I teach philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. I have research interests in philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminism, and philosophy of religion.
Quite wisely, Fiona Cowie begins her provocative new book, What's Within? with a long and detaile... more Quite wisely, Fiona Cowie begins her provocative new book, What's Within? with a long and detailed exploration of the notion of 'innateness' as it has functioned in both classical and contemporary philosophical thought. 1 Cowie eventually distills, from a survey of discussions by Locke, Descartes, and Leibniz, two 'independent strands in nativist thought' (p. 67). The first of these is concerned with establishing an empirical, psychological thesis about learning, namely the thesis that there exist 'domain-specific learning devices or mechanisms.' This strand winds into the twentieth-century in the form of Chomsky's 'poverty-of-the-stimulus' arguments for the existence of a specialized body of innate principles that make possible language development in human beings (p. 67). The second strand in nativism identified by Cowie involves the 'metapsychological, or more narrowly "philosophical" thesis' that 'the bearing of experience on our acquisition of ideas is utterly inscrutable' (p. 64). Nativism in this form, Cowie argues, is not so much a positive thesis about the origin of our ideas, as it is an in-principle rejection of the causal account of concept acquisition proffered by the empiricists. According to Cowie's reading, Descartes and Leibniz both held (albeit for different reasons) that there could be no causal interaction between the mind and the extra-mental world, and hence no possibility of our ideas having been genuinely caused by things in that *Review of Fiona Cowie, What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered. Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 334. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Meetings in December, 1999; I'd like to thank my audience and co-panelists, Fiona Cowie and Robert Matthews, for a stimulating discussion of these topics. I'd also like to thank Fiona Cowie and Jerry Fodor for their correspondence with me, and Georges Rey and Joseph Levine for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Finally, I'd like to thank the participants in my seminar on innate ideas at the
People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular ... more People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular car gets 45 mpg, and it doesn't, we care. If the information board says that our flight is leaving from Gate 24, and it's not, we care. If our children say that they have done their homework, but they haven't, we care. Truth still matters. Why, then, do we elect people who don't seem to care about the truth? I think that the answer to this question is partly political, and partly epistemological. Let me start with the epistemological issues. The first thing I want to call attention to is the difficulty of finding the truth on many matters of current concern. I am a highly educated person with lots of control over my daily schedule, and yet even I find it extremely difficult to gain more than a passing understanding of many of the important issues of our time. I certainly cannot personally confirm or disconfirm many of the propositions I believe to be true, including some that form the bases of my political allegiances. These include: my belief in human-caused climate change 0 my belief that public job programs will help the economy more than tax reductions for the wealthy my belief that the "free market" produces neither efficacy nor efficiency in the delivery of health care. * Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I wish to thank Joseph Levine, Heidi Feldman, and Bruce Ledewitz for comments and questions that helped me develop this paper. I would also like to thank Professor Feldman and Professor Ledewitz for their kind invitation to speak at the "Will These Bones Rise?" conference. Finally, I would like to thank my audience at Duquesne University School of Law for their stimulating questions and remarks.
What is the philosophical significance of illusions? In epistemology, illusions turn up regularly... more What is the philosophical significance of illusions? In epistemology, illusions turn up regularly in arguments for external-world skepticism. But Tim Crane argues that they raise problems antecedent to issues about the reliability of perception. The possibility of illusions, Crane says, threatens our "ordinary conception of perception," according to which perception is or involves "openness to the world." (Crane 2011) This "openness," as Crane characterizes it, involves two ideas: first, that the objects of experience, the things that we perceive, are mindindependent, and second, that the phenomenal character of the experience has, as Crane cautiously puts it, "something to do with the nature" of those objects. So in the typical case, a case of veridical perception, when I have an experience of some object o's having a property F, 2 the experience will be "open" both in the sense that I am directly aware of a mind-external object, o, and also in the sense that o's being F somehow determines or explains the character of 1 This paper has had-as they say of some Broadway shows-an unusually long preview period. Consequently, I have many people to thank: my audiences at the 3 rd Croatian Conference on Metaphysics and Epistemology, at Philosophy of Mind in Budapest, Collegium Budapest and
Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating t... more Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating the choice to eye movements. Participants in their study considered questions such as "Is murder sometimes justifiable?" and their gaze was monitored as they looked at on-screen yes and no buttons. They were required to choose as soon as the buttons disappeared. Richardson et al. arranged for die buttons to disappear when the participant's gaze had rested on one of them for 500 ms and found diat "yes" responses were about 10% more likely when gaze had been on the yes than the no button. This and many other such subtle priming effects offer considerable promise for future exploration of insight, awareness, and decision making.
Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating t... more Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating the choice to eye movements. Participants in their study considered questions such as "Is murder sometimes justifiable?" and their gaze was monitored as they looked at on-screen yes and no buttons. They were required to choose as soon as the buttons disappeared. Richardson et al. arranged for die buttons to disappear when the participant's gaze had rested on one of them for 500 ms and found diat "yes" responses were about 10% more likely when gaze had been on the yes than the no button. This and many other such subtle priming effects offer considerable promise for future exploration of insight, awareness, and decision making.
Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Although women garner a little more than ... more Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Although women garner a little more than half of the PhDs awarded in the United States, and about 53 percent of those awarded in the Arts and Humanities, 2 slightly fewer than 30 percent of doctorates in philosophy are awarded to women. 3 And women's representation in the professoriate falls below that. 4 Why is philosophy so exceptional in this regard? My aim in this paper is not to answer this question but to contrast two different frameworks for addressing it. I call one model "Different Voices" and the other "The Perfect Storm"; I'll argue that we ought to adopt the second model and that we ought to abandon the first. Why are there so few women in philosophy? Women who are in the field have been speculating about this for quite a while, but interest in the question has suddenly surged, engaging men now as well as women. 5 Most recently, a paper addressing this issue by Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich has sparked intense controversy. 6 Buckwalter and Stich claim to have found evidence of gender differences in people's responses to common philosophical thought-experiments, and they speculate that these differences may help account for the dearth of women in the field. Their idea is that if women have different intuitions about standard thought-experiments than men do, and if men dominate philosophy, then women studying philosophy may come to the conclusion-or be told explicitlythat they just don't "get" philosophy-that philosophy is not the subject for them. More precisely, Buckwalter and Stitch's suggestion is that women may be victims of a "selection effect" within philosophy. If agreement with the philosophical consensus is taken to be a sine qua non of philosophical ability, individuals with non-orthodox intuitions will be filtered out. If that consensus is forged within a community that is almost all-male, then it will be men's intuitions that will constitute the philosophical mainstream. If women, then, have systematically different intuitions from men's, then their intuitions will be less likely than men's to agree with mainstream opinion, and thus more likely to be filtered out. Women, in short, will be disproportionately selected against. Now this suggestion-that there's something about philosophy and something about women that makes the one alien to the other-is not new. To choose one notable example: Kant notoriously held that women were generally incapable of abstract thought, that women's faculties of understanding were merely "beautiful," not "sublime" like men's. For this reason, the idea of a woman philosopher bs_bs_banner
Jaegwon Kim's well-known ''explanatory exclusion'' argument is usually discussed in the context o... more Jaegwon Kim's well-known ''explanatory exclusion'' argument is usually discussed in the context of the mental causation debate. But I also see in this argument a fundamental challenge to a popular view of the relation between the mental and the physical, namely, the view that mental properties are higher-order properties realized by physical properties. (I'll refer to this view simply as ''Multiple Realizability'' or ''MR.'') MR aims to maneuver between the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of type reductionism by asserting two things about mental properties: first, that they are realized by physical properties, 1 and second, that they are multiply realizable by physical properties. The first thing explains how mental properties can be causally efficacious: because a mental property is instantiated via the instantiation of a physical property, the mental property ''inherits'' all the causal powers associated with the realizing physical property. The second thing certifies the autonomy of the mental: because one and the same mental property can be realized in a variety of different physical properties, the mental property cannot be identified with, and therefore cannot be reduced to, any particular physical realizer property. For purposes of preserving the autonomy of the mental, the ''able'' in ''multiply realizable'' is crucial. Even if it were to turn out that mental properties were actually co-extensive with specific physical properties, the fact that they were not necessarily co-extensive would be enough to show that the mental properties and these physical realizer properties were not the same. Many philosophers find MR intuitively plausible. Indeed, the ability to countenance creatures with mental lives who happen not to be constituted like us has long been considered an important desideratum for an adequate theory of mentality. It was an advantage that behaviorism enjoyed over type identity theory, and one that functionalism readily co-opted. What pedagogue among us has not pumped our students' intuitions in favor of one or Philosophical Issues, 13, Philosophy of Mind, 2003 the other of these views by bidding them to consider the android Data of Star Trek? In a properly run classroom, all will agree that you don't need a human brain to possess a mind. 2 Significantly, even John Searle, who maintains that intentionality is a causal power of brains, insists that his view leaves open the possibility of artificial or alien minds-a mind needn't be made out of actual brain stuff, he says, as long as the alternate stuff has the same causal powers as brains. (Searle 1992) But all along, there have been dissonant voices. David Lewis, in his ''Mad Pain and Martian Pain'' (Lewis 1980) pointed out that advocates of multiple realizability might find themselves faced with an uncomfortable choice: between, on the one hand, honoring the idea that similarity of stuff (brains, nerves, muscles, bones-your standard issue terrestrial components) suffices for similarity of mental states, and on the other, retaining the idea that functional profile is the deciding factor, damn the stuff. Ned Block, in ''Troubles with Functionalism,'' dares us to uphold our functionalist principles when faced with ''minds'' made out of the citizens of China. More recently, Ruth Millikan has argued that mentality can only be treated scientifically if it is considered to be a biological property, and Noam Chomsky (et tu, Noam?) seems to agree, averring that ''there is no interest in taking 'mental types' to be non-biological, any more than there would be in defining 'chemical' or 'optical types' that share some properties of chemical and optical aspects of the world.'' (Chomsky 2003, 261) For both Millikan and Chomsky, the proper subject of a serious science is mentality as we find it, instantiated in brains. In Millikan's view, the question whether Data has a mind is as idle a question as whether Emma Bovary had a freckle on her left knee; in Chomsky's view, it's akin to the question of whether airplanes ''really'' fly-a matter for stipulation, not discovery. Kim is no doubt sympathetic to all these points. But his particular challenge to MR has more bite. None of the critics mentioned above claims that there's anything incoherent about MR. Kim's objection, however, if correct, would show that the arguments standardly given in favor of multiple realizability are self-undermining. I don't think that this aspect of Kim's argument has been widely appreciated, so let me start by showing how this radical challenge emerges from the explanatory exclusion argument. Kim's first premise is the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical (CC)-the principle that every physical event (that has a cause at all) 3 has a physical cause. It follows immediately from CC that for every physical event, there is a complete causal explanation in terms of purely physical properties. Now, Kim says, consider a particular physical event-say, an upward motion of my left forefinger at time t. Let us suppose that this particular physical event has a mental cause-say, my wanting to bring my E[ into better tune. CC requires that this motion of my forefinger must have, in addition to the causal explanation in terms of my desire to play in better tune, a complete physicalistic explanation. But now, Kim argues, it looks
Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or "rational-causal" pr... more Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or "rational-causal" process, but can only be a "brute-causal" process of acquisition. This position generates the "doorknob → DOORKNOB" problem: why are concepts typically acquired on the basis of experience with items in their extensions? I argue that Fodor's taxonomy of causal processes needs supplementation, and characterize a third type: what I call "intelligible-causal processes." Armed with this new category I present what I regard as a better response than Fodor's to the doorknob → DOORKNOB problem.
A familiar complaint against naturalized epistemology is that it leaves no room for norms-that it... more A familiar complaint against naturalized epistemology is that it leaves no room for norms-that it abandons the traditional normative goals of theories of knowledge in favor of merely descriptive goals (Kim 1994). In the minds of many critics, this complaint is closely connected with a second, viz., that naturalization leaves no room for the a priori (Haack 1993). In earlier work, I've tried to meet both these challenges head on (Antony 2000). I've tried to show that naturalized epistemology has room for both normativity and the a priori-that indeed, a naturalist can provide a needed explanation of a priori access to epistemic norms. But when I looked around for allies in this noble mission, I discovered that many prominent naturalists agreed with the critics on at least this point: that a naturalized approach to knowledge requires repudiation of the a priori (Devitt forthcoming, Kitcher 2000, Maddy 2000). 2 Michael Devitt goes so far as to define ''naturalism'' in a way that rules out the possibility of a priori knowledge: It is overwhelmingly plausible that some knowledge is empirical, justified by experience. The attractive thesis of naturalism is that all knowledge is; there is only one way of knowing. (Devitt forthcoming) I certainly do not understand epistemological naturalism in this way. Devitt's definition conflates naturalism with empiricism, but this is both wrongheaded and ironic. It's wrongheaded for a naturalist to be an empiricist, because our best scientific theories of cognition have it that empiricism is false. Naturalistic methodology in the study of knowledge (human and non-human) has produced ample support for the existence of a priori elements in cognition, and indeed, for their necessity in even the most mundane cognitive achievements. It's ironic, because a naturalized
Ten years ago, if you went to the store for laundry detergent, you'd find enormous jugs of the st... more Ten years ago, if you went to the store for laundry detergent, you'd find enormous jugs of the stuff. Nowadays, in our more ecologically-minded times, the detergent has been concentrated and repackaged in containers a quarter of the original size. In keeping with the spirit of the age, Shoemaker has taken the amount of philosophy it used to take several volumes to hold and concentrated it into this slim little book. You can do a lot of philosophical laundry with what's in here. It's a privilege and an honor to have this opportunity to discuss it. Of the myriad topics treated in Realization, I'd like to concentrate on two that particularly interest me as a philosopher of mind: first, cross-subject property realization, or realization 2 , and second, the causal profiles of multiply realizable properties. Most of my time will be devoted to the first. 1 Shoemaker believes that we need two kinds of property realization: realization 1 , which holds between properties of one and the same subject, and realization 2, which hold of properties possessed by different subjects. Realization 1 is fully captured by the subset account: an instance of property P is realized 1 in an instance of Q if the instances occur in the same thing and the forward-looking causal features of P are a subset of those of Q, while the backward-looking causal features of Q are a subset of those of P. (31)
I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, "What is it to be a woman?" Prior attempts by ... more I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, "What is it to be a woman?" Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents.
Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and id... more Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and ideas are presented and subsequently refined in the crucible of close scrutiny. The purpose of this series is to reconstruct this vital interplay among thinkers. Each book consists of a temporary assessment of an important living philosopher's work. A collection of essays written by an interdisciplinary group of critics addressing the substantial theses of the philosopher's corpus opens each volume. In the last section, the philosopher responds to his or her critics, clarifies crucial points of the discussion, or updates his or her doctrines.
* 1 am told that the phrase 'raw feels' is due in the first place to E. C. 'Iolman, Purposive Beh... more * 1 am told that the phrase 'raw feels' is due in the first place to E. C. 'Iolman, Purposive Behavioutin Aninzals and Men (New York-London, 1932). It became familiar to philosophers through Herbert Feigl's paper 'The "Mental" and the "Physical" ' in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science I1 (1958). I owe the reference to Tolman to Ullin Place-to the eKect of whose stimulating company, indeed, this paper is largely due.
Back in the 60's, the philosophy of mind, like so many things, was full of hope and promise. Putn... more Back in the 60's, the philosophy of mind, like so many things, was full of hope and promise. Putnam had just invented functionalism and the words "multiple realization" were on everyone's lips. The idea that mentality was a higherorder property of physical systems promised to satisfy our materialist longings without depriving us of our minds. (We were very fond of our minds.) But now a sort of fin de siecle exhaustion has settled over the philosophical world, and many among us have abandoned the dream of having our minds and reducing them too. On the one hand, Jaegwon Kim insists that we must retreat to the "strong" typereductionism of the 50's if we expect our beliefs and desires to have any efficacy in a material world. On the other hand, philosophers including Lynne Rudder Baker (1995), Tyler Burge (1993), Stephen Schiffer (1987), and Stephens Stich and Laurence (1994) now maintain that reductionism in any form is probably impossible and certainly unnecessary. Throwbacks that we are, we mean to keep hope alive. We agree with Kim that Baker and the others are mistaken in thinking that an adequate theory of mind can do without a systematic account of relations between the mental and the physical. We deny that the mind-body problem is an artifact of either screwed-up philosophical priorities or metaphysical self-indulgence (though what's wrong with self-indulgence?). But at the same time, we reject Kim's form of reductionism for its failure to preserve the autonomy of the mental. We believe that a reconsideration of the original arguments for the multiple realization thesis will establish both the reality and the causal relevance of the mental, in a way that is consistent with the demands of materialism. We begin, in Part One, with our criticisms of Kim's reductionist solution to the problem of mental causation, and argue for an alternative approach. In Part Two, we address arguments Baker and Burge have made against the need for reduction, and then explain why the autonomy of the mental cannot be taken for granted.
People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular ... more People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular car gets 45 mpg, and it doesn't, we care. If the information board says that our flight is leaving from Gate 24, and it's not, we care. If our children say that they have done their homework, but they haven't, we care. Truth still matters. Why, then, do we elect people who don't seem to care about the truth? I think that the answer to this question is partly political, and partly epistemological. Let me start with the epistemological issues. The first thing I want to call attention to is the difficulty of finding the truth on many matters of current concern. I am a highly educated person with lots of control over my daily schedule, and yet even I find it extremely difficult to gain more than a passing understanding of many of the important issues of our time. I certainly cannot personally confirm or disconfirm many of the propositions I believe to be true, including some that form the bases of my political allegiances. These include: my belief in human-caused climate change 0 my belief that public job programs will help the economy more than tax reductions for the wealthy my belief that the "free market" produces neither efficacy nor efficiency in the delivery of health care. * Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I wish to thank Joseph Levine, Heidi Feldman, and Bruce Ledewitz for comments and questions that helped me develop this paper. I would also like to thank Professor Feldman and Professor Ledewitz for their kind invitation to speak at the "Will These Bones Rise?" conference. Finally, I would like to thank my audience at Duquesne University School of Law for their stimulating questions and remarks.
Quite wisely, Fiona Cowie begins her provocative new book, What's Within? with a long and detaile... more Quite wisely, Fiona Cowie begins her provocative new book, What's Within? with a long and detailed exploration of the notion of 'innateness' as it has functioned in both classical and contemporary philosophical thought. 1 Cowie eventually distills, from a survey of discussions by Locke, Descartes, and Leibniz, two 'independent strands in nativist thought' (p. 67). The first of these is concerned with establishing an empirical, psychological thesis about learning, namely the thesis that there exist 'domain-specific learning devices or mechanisms.' This strand winds into the twentieth-century in the form of Chomsky's 'poverty-of-the-stimulus' arguments for the existence of a specialized body of innate principles that make possible language development in human beings (p. 67). The second strand in nativism identified by Cowie involves the 'metapsychological, or more narrowly "philosophical" thesis' that 'the bearing of experience on our acquisition of ideas is utterly inscrutable' (p. 64). Nativism in this form, Cowie argues, is not so much a positive thesis about the origin of our ideas, as it is an in-principle rejection of the causal account of concept acquisition proffered by the empiricists. According to Cowie's reading, Descartes and Leibniz both held (albeit for different reasons) that there could be no causal interaction between the mind and the extra-mental world, and hence no possibility of our ideas having been genuinely caused by things in that *Review of Fiona Cowie, What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered. Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 334. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Meetings in December, 1999; I'd like to thank my audience and co-panelists, Fiona Cowie and Robert Matthews, for a stimulating discussion of these topics. I'd also like to thank Fiona Cowie and Jerry Fodor for their correspondence with me, and Georges Rey and Joseph Levine for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Finally, I'd like to thank the participants in my seminar on innate ideas at the
People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular ... more People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular car gets 45 mpg, and it doesn't, we care. If the information board says that our flight is leaving from Gate 24, and it's not, we care. If our children say that they have done their homework, but they haven't, we care. Truth still matters. Why, then, do we elect people who don't seem to care about the truth? I think that the answer to this question is partly political, and partly epistemological. Let me start with the epistemological issues. The first thing I want to call attention to is the difficulty of finding the truth on many matters of current concern. I am a highly educated person with lots of control over my daily schedule, and yet even I find it extremely difficult to gain more than a passing understanding of many of the important issues of our time. I certainly cannot personally confirm or disconfirm many of the propositions I believe to be true, including some that form the bases of my political allegiances. These include: my belief in human-caused climate change 0 my belief that public job programs will help the economy more than tax reductions for the wealthy my belief that the "free market" produces neither efficacy nor efficiency in the delivery of health care. * Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I wish to thank Joseph Levine, Heidi Feldman, and Bruce Ledewitz for comments and questions that helped me develop this paper. I would also like to thank Professor Feldman and Professor Ledewitz for their kind invitation to speak at the "Will These Bones Rise?" conference. Finally, I would like to thank my audience at Duquesne University School of Law for their stimulating questions and remarks.
What is the philosophical significance of illusions? In epistemology, illusions turn up regularly... more What is the philosophical significance of illusions? In epistemology, illusions turn up regularly in arguments for external-world skepticism. But Tim Crane argues that they raise problems antecedent to issues about the reliability of perception. The possibility of illusions, Crane says, threatens our "ordinary conception of perception," according to which perception is or involves "openness to the world." (Crane 2011) This "openness," as Crane characterizes it, involves two ideas: first, that the objects of experience, the things that we perceive, are mindindependent, and second, that the phenomenal character of the experience has, as Crane cautiously puts it, "something to do with the nature" of those objects. So in the typical case, a case of veridical perception, when I have an experience of some object o's having a property F, 2 the experience will be "open" both in the sense that I am directly aware of a mind-external object, o, and also in the sense that o's being F somehow determines or explains the character of 1 This paper has had-as they say of some Broadway shows-an unusually long preview period. Consequently, I have many people to thank: my audiences at the 3 rd Croatian Conference on Metaphysics and Epistemology, at Philosophy of Mind in Budapest, Collegium Budapest and
Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating t... more Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating the choice to eye movements. Participants in their study considered questions such as "Is murder sometimes justifiable?" and their gaze was monitored as they looked at on-screen yes and no buttons. They were required to choose as soon as the buttons disappeared. Richardson et al. arranged for die buttons to disappear when the participant's gaze had rested on one of them for 500 ms and found diat "yes" responses were about 10% more likely when gaze had been on the yes than the no button. This and many other such subtle priming effects offer considerable promise for future exploration of insight, awareness, and decision making.
Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating t... more Comm«nícn//Newell & Shanks: Unconscious influences on decision making be influenced by relating the choice to eye movements. Participants in their study considered questions such as "Is murder sometimes justifiable?" and their gaze was monitored as they looked at on-screen yes and no buttons. They were required to choose as soon as the buttons disappeared. Richardson et al. arranged for die buttons to disappear when the participant's gaze had rested on one of them for 500 ms and found diat "yes" responses were about 10% more likely when gaze had been on the yes than the no button. This and many other such subtle priming effects offer considerable promise for future exploration of insight, awareness, and decision making.
Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Although women garner a little more than ... more Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Although women garner a little more than half of the PhDs awarded in the United States, and about 53 percent of those awarded in the Arts and Humanities, 2 slightly fewer than 30 percent of doctorates in philosophy are awarded to women. 3 And women's representation in the professoriate falls below that. 4 Why is philosophy so exceptional in this regard? My aim in this paper is not to answer this question but to contrast two different frameworks for addressing it. I call one model "Different Voices" and the other "The Perfect Storm"; I'll argue that we ought to adopt the second model and that we ought to abandon the first. Why are there so few women in philosophy? Women who are in the field have been speculating about this for quite a while, but interest in the question has suddenly surged, engaging men now as well as women. 5 Most recently, a paper addressing this issue by Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich has sparked intense controversy. 6 Buckwalter and Stich claim to have found evidence of gender differences in people's responses to common philosophical thought-experiments, and they speculate that these differences may help account for the dearth of women in the field. Their idea is that if women have different intuitions about standard thought-experiments than men do, and if men dominate philosophy, then women studying philosophy may come to the conclusion-or be told explicitlythat they just don't "get" philosophy-that philosophy is not the subject for them. More precisely, Buckwalter and Stitch's suggestion is that women may be victims of a "selection effect" within philosophy. If agreement with the philosophical consensus is taken to be a sine qua non of philosophical ability, individuals with non-orthodox intuitions will be filtered out. If that consensus is forged within a community that is almost all-male, then it will be men's intuitions that will constitute the philosophical mainstream. If women, then, have systematically different intuitions from men's, then their intuitions will be less likely than men's to agree with mainstream opinion, and thus more likely to be filtered out. Women, in short, will be disproportionately selected against. Now this suggestion-that there's something about philosophy and something about women that makes the one alien to the other-is not new. To choose one notable example: Kant notoriously held that women were generally incapable of abstract thought, that women's faculties of understanding were merely "beautiful," not "sublime" like men's. For this reason, the idea of a woman philosopher bs_bs_banner
Jaegwon Kim's well-known ''explanatory exclusion'' argument is usually discussed in the context o... more Jaegwon Kim's well-known ''explanatory exclusion'' argument is usually discussed in the context of the mental causation debate. But I also see in this argument a fundamental challenge to a popular view of the relation between the mental and the physical, namely, the view that mental properties are higher-order properties realized by physical properties. (I'll refer to this view simply as ''Multiple Realizability'' or ''MR.'') MR aims to maneuver between the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of type reductionism by asserting two things about mental properties: first, that they are realized by physical properties, 1 and second, that they are multiply realizable by physical properties. The first thing explains how mental properties can be causally efficacious: because a mental property is instantiated via the instantiation of a physical property, the mental property ''inherits'' all the causal powers associated with the realizing physical property. The second thing certifies the autonomy of the mental: because one and the same mental property can be realized in a variety of different physical properties, the mental property cannot be identified with, and therefore cannot be reduced to, any particular physical realizer property. For purposes of preserving the autonomy of the mental, the ''able'' in ''multiply realizable'' is crucial. Even if it were to turn out that mental properties were actually co-extensive with specific physical properties, the fact that they were not necessarily co-extensive would be enough to show that the mental properties and these physical realizer properties were not the same. Many philosophers find MR intuitively plausible. Indeed, the ability to countenance creatures with mental lives who happen not to be constituted like us has long been considered an important desideratum for an adequate theory of mentality. It was an advantage that behaviorism enjoyed over type identity theory, and one that functionalism readily co-opted. What pedagogue among us has not pumped our students' intuitions in favor of one or Philosophical Issues, 13, Philosophy of Mind, 2003 the other of these views by bidding them to consider the android Data of Star Trek? In a properly run classroom, all will agree that you don't need a human brain to possess a mind. 2 Significantly, even John Searle, who maintains that intentionality is a causal power of brains, insists that his view leaves open the possibility of artificial or alien minds-a mind needn't be made out of actual brain stuff, he says, as long as the alternate stuff has the same causal powers as brains. (Searle 1992) But all along, there have been dissonant voices. David Lewis, in his ''Mad Pain and Martian Pain'' (Lewis 1980) pointed out that advocates of multiple realizability might find themselves faced with an uncomfortable choice: between, on the one hand, honoring the idea that similarity of stuff (brains, nerves, muscles, bones-your standard issue terrestrial components) suffices for similarity of mental states, and on the other, retaining the idea that functional profile is the deciding factor, damn the stuff. Ned Block, in ''Troubles with Functionalism,'' dares us to uphold our functionalist principles when faced with ''minds'' made out of the citizens of China. More recently, Ruth Millikan has argued that mentality can only be treated scientifically if it is considered to be a biological property, and Noam Chomsky (et tu, Noam?) seems to agree, averring that ''there is no interest in taking 'mental types' to be non-biological, any more than there would be in defining 'chemical' or 'optical types' that share some properties of chemical and optical aspects of the world.'' (Chomsky 2003, 261) For both Millikan and Chomsky, the proper subject of a serious science is mentality as we find it, instantiated in brains. In Millikan's view, the question whether Data has a mind is as idle a question as whether Emma Bovary had a freckle on her left knee; in Chomsky's view, it's akin to the question of whether airplanes ''really'' fly-a matter for stipulation, not discovery. Kim is no doubt sympathetic to all these points. But his particular challenge to MR has more bite. None of the critics mentioned above claims that there's anything incoherent about MR. Kim's objection, however, if correct, would show that the arguments standardly given in favor of multiple realizability are self-undermining. I don't think that this aspect of Kim's argument has been widely appreciated, so let me start by showing how this radical challenge emerges from the explanatory exclusion argument. Kim's first premise is the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical (CC)-the principle that every physical event (that has a cause at all) 3 has a physical cause. It follows immediately from CC that for every physical event, there is a complete causal explanation in terms of purely physical properties. Now, Kim says, consider a particular physical event-say, an upward motion of my left forefinger at time t. Let us suppose that this particular physical event has a mental cause-say, my wanting to bring my E[ into better tune. CC requires that this motion of my forefinger must have, in addition to the causal explanation in terms of my desire to play in better tune, a complete physicalistic explanation. But now, Kim argues, it looks
Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or "rational-causal" pr... more Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or "rational-causal" process, but can only be a "brute-causal" process of acquisition. This position generates the "doorknob → DOORKNOB" problem: why are concepts typically acquired on the basis of experience with items in their extensions? I argue that Fodor's taxonomy of causal processes needs supplementation, and characterize a third type: what I call "intelligible-causal processes." Armed with this new category I present what I regard as a better response than Fodor's to the doorknob → DOORKNOB problem.
A familiar complaint against naturalized epistemology is that it leaves no room for norms-that it... more A familiar complaint against naturalized epistemology is that it leaves no room for norms-that it abandons the traditional normative goals of theories of knowledge in favor of merely descriptive goals (Kim 1994). In the minds of many critics, this complaint is closely connected with a second, viz., that naturalization leaves no room for the a priori (Haack 1993). In earlier work, I've tried to meet both these challenges head on (Antony 2000). I've tried to show that naturalized epistemology has room for both normativity and the a priori-that indeed, a naturalist can provide a needed explanation of a priori access to epistemic norms. But when I looked around for allies in this noble mission, I discovered that many prominent naturalists agreed with the critics on at least this point: that a naturalized approach to knowledge requires repudiation of the a priori (Devitt forthcoming, Kitcher 2000, Maddy 2000). 2 Michael Devitt goes so far as to define ''naturalism'' in a way that rules out the possibility of a priori knowledge: It is overwhelmingly plausible that some knowledge is empirical, justified by experience. The attractive thesis of naturalism is that all knowledge is; there is only one way of knowing. (Devitt forthcoming) I certainly do not understand epistemological naturalism in this way. Devitt's definition conflates naturalism with empiricism, but this is both wrongheaded and ironic. It's wrongheaded for a naturalist to be an empiricist, because our best scientific theories of cognition have it that empiricism is false. Naturalistic methodology in the study of knowledge (human and non-human) has produced ample support for the existence of a priori elements in cognition, and indeed, for their necessity in even the most mundane cognitive achievements. It's ironic, because a naturalized
Ten years ago, if you went to the store for laundry detergent, you'd find enormous jugs of the st... more Ten years ago, if you went to the store for laundry detergent, you'd find enormous jugs of the stuff. Nowadays, in our more ecologically-minded times, the detergent has been concentrated and repackaged in containers a quarter of the original size. In keeping with the spirit of the age, Shoemaker has taken the amount of philosophy it used to take several volumes to hold and concentrated it into this slim little book. You can do a lot of philosophical laundry with what's in here. It's a privilege and an honor to have this opportunity to discuss it. Of the myriad topics treated in Realization, I'd like to concentrate on two that particularly interest me as a philosopher of mind: first, cross-subject property realization, or realization 2 , and second, the causal profiles of multiply realizable properties. Most of my time will be devoted to the first. 1 Shoemaker believes that we need two kinds of property realization: realization 1 , which holds between properties of one and the same subject, and realization 2, which hold of properties possessed by different subjects. Realization 1 is fully captured by the subset account: an instance of property P is realized 1 in an instance of Q if the instances occur in the same thing and the forward-looking causal features of P are a subset of those of Q, while the backward-looking causal features of Q are a subset of those of P. (31)
I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, "What is it to be a woman?" Prior attempts by ... more I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, "What is it to be a woman?" Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents.
Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and id... more Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and ideas are presented and subsequently refined in the crucible of close scrutiny. The purpose of this series is to reconstruct this vital interplay among thinkers. Each book consists of a temporary assessment of an important living philosopher's work. A collection of essays written by an interdisciplinary group of critics addressing the substantial theses of the philosopher's corpus opens each volume. In the last section, the philosopher responds to his or her critics, clarifies crucial points of the discussion, or updates his or her doctrines.
* 1 am told that the phrase 'raw feels' is due in the first place to E. C. 'Iolman, Purposive Beh... more * 1 am told that the phrase 'raw feels' is due in the first place to E. C. 'Iolman, Purposive Behavioutin Aninzals and Men (New York-London, 1932). It became familiar to philosophers through Herbert Feigl's paper 'The "Mental" and the "Physical" ' in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science I1 (1958). I owe the reference to Tolman to Ullin Place-to the eKect of whose stimulating company, indeed, this paper is largely due.
Back in the 60's, the philosophy of mind, like so many things, was full of hope and promise. Putn... more Back in the 60's, the philosophy of mind, like so many things, was full of hope and promise. Putnam had just invented functionalism and the words "multiple realization" were on everyone's lips. The idea that mentality was a higherorder property of physical systems promised to satisfy our materialist longings without depriving us of our minds. (We were very fond of our minds.) But now a sort of fin de siecle exhaustion has settled over the philosophical world, and many among us have abandoned the dream of having our minds and reducing them too. On the one hand, Jaegwon Kim insists that we must retreat to the "strong" typereductionism of the 50's if we expect our beliefs and desires to have any efficacy in a material world. On the other hand, philosophers including Lynne Rudder Baker (1995), Tyler Burge (1993), Stephen Schiffer (1987), and Stephens Stich and Laurence (1994) now maintain that reductionism in any form is probably impossible and certainly unnecessary. Throwbacks that we are, we mean to keep hope alive. We agree with Kim that Baker and the others are mistaken in thinking that an adequate theory of mind can do without a systematic account of relations between the mental and the physical. We deny that the mind-body problem is an artifact of either screwed-up philosophical priorities or metaphysical self-indulgence (though what's wrong with self-indulgence?). But at the same time, we reject Kim's form of reductionism for its failure to preserve the autonomy of the mental. We believe that a reconsideration of the original arguments for the multiple realization thesis will establish both the reality and the causal relevance of the mental, in a way that is consistent with the demands of materialism. We begin, in Part One, with our criticisms of Kim's reductionist solution to the problem of mental causation, and argue for an alternative approach. In Part Two, we address arguments Baker and Burge have made against the need for reduction, and then explain why the autonomy of the mental cannot be taken for granted.
People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular ... more People do care about the truth, at least in mundane contexts. If the automaker says a particular car gets 45 mpg, and it doesn't, we care. If the information board says that our flight is leaving from Gate 24, and it's not, we care. If our children say that they have done their homework, but they haven't, we care. Truth still matters. Why, then, do we elect people who don't seem to care about the truth? I think that the answer to this question is partly political, and partly epistemological. Let me start with the epistemological issues. The first thing I want to call attention to is the difficulty of finding the truth on many matters of current concern. I am a highly educated person with lots of control over my daily schedule, and yet even I find it extremely difficult to gain more than a passing understanding of many of the important issues of our time. I certainly cannot personally confirm or disconfirm many of the propositions I believe to be true, including some that form the bases of my political allegiances. These include: my belief in human-caused climate change 0 my belief that public job programs will help the economy more than tax reductions for the wealthy my belief that the "free market" produces neither efficacy nor efficiency in the delivery of health care. * Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I wish to thank Joseph Levine, Heidi Feldman, and Bruce Ledewitz for comments and questions that helped me develop this paper. I would also like to thank Professor Feldman and Professor Ledewitz for their kind invitation to speak at the "Will These Bones Rise?" conference. Finally, I would like to thank my audience at Duquesne University School of Law for their stimulating questions and remarks.
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