bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Parapsychology
Authors: Stairs Allen 
Published: September 2018

Tales of dreams that come true, ‘mind over matter’ and other such oddities are both familiar and old. Parapsychology investigates such things, attempting to use scientific and, especially, experimental methods to investigate whether and in what circumstances humans can glean information without using ordinary perceptual means (that is, by extrasensory perception or ESP) or can alter the physical environment simply by willing it (that is, by psychokinesis). Such phenomena, if they exist, are often grouped under the heading psi(-phenomena).
It is sometimes claimed that parapsychology presents a challenge to physicalism. However, ostensible psi-phenomena are known through their physical effects and are studied within parapsychology by ordinary scientific methods. In fact, models intended to explain psi-phenomena by known physical processes have been seriously discussed within parapsychology. In any case, parapsychology alone could not show that psi-phenomena have no physical explanation; that is a judgment for physics itself. More important, physicalism is a very broad doctrine that should not simply be equated with the requirement that everything be explained within physics. It is very unclear what we would gain by denying that psi-phenomena are physical.
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)
Authors: Gopnik Alison 
Published: September 2018

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the founder of the field we now call cognitive development. His own term for the discipline was ‘genetic epistemology’, reflecting his deep philosophical concerns. Among Piaget’s most enduring contributions were his remarkably robust and surprising observations of children. Time after time, in a strikingly wide variety of domains, and at every age from birth to adolescence, he discovered that children understood the world in very different ways from adults.
But Piaget was really only interested in children because he thought they exemplified basic epistemological processes. By studying children we could discover how biological organisms acquire knowledge of the world around them. The principles of genetic epistemology could then be applied to other creatures, from molluscs to physicists. Piaget’s other enduring legacy is the idea that apparently foundational kinds of knowledge were neither given innately nor directly derived from experience. Rather, knowledge was constructed as a result of the complex interplay between organisms and their environment. Piaget saw this view as an alternative to both classical rationalism and empiricism.
Semantics, conceptual role
Authors: Block Ned 
Published: September 2018

According to conceptual role semantics (CRS), the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, thought and decision-making. It is an extension of the well-known ‘use’ theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and, more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual, but also counterfactual: not only what effects a thought does have, but what effects it would have had if stimuli or other states had differed. Of course, so defined, the functional role of a thought includes all sorts of causes and effects that are non-semantic, for example, perhaps happy thoughts can bolster one’s immunity, promoting good health. Conceptual roles are functional roles minus such non-semantic causes and effects.
The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where it is sometimes called ‘inferential’ or ‘functional’ role semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes called ‘procedural semantics’).
Syntax
Authors: Neale Stephen 
Published: September 2018

Syntax (more loosely, ‘grammar’) is the study of the properties of expressions that distinguish them as members of different linguistic categories, and ‘well-formedness’, that is, the ways in which expressions belonging to these categories may be combined to form larger units. Typical syntactic categories include noun, verb and sentence. Syntactic properties have played an important role not only in the study of ‘natural’ languages (such as English or Urdu) but also in the study of logic and computation. For example, in symbolic logic, classes of well-formed formulas are specified without mentioning what formulas (or their parts) mean, or whether they are true or false; similarly, the operations of a computer can be fruitfully specified using only syntactic properties, a fact that has a bearing on the viability of computational theories of mind.
The study of the syntax of natural language has taken on significance for philosophy in the twentieth century, partly because of the suspicion, voiced by Russell, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, that philosophical problems often turned on misunderstandings of syntax (or the closely related notion of ‘logical form’). Moreover, an idea that has been fruitfully developed since the pioneering work of Frege is that a proper understanding of syntax offers an important basis for any understanding of semantics, since the meaning of a complex expression is compositional, that is, built up from the meanings of its parts as determined by syntax.
In the mid-twentieth century, philosophical interest in the systematic study of the syntax of natural language was heightened by Noam Chomsky’s work on the nature of syntactic rules and on the innateness of mental structures specific to the acquisition (or growth) of grammatical knowledge. This work formalized traditional work on grammatical categories within an approach to the theory of computability, and also revived proposals of traditional philosophical rationalists that many twentieth-century empiricists had regarded as bankrupt. Chomskian theories of grammar have become the focus of most contemporary work on syntax.
Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–54)
Authors: Moor James H. 
Published: September 2018

Alan Turing was a mathematical logician who made fundamental contributions to the theory of computation. He developed the concept of an abstract computing device (a ‘Turing machine’) which precisely characterizes the concept of computation, and provided the basis for the practical development of electronic digital computers beginning in the 1940s. He demonstrated both the scope and limitations of computation, proving that some mathematical functions are not computable in principle by such machines.
Turing believed that human behaviour might be understood in terms of computation, and his views inspired contemporary computational theories of mind. He proposed a comparative test for machine intelligence, the ‘Turing test’, in which a human interrogator tries to distinguish a computer from a human by interacting with them only over a teletypewriter. Although the validity of the Turing test is controversial, the test and modifications of it remain influential measures for evaluating artificial intelligence.
Unconscious mental states
Authors: Rey Georges 
Published: September 2018

Unconscious phenomena are those mental phenomena which their possessor cannot introspect, not only at the moment at which the phenomenon occurs, but even when prompted (‘Do you think/want/…?’). There are abundant allusions to many kinds of unconscious phenomena from classical times to Freud. Most notably, Plato in his Meno defended a doctrine of anamnesis according to which a priori knowledge of, for example, geometry is ‘recollected’ from a previous life. But the notion of a rich, unconscious mental life really takes hold in nineteenth-century writers, such as Herder, Hegel, Helmholtz and Schopenhauer. It is partly out of this latter tradition that Freud’s famous postulations of unconscious, ‘repressed’ desires and memories emerged.
Partly in reaction to the excesses of introspection and partly because of the rise of computational models of mental processes, twentieth-century psychology has often been tempted by Lashley’s view that ‘no activity of mind is ever conscious’ (1956). A wide range of recent experiments do suggest that people can be unaware of a multitude of sensory cognitive factors (for example, pupillary dilation, cognitive dissonance, subliminal cues to problem-solving) that demonstrably affect their behaviour. And Weiskrantz has documented cases of ‘blindsight’ in which patients with damage to their visual cortex can be shown to be sensitive to visual material they sincerely claim they cannot see.
The most controversial cases of unconscious phenomena are those which the agent could not possibly introspect, even in principle. Chomsky ascribes unconscious knowledge of quite abstract principles of grammar to adults and even newborn children that only a linguist could infer.
Many philosophers have found these claims about the unconscious unconvincing, even incoherent. However, they need to show how the evidence cited above could be otherwise explained, and why appeals to the unconscious have seemed so perfectly intelligible throughout history.
Simulation theory
Authors: Davis Martin , Stone Tony 
Published: September 2018

Mental simulation is the simulation, replication or re-enactment, usually in imagination, of the thinking, decision-making, emotional responses or other aspects of the mental life of another person. According to simulation theory, mental simulation in imagination plays a key role in our everyday psychological understanding of other people. The same mental resources that are used in our own thinking, decision-making or emotional responses are redeployed in imagination to provide an understanding of the thoughts, decisions or emotions of another.
Simulation theory stands opposed to the ’ theory theory’ of folk psychology. According to the theory theory, everyday psychological understanding depends on deployment of an empirical theory or body of information about psychological matters, such as how people normally think, make decisions or respond emotionally. Simulation theory does not altogether deny that third-personal psychological knowledge is implicated in our folk psychological practice, prediction, interpretation and explanation. But it maintains that, over a range of cases, the first-personal methodology of mental simulation allows us to avoid the need for detailed antecedent knowledge about how psychological processes typically operate.
Mirror self-recognition
Authors: Schilhab Theresa 
Published: September 2018

Mirror self-recognition (MSR) refers to the empirical investigation of self-awareness, also known as the ‘mirror and mark test’ introduced by psychologist Gordon G. Gallup (1970). The ability to direct behaviour to previously unseen parts of the body such as the inside of the mouth or to groom the eye by the aid of mirrors has been interpreted as the recognition of the self and evidence of a self-concept. Unknowingly, a similar approach was developed independently with children (Amsterdam 1972).
The successful passing of the mirror and mark test has been widely used as a benchmark for distinguishing conscious and non-conscious species within fields with a general interest in evolutionary perspectives on consciousness and cognition such as comparative psychology and cognitive ethology, although controversies about the methodology and theoretical framework persist. These disputes question our intuitions about consciousness and accentuate the epistemic difficulty of obtaining evidence on mental states in others.
Intuitionistic logic and antirealism
Authors: Pagin Peter 
Published: September 2018

The law of excluded middle (LEM) says that every sentence of the form A∨¬A (‘A or not A’) is logically true. This law is accepted in classical logic, but not in intuitionistic logic. The reason for this difference over logical validity is a deeper difference about truth and meaning. In classical logic, the meanings of the logical connectives are explained by means of the truth tables, and these explanations justify LEM. However, the truth table explanations involve acceptance of the principle of bivalence, that is, the principle that every sentence is either true or false. The intuitionist does not accept bivalence, at least not in mathematics. The reason is the view that mathematical sentences are made true and false by proofs which mathematicians construct. On this view, bivalence can be assumed only if we have a guarantee that for each mathematical sentence, either there is a proof of the truth of the sentence, or a proof of its falsity. But we have no such guarantee. Therefore bivalence is not intuitionistically acceptable, and then neither is LEM.
A realist about mathematics thinks that if a mathematical sentence is true, then it is rendered true by the obtaining of some particular state of affairs, whether or not we can know about it, and if that state of affairs does not obtain, then the sentence is false. The realist further thinks that mathematical reality is fully determinate, in that every mathematical state of affairs determinately either obtains or does not obtain. As a result, the principle of bivalence is taken to hold for mathematical sentences. The intuitionist is usually an antirealist about mathematics, rejecting the idea of a fully determinate, mind-independent mathematical reality.
The intuitionist’s view about the truth-conditions of mathematical sentences is not obviously incompatible with realism about mathematical states of affairs. According to Michael Dummett, however, the view about truth-conditions implies antirealism. In Dummett’s view, a conflict over realism is fundamentally a conflict about what makes sentences true, and therefore about semantics, for there is no further question about, for example, the existence of a mathematical reality than as a truth ground for mathematical sentences. In this vein Dummett has proposed to take acceptance of bivalence as actually defining a realist position.
If this is right, then both the choice between classical and intuitionistic logic and questions of realism are fundamentally questions of semantics, for whether or not bivalence holds depends on the proper semantics. The question of the proper semantics, in turn, belongs to the theory of meaning. Within the theory of meaning Dummett has laid down general principles, from which he argues that meaning cannot in general consist in bivalent truth-conditions. The principles concern the need for, and the possibility of, manifesting one’s knowledge of meaning to other speakers, and the nature of such manifestations. If Dummett’s argument is sound, then bivalence cannot be justified directly from semantics, and may not be justifiable at all.
Free logics, philosophical issues in
Authors: Lambert Karel 
Published: September 2018

The expression ‘free logic’ is a contraction of the more cumbersome ‘logic free of existence assumptions with respect to both its general terms (predicates) and its singular terms’. Its most distinctive feature is the rejection of the principle of universal specification, a principle of classical predicate logic which licenses the logical truth of statements such as ‘If everything rotates then (the planet) Mars rotates’. If a free logic contains the general term ‘exists’, this principle is replaced by a restricted version, one which licenses the logical truth only of statements such as ‘If everything rotates then Mars rotates, provided that Mars exists’. If the free logic does not contain the general term ‘exists’, but contains the term ‘is the same as’, the principle is replaced by a version which licenses only statements such as ‘If everything rotates then Mars rotates, provided that there is an object the same as Mars’.
Most free logicians regard the restricted version of universal specification as simply making explicit an implicit assumption, namely, that Mars exists. Indeed, free logic is the culmination of a long historical trend to rid logic of existence assumptions with respect to its terms. Just as classical predicate logic purports to be free of the hidden existence assumptions which pervaded the medieval theory of inference with respect to its general terms, so free logic rids classical predicate logic of hidden existence assumptions with respect to its singular terms.
There are various kinds of free logic, with many interesting and novel philosophical applications. These cover a wide range of issues from the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of religion. In addition to the issue of how to analyse singular existence statements, of the form ‘3 + 7 exists’ and ‘That than which nothing greater can be conceived exists’, of special importance are issues in the theory of definite descriptions, set theory, the theory of reference, modal logic and the theory of complex general terms.
Second-order logic, philosophical issues in
Authors: Shapiro Stewart 
Published: September 2018

Typically, a formal language has variables that range over a collection of objects, or domain of discourse. A language is ‘second-order’ if it has, in addition, variables that range over sets, functions, properties or relations on the domain of discourse. A language is third-order if it has variables ranging over sets of sets, or functions on relations, and so on. A language is higher-order if it is at least second-order.
Second-order languages enjoy a greater expressive power than first-order languages. For example, a set S of sentences is said to be categorical if any two models satisfying S are isomorphic, that is, have the same structure. There are second-order, categorical characterizations of important mathematical structures, including the natural numbers, the real numbers and Euclidean space. It is a consequence of the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems that there is no first-order categorical characterization of any infinite structure. There are also a number of central mathematical notions, such as finitude, countability, minimal closure and well-foundedness, which can be characterized with formulas of second-order languages, but cannot be characterized in first-order languages.
Some philosophers argue that second-order logic is not logic. Properties and relations are too obscure for rigorous foundational study, while sets and functions are in the purview of mathematics, not logic; logic should not have an ontology of its own. Other writers disqualify second-order logic because its consequence relation is not effective – there is no recursively enumerable, sound and complete deductive system for second-order logic.
The deeper issues underlying the dispute concern the goals and purposes of logical theory. If a logic is to be a calculus, an effective canon of inference, then second-order logic is beyond the pale. If, on the other hand, one aims to codify a standard to which correct reasoning must adhere, and to characterize the descriptive and communicative abilities of informal mathematical practice, then perhaps there is room for second-order logic.
Demonstratives and indexicals
Authors: Deutsch Harry 
Published: September 2018

Demonstratives and indexicals are words and phrases whose interpretations are dependent on features of the context in which they are used. For example, the reference of ‘I’ depends on conditions associated with its use: as you use it, it refers to you; as I use it, it refers to me. In contrast, what ‘the inventor of bifocals’ refers to does not depend on when or where or by whom it is used. Among indexicals are the words ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’, demonstrative pronouns such as ‘this’, reflexive, possessive and personal pronouns; and compound phrases employing indexicals, such as ‘my mother’. C.S. Peirce introduced the term ‘indexical’ to suggest the idea of pointing (as in ‘index finger’).
The phenomenon of indexicality figures prominently in recent debates in philosophy. This is because indexicals allow us to express beliefs about our subjective ‘place’ in the world, beliefs which are the immediate antecedents of action; and some argue that such beliefs are irreducibly indexical. For example, my belief that I am about to be attacked by a bear is distinct from my belief that HD is about to be attacked by a bear, since my having the former belief explains why I act as I do (I flee), whereas my having the latter belief explains nothing unless the explanation continues ‘and I believe that I am HD’. It seems impossible to describe the beliefs that prompt my action without the help of ‘I’. Similarly, some have argued that indexical-free accounts of the self or of consciousness are necessarily incomplete, so that a purely objective physicalism is impossible. In a different vein, some (such as Putnam 1975) have argued that our terms for natural substances, kinds and phenomena (‘gold’, ‘water’, ‘light’) are indexical in a way that entails that certain substantive scientific claims – for example, that water is H2O – are, if true, necessarily true. Thus, reflection on indexicality has yielded some surprising (and controversial) philosophical conclusions.
Existence
Authors: Mackie Penelope 
Published: September 2018

Philosophical problems concerning existence fall under two main headings: ‘What is existence?’ and ‘What things exist?’. Although these questions cannot be entirely separated, this entry will concentrate on the first.
The question ‘What is existence?’ has produced a surprising variety of answers. Some hold that existence is a property that every individual has, others that it is a characteristic that some individuals have but other (for example, imaginary) individuals lack, while proponents of the thesis that ‘existence is not a predicate’ hold that existence is not a property or characteristic of individuals at all.
Other philosophical issues concerning existence include: disputes about whether there are abstract objects (for example, numbers, universals) as well as concrete ones, immaterial souls as well as bodies, possible objects as well as actual ones, and so on; and questions about which entities (if any) are the fundamental constituents of reality.
Identity
Authors: Williamson Timothy 
Published: September 2018

Anything whatsoever has the relation of identity to itself, and to nothing else. Things are identical if they are one thing, not two. We can refute the claim that they are identical if we can find a property of one that is not simultaneously a property of the other. The concept of identity is fundamental to logic. Without it, counting would be impossible, for we could not distinguish in principle between counting one thing twice and counting two different things. When we have acquired the concept, it can still be difficult to make this distinction in practice. Misjudgments of identity are possible because one thing can be presented in many guises.
Identity judgments often involve assumptions about the nature of things. The identity of the present mature tree with the past sapling implies persistence through change. The non-identity of the actual child of one couple with the hypothetical child of a different couple is implied by the claim that ancestry is an essential property. Knowledge of what directions are involves knowledge that parallel lines have identical directions. Many controversies over identity concern the nature of the things in question. Others concern challenges to the orthodox conception just sketched of identity itself.