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A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the...
This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information and data processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental and m...
In this volume, the authors present their view of cognition. They propose that unlike the classical paradigm that takes the mind to be a computer, the mind is best understood as a dynamical system realized in a neural network.
This volume brings together many of Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes: Newcomb's problem, the Monty Hall problem, the two-envelope paradox, the sorites paradox, and the Sleeping Beauty problem. Newcomb's problem arises because the ordinary concept of practical rationality constitutively includes normative standards that can sometimes come into direct conflict with one another. The Monty Hall problem reveals that sometimes the higher-order fact of one's having reliably received pertinent new first-order information constitutes stronger pertinent new information than does the new first-order information itself. The two-envelope paradox reveals that epistemic-probability contexts are weakly ...
Philosophical and scientific defenses of Indirect Realism and counterarguments to the attacks of qualiaphobes. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of Indirect Realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be second-hand and, worse, hidden behind a "veil of sensation"--a position that would sli...
A cutting-edge and groundbreaking set of new essays by top philosophers on key topics related to the ever-influential knowledge argument.
Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts or truths do not exist. Do these views imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic ones, do not exist? The Normative Web develops a positive answer to this question. Terence Cuneo argues that the similarities between moral and epistemic facts provide excellent reason to believe that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist. But epistemic facts, it is argued, do exist: to deny their existence would commit us to an extreme version of epistemological skepticism. Therefore, Cuneo concludes, moral facts exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. In so arguing, Cuneo provides not simply a defense of moral realism, but a positive argument for it. Moreover, this argument engages with a wide range of antirealist positions in epistemology such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. If the central argument of The Normative Web is correct, antirealist positions of these varieties come at a very high cost. Given their cost, Cuneo contends, we should find realism about both epistemic and moral facts highly attractive.
Henderson and Horgan set out a broad new approach to epistemology. They defend the roles of the a priori and conceptual analysis, but with an essential empirical dimension. 'Transglobal reliability' is the key to epistemic justification. The question of which cognitive processes are reliable depends on contingent facts about human capacities.
Ireland 1973: a very different world. But a tiny village in County Dublin was about to lose its innocence for ever. On a bright and sunny June afternoon, a seven-year-old boy was left in the care of his teenage neighbour. No one knew, or would even have dreamed of suspecting, that the teenager was a Satanist. The two went out to the fields to look for rabbits. The child was never seen alive again. For the first time, in The Boy in the Attic, David Malone reveals the exact events of that summer day: how the youngster was lured to his death, how the teenager came to delve so deeply into the occult and the nightmarish scene awaiting police when they entered the attic. But there is another disturbing question - how is it that this murder, which was easily one of the most shocking and horrific in living memory, was barely reported upon at all? Why have you never heard of the boy in the attic until now?
A collection of new essays that develop themes from the work of the philosopher Jaegwon Kim.