appear may differ from how they are. A circular coin tilted will look elliptical. A stick partially immersed in water will look bent. Noting that appearance and reality do not always coincide, some philosophers have given the following account of the contrast between the two. Suppose someone seems to see a book with a red cover. Whether or not there is any book to be seen, the individual seeming to see the red book will be aware of something red. What they are aware of is called a sense-datum. According to a sense-datum theory, any perceptual experience involves awareness of a sense-datum whether or not it is an experience of a physical object.

Some philosophers link a sense-datum theory with certain views about knowledge. According to foundationalists all knowledge of the external world must rest on a foundation of beliefs that are beyond doubt. We can always be mistaken about what physical objects are like. On the other hand, we cannot be mistaken about what sense-data are like. So, all knowledge about the external world rests on beliefs about sense-data. In this way a sense-datum theory is supposed to do double duty in contributing towards an account of perception, and an account of knowledge based on perception.
Passmore, John Arthur (1914–2004)
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: September 2018

John Passmore was born in New South Wales and studied at the Univesity of Sydney. He taught there before moving to Otago in New Zealand and then to the Australian National University. He is perhaps best known for A Hundred Years of Philosophy which has been widely recognized as a major feat of philosophical scholarship. He contributed widely to topics in the history of philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of science and philosophy of the environment. He was one of the pioneers of what has come to be called applied philosophy.
Representationalism about experience
Authors: Leeds Stephen
Published: September 2018

Look at the screen before you and concentrate on the property of which you are putatively aware that makes it appropriate to call the screen white. This property – let us call it W – seems to be one you might be aware of even in a case in which the colour of the screen was a clever illusion or a hallucination. This observation has traditionally led to difficulties in saying what property W is. If one adopts the view that we cannot be aware of uninstantiated properties, one will need to say that even if the colour of the screen were an illusion, there would be something which actually had the property W. This line of thought leads in one direction to sense-datum theories, which postulate somewhat obscure mental objects to serve as the bearers of W, and in another direction, it leads to the view that W is a property of yourself, or of the events that constitute your experiencing. Against both these views, the representationalist denies that awareness of a property requires that the property be instantiated, any more than thinking about, or talking about a property requires its instantiation (we can think about winning a lottery even if we never win one). Your experience represents that something is W but this does not require that anything actually be W. This view allows the representationalist to identify W as ordinary physical whiteness (it does not require him to do this, however). Similarly for bodily sensations like pain – it allows the representationalist to say that what you are aware of when you feel pain is bodily damage in the sense that your experience represents that there is bodily damage – and that bodily damage can be the object of your awareness even if your body isn’t in fact damaged.
Psychology, personal and subpersonal
Authors: Drayson Zoe
Published: September 2018

Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. By contrast, explanations in psychology are described as subpersonal when they attribute psychological phenomena below the level of the person, as occurs when scientists describe parts of the brain as representing or evaluating, for example. The practice of subpersonal psychology raises a number of philosophical issues: whether it is acceptable to attribute psychological phenomena to parts of persons, for example, and whether such attributions can yield any explanatory benefit. Even those who endorse subpersonal psychology do not necessarily agree on what this entails: there are several distinct ways of understanding the relationship between subpersonal psychology and personal psychology, which depend in part on how the ontological commitments of subpersonal explanations are understood.
Cognitive architecture
Authors: Pylyshyn Zenon W.
Published: September 2018

Cognitive architecture involves the properties of mental structures and mental mechanisms that do not vary when people have different goals, beliefs, precepts or other cognitive states. A serious computational theory of mind (CTM) requires that the architecture be constrained independently of such states. One consequence of taking the distinction between architecture and representation-governed process seriously is that it provides a reply to those who are sceptical about the role of rules in cognition, on the grounds that following rules leads to an infinite regress: in CTM, rules are executed by the causal structure of the architecture, and hence do not require further rules for following rules.
Cognitive development
Authors: Keil F.C. , Gutheil G.
Published: September 2018

Psychological research of the last two decades has produced a surge of surprising results regarding cognitive development in children that has challenged a number of traditional philosophical assumptions about the nature of knowledge. The developing cognitive system seems organized in terms of specific domains, rather than as a general, all-purpose processor to which traditional empiricism was committed. Children’s conceptual development is often guided by highly abstract principles and parameters that are present in a child’s mind long before concrete details of a domain are encountered. Moreover, the data seem to indicate that development consists predominantly of gradual conceptual enrichment over time, rather than radical change.
Gestalt psychology
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: September 2018

The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels. ‘Gestalt’, in colloquial German, means ‘shape’ or ‘structure’. Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay of 1890 that there are certain inherently structural features of experience that must be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’ if we are to do justice to the objects towards which perception, memory and abstract thinking are directed. His essay initiated a reaction against the then still dominant atomism in psychology, a reaction that led in turn to the ideas on ‘cerebral integration’ of the so-called Berlin school of Gestalt psychology and thence to contemporary investigations of ‘neural networks’ in cognitive science. Many of the specific empirical facts discovered by the Gestaltists about the perception of movement and contour, about perceptual constancy and perceptual illusions, and about the role of ‘good form’ in perception and memory have been absorbed into psychology as a whole.
Imagery
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: September 2018

Most philosophers prior to the twentieth century thought of mental images as inner pictures, along lines suggested by introspection. But there are obvious differences between mental images and pictures. The former have no objective size or shape, for example. These differences have led some philosophers to argue that mental images are more like linguistic descriptions. The descriptional view of images is also taken by some cognitive psychologists. Other psychologists maintain that the pictorial conception of images provides the best explanation for the results of a number of intriguing experiments on imagery.
Language of thought
Authors: Rey Georges
Published: September 2018

The ‘language of thought’ is a formal language that is postulated to be encoded in the brains of intelligent creatures as a vehicle for their thought. It is an open question whether it resembles any ‘natural’ language spoken by anyone. Indeed, it could well be encoded in the brains of people who claim not to ‘think in words’, or even by intelligent creatures (for example, chimpanzees) incapable of speaking any language at all. Its chief function is to be a medium of representation over which the computations posited by cognitive psychologists are defined. Its language-like structure is thought to afford the best explanation of such facts about animals as the productivity, systematicity and (hyper-)intensionality of their thought, the promiscuity of their attitudes, and their ability to reason in familiar deductive, inductive and practical ways.
Mental causation
Authors: Loewer Barry
Published: September 2018

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena have challenged these assumptions. In the case of mental events (such as someone’s thinking about Vienna), one proposal has been simply to identify not ‘types’ (or classes) of mental events with types of physical events, but merely individual ‘token’ mental events with token physical ones, one by one (your and my thinking about Vienna may be ‘realized’ by different type physical states).

The role of mental properties (such as ‘being about Vienna’) in causation is more problematic. Properties are widely thought to have three features that seem to render them causally irrelevant: (1) they are ‘multiply-realizable’ (they can be realized in an indefinite variety of substances); (2) many of them seem not to supervene on neurophysiological properties (differences in mental properties do not always depend merely on differences in neurophysiological ones, but upon relations people bear to things outside their skin); and (3) many of them (for example, ‘being painful’) seem inherently ‘subjective’ in a way that no objective physical properties seem to be. All of these issues are complicated by the fact that there is no consensus concerning the nature of causal relevance for properties in general.
Moral psychology
Authors: Slote Michael
Published: September 2018

Moral psychology as a discipline is centrally concerned with psychological issues that arise in connection with the moral evaluation of actions. It deals with the psychological presuppositions of valid morality, that is, with assumptions it seems necessary for us to make in order for there to be such a thing as objective or binding moral requirements: for example, if we lack free will or are all incapable of unselfishness, then it is not clear how morality can really apply to human beings. Moral psychology also deals with what one might call the psychological accompaniments of actual right, or wrong, action, for example, with questions about the nature and possibility of moral weakness or self-deception, and with questions about the kinds of motives that ought to motivate moral agents. Moreover, in the approach to ethics known as ‘virtue ethics’ questions about right and wrong action merge with questions about the motives, dispositions, and abilities of moral agents, and moral psychology plays a more central role than it does in other forms of ethical theory.
Psychoanalysis, methodological issues in
Authors: Kitcher Patricia
Published: September 2018

Philosophers have subjected psychoanalysis to an unusual degree of methodological scrutiny for several interconnected reasons. Even a cursory look at the Freudian corpus reveals a slender base of evidence: eleven ‘case histories’, including those published jointly with Breuer. On the other hand, the theoretical claims have broad scope: all psychopathology can be traced to repressed sexuality. Further, Freud and his followers have disdained the most widely accepted means of establishing theories – experimental confirmation – while allowing themselves to appeal to such apparently dubious sources of support as dream interpretation, literature and everyday life. Together, these factors conjure a picture of a ‘science ’ with a large gap between theory and evidence that has not and cannot be filled by solid data.

The central methodological question about psychoanalysis is whether there is now or ever has been any evidence supporting its truth. Popper rejected psychoanalysis as a science on the grounds that there could be no possible evidence against it which could test its truth. More recently, Grünbaum has objected that there are serious logical difficulties with appealing to cures as evidence of truth. Grünbaum and others have attacked both the theory of dreams and the use of dream interpretation as evidence. Sulloway and Kitcher have argued that several tenets of psychoanalysis were supported by their nineteenth-century scientific context, particularly certain aspects of Darwinian biology, but that those crucial supports have been eroded by later scientific developments. Eysenck and Wilson have examined experimental results that have been offered in support of various claims of psychoanalysis and rejected them as inadequate to establish any specifically psychoanalytic claims. By contrast, Glymour (and others) have explained how even single case histories could provide evidence in favour of psychoanalysis. Other philosophers have argued that psychoanalysis is continuous with ‘common-sense’ psychology and is supported by the continual reaffirmation of the essential correctness of common-sense psychological prediction and explanation.
Rationality of belief
Authors: Adler Jonathan E.
Published: September 2018

Humans, claimed Aristotle, are rational animals. However, recent psychological studies purport to show that people systematically deviate from canons of logic, probability theory, decision theory and statistics. Interpretations of these studies differ about the nature of the errors: on some views, there are no real errors at all; on others, subjects are distracted from applying the proper formal rules by, for example, the influence of conversational expectations. A common suggestion is that the reasoning subjects display is nearly optimal, once we take account of our severe cognitive limits in realistic circumstances or in our evolutionary history.

These diverse views reveal two opposed tendencies in constructing a theory of rationality. One favours the formal rules which, if violated in real life, could have serious consequences. The other holds that people’s actual practice provides the only standard. A popular model, incorporating both tendencies, holds that those principles or norms are justified that yield the best balance between our reasoning intuitions and the demands of theory or system.
Common-sense reasoning, theories of
Authors: Horty John
Published: September 2018

The task of formalizing common-sense reasoning within a logical framework can be viewed as an extension of the programme of formalizing mathematical and scientific reasoning that has occupied philosophers throughout much of the twentieth century. The most significant progress in applying logical techniques to the study of common-sense reasoning has been made, however, not by philosophers, but by researchers in artificial intelligence, and the logical study of common-sense reasoning is now a recognized sub-field of that discipline.

The work involved in this area is similar to what one finds in philosophical logic, but it tends to be more detailed, since the ultimate goal is to encode the information that would actually be needed to drive a reasoning agent. Still, the formal study of common-sense reasoning is not just a matter of applied logic, but has led to theoretical advances within logic itself. The most important of these is the development of a new field of ‘non-monotonic’ logic, in which the conclusions supported by a set of premises might have to be withdrawn as the premise set is supplemented with new information.
Semantics, teleological (teleosemantics)
Authors: Godfrey-Smith Peter
Published: September 2018

Teleological/biological theories of meaning use a biological concept of function to explain how the internal states of organisms like ourselves can represent conditions in the world. These theories are controversial, as they have the consequence that an organism’s history affects the content of its present thoughts. These theories have advantages over other naturalistic theories of meaning in the task of explaining the possibility of error and unreliable representation.
Content: wide and narrow
Authors: Bach Kent
Published: September 2018

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external relations. That is, a person could be in just those states and those states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises the referential relations that mental states bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected.
Split brains
Authors: Marks Charles
Published: September 2018

Severing the direct neural connections between the two cerebral hemispheres produces a ‘split brain’. Does it also multiply minds? The most extensive tests of the psychological results of this operation were conducted by Roger Sperry and his colleagues. He concluded that split-brain patients have ‘Two separate spheres of conscious awareness, two separate conscious entities or minds, running in parallel in the same cranium, each with its own sensations, cognitive processes, learning processes, memories and so on’. Sperry’s view faces both conservative and radical challenges. The conservative challenge is that the results of the tests do not imply that split-brain patients have two minds and are two persons. The radical challenge is that the operation does not multiply minds but, instead, reveals a startling fact: human beings with intact commissures already have two spheres of consciousness, house two minds, and are two persons.
Vision
Authors: Egan Frances
Published: September 2018

Vision is the most studied sense. It is our richest source of information about the external world, providing us with knowledge of the shape, size, distance, colour and luminosity of objects around us. Vision is fast, automatic and achieved without conscious effort; however, the apparent ease with which we see is deceptive. Ever since Kepler characterized the formation of the retinal image in the early seventeenth century, vision theorists have known that the image on the retina does not correspond in an obvious manner to the way things look. The retinal image is two-dimensional, yet we see three dimensions; the size and shape of the image that an object casts on the retina varies with the distance and perspective of the observer, yet we experience objects as having constant size and shape. The primary task of a theory of vision is to explain how useful information about the external world is recovered from the changing retinal image.

Theories of vision fall roughly into two classes. Indirect theories characterize the processes underlying visual perception in psychological terms, as, for example, inference from prior data or construction of complex percepts from basic sensory components. Direct theories tend to stress the richness of the information available in the retinal image, but, more importantly, they deny that visual processes can be given any correct psychological or mental characterization. Direct theorists, while not denying that the processing underlying vision may be very complex, claim that the complexity is to be explicated merely by reference to nonpsychological, neural processes implemented in the brain.

The most influential recent work in vision treats it as an information-processing task, hence as indirect. Many computational models characterize visual processing as the production and decoding of a series of increasingly useful internal representations of the distal scene. These operations are described in computational accounts by precise algorithms. Computer implementations of possible strategies employed by the visual system contribute to our understanding of the problems inherent in complex visual tasks such as edge detection and shape recognition, and make possible the rigorous testing of proposed solutions.
Mind, child’s theory of
Authors: Leslie Alan M.
Published: September 2018

Knowledge of other minds poses a variety of unusual problems due to the peculiarly private nature of mental states. Some current views, impressed by the contrast between the apparently direct access we have to our own mental states and the inaccessibility of others’ mental states, argue that we understand the mental states of others by imagining that they are our own by ‘simulation’. Other current views propose that we infer both our own mental states and the mental states of others by employing a set of conjectures arrived at through general inductive reasoning over experience: a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’.

Experimental studies, by contrast, suggest that we possess an ‘instinct’ for comprehending the informational mental states of other minds. Children develop mental state concepts uniformly and rapidly in the preschool period when general reasoning powers are limited. For example, children can reason effectively about other people’s beliefs before they can reliably calculate that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In the empirical study of the ‘theory of mind’ instinct there have been three major discoveries so far: first, that normally developing 2-year-olds are able to recognize the informational state of pretending; second, that normally developing children can, by the age of 4 years, solve a variety of false belief problems; and lastly, that this instinct is specifically impaired in children with the neurodevelopmental disorder known as ‘autism’.
Delusion
Authors: Bortolotti Lisa , Gunn Rachel
Published: September 2018

In a clinical context, delusions are symptoms of a number of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and dementia, manifesting as beliefs that are implausible and resistant to counter-evidence. In the philosophical literature, the nature of delusions (what they are) and their formation (what causes them) have been examined with increasing interest. Different arguments for and against delusions being regarded as beliefs have been put forward, and both the doxastic and the anti-doxastic camp capture some distinctive and puzzling features of delusions. The one-factor theory, the two-factor theory, and the prediction-error theory constitute distinct attempts to describe the causal mechanisms responsible for the formation of delusions and have implications for the management and treatment of delusions in clinical practice. The lively debates surrounding the nature and the causal history of delusions have also shed some light on standard issues in the philosophy of mind, such as what conditions a report needs to satisfy to be regarded as a belief report, and how experience and reasoning interact in generating of hypotheses that can then be accepted as beliefs.
Artificial intelligence, recent work on
Authors: Walmsley Joel
Published: September 2018

The two main philosophical questions with which artificial intelligence (AI) has been traditionally concerned are (1) 'Could a machine think?’ and (2) 'Are we (humans) thinking machines?’ (see Walmsley 2012). Recent work in AI has continued to seek answers to these questions either by building technological tools to perform activities and accomplish tasks that human minds can do, or by helping us to understand the processes and mechanisms involved in human cognition. In addition, recent work in AI attempts to go beyond the human case to raise questions about the cognitive capacities of actual and potential systems that are more powerful than the human mind, and to understand the consequences—and the risks—of the underlying technological developments.

Recent extensions of previous work in AI include the development of ‘Deep Learning’ algorithms to enable artificial systems to learn from complex data with much less intervention and supervision by the human programmer. This is partly inspired by success in neuroscientific research on the structure and function of the human brain (and developments in connectionist and neural network AI), and has a wide range of technological applications and psychological implications. Such work goes hand-in-hand with work in brain emulation and the fine-grained replication of neurological structure in non-biological substrates.

In addition to building on earlier successes, recent work has begun to address related questions about the consequences – and risks – of the development of AI technologies. First, there is a significant (and increasingly nuanced) debate about the possibility of (and the timeframe for) the development of ‘superintelligent’ AI (AI systems that exceed the cognitive capacities of humans): a hypothetical point in the future that has come to be known as ‘the singularity’. Second, recent work in AI has seen a growing appreciation of the risks of both current, and hypothetical future, AI.

As a consequence, recent work in AI continues to address—and shed light on—many familiar philosophical questions. In addition to the general questions of whether machines could think, or whether the human mind could be understood in mechanical terms, there are also several specific questions that touch on other areas of philosophy, such as: would the development of AI show that physicalism, or functionalism, about the mind is correct? How should we understand the identity of a person over time? How should we understand the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and the brain? What is the relationship between values, motivation and behaviour?