Abstract:
I will sketch out the analogy between the Wason Task(s) and the Paradox of Confirmation. This will mainly involve going through some existing historical discussions concerning the analogy, and developing a precise framework for refining and critiquing the analogy. I will explain what I think is right about the existing literature, and also what I think is wrong with it (i.e., what I think the disanalogies are). Along the way, I will make various historical observations about confirmation theory and some of the contemporary evaluative assessments of the behavior of subjects faced with Wason Task(s).
Abstract:
This talk has two goals. The first is to introduce philosophers and cognitive scientists to a “ruthlessly reductive” field in current neuroscience, ‘molecular and cellular cognition (MCC),’ that has been investigating and increasingly discovering the cellular and molecular bases of specific cognitive phenomena. Learning and memory have so far provided the field’s greatest accomplishments, but experimental work is now underway on virtually all phenomena that comprise cognitive science. The key experimental practices that characterize this field are the use of genetically engineered mutant mammals and a variety of behavioral procedures widely accepted as measures of specific cognitive functions. This work contravenes the popular assumption that only “higher level” neuroscience, namely cognitive and systems neuroscience, can fruitfully address “the mind.”
My second goal is to present the experimental conditions that need to be met in order for MCC practitioners to assert that a cellular or molecular mechanism for a specific cognitive function has been established. Neurobiologist Alcino Silva was the first to propose what we now call The Convergent Four hypothesis; recently Silva, Bickle, and Anthony Landreth have revised these four jointly sufficient conditions on experimental evidence. I’ll explain each condition (as we’ve articulated them so far) and give an example of an experimental result from MCC that illustrates each one. There is reason to think that these conditions are employed beyond MCC, throughout causal-mechanistic sciences generally. They suggest a novel account of scientific reductionism (compared to existing accounts articulated by philosophers of science), a automatable program for increasing the efficiency of scientific research, and a codification of scientific practices that could replace widely accepted accounts (like Mill’s methods).
Abstract:
The talk will propose a rationalization of drinking the toxin in the Toxin Puzzle and of taking only one box in Newcomb's problem within the confines of causal decision theory. The essential point will be to explicitly separate decision and action within so-called reflexive decision models - something not considered so far - and then to observe that the conditional probabilities that make no causal sense within the usual unreflexive decision models simply reflect a common cause relation within the reflexive models. The point has deep consequences that will be only hinted at, e.g. on the rationalization of cooperation in the one-shot prisoners' dilemma.
Abstract:
In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a great deal of
inconclusive discussion of whether it could ever be rational to change
our logic. The arguments that this could be rational were based on
rather dubious examples. In this paper I will try to make a stronger
case that change of logic can be rational, by focusing on the semantic
paradoxes. I may also discuss some issues about the impact of this on
formal epistemology.
Abstract:
Conceptual analysis is difficult; analysis of a normative concept like "rights" generates even greater challenges. The paper surveys the long-standing debate between the two leading accounts of the nature of rights, and argues that the debate is intractable because each side is defending a partial analysis in order to bolster some controversial substantive normative theory. Progress in understanding rights depends on our generating an analysis that captures all of the complexities of rights as they are commonly understood.
Abstract:
Georg Cantor's Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds (1883) is a watershed in the history of philosophy: It finally and definitively put to rest the historical 'paradoxes' of the actual infinite, at a time when the demands of mathematics itself led to its introduction. But at the same time, with its theory of transfinite numbers, it exposed the real problem of the infite: The essential open-endedness of the mathematical universe and the consequent unceasing demand for new axioms to express it.