Different people expect different things from theories of well-being. Some expect that they systematise in a maximally general way intuitions about goods that constitute well-being, others that they states most important causes of well-being, still others that they help them to lead a good life. I for one ask that a theory tells me which constucts of well-being scientists should use and why. [ 1,165 more word ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/05/expect-theorising-well.a…

My interest in what is now called the science of well-being dates back to my graduate school days at UC San Diego. Sometime in the mid-aughts I came across a debate between psychologists who advanced ‘hedonic profile’ measures of happiness and those who favoured life satisfaction questionnaires. The former argued that hedonic measures are superior because they capture the raw experience of an individual, while the latter prioritised the individual’s judgment about their life as a whole. [ 1,285 more word ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/…/1-single-concept-well.aspx

We are grateful to Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) for blogging this week on A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.

http://philosophyofbrains.com/2017/12/04/now-featured-8.aspx

Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let's now address those questions. When people talk about "the psychological reality of syntax", there are (at least) two importantly different types of psychological state that they might have in mind. One of them is what I call [ 2,151 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/2-psychological-computation…

There are, broadly speaking, three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory—cognitivism (e.g., Chomsky 1995, 2000), platonism (e.g., Katz 1981, 2000), and nominalism (e.g., Devitt 2006, 2008). Platonism is the view that the subject matter of linguistics is an uncountable set of abstracta—entities that are located outside of spacetime and enter into no causal interactions. On this view, the purpose of a grammar is to lay bare the essential properties of such entities and the metaphysically necessary relations between them, in roughly the way that mathematicians do with numbers and functions. [ 1,504 more word ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/1-ontology-epistemology-met…

Thanks to Felipe De Brigard for permission to re-post this memorial that he shared last night on Facebook.

In his groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Noam Chomsky first made explicit what is now arguably the dominant view concerning the objects and aims of linguistic inquiry. Rather than studying the sounds and inscriptions that we produce and comprehend, or the social conventions that govern linguistic usage, Chomsky argued that the primary target of linguistic theorizing must be the "tacit knowledge" that underlies every competent speaker-hearer’s linguistic competence. [ 1,694 more word ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/2017/11/28/7607.aspx

We are pleased to have David Pereplyotchik (Kent State University) blogging this week on his book Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and its Place in the Mind (Springer, 2017). To view his posts on a single page, click here.

http://philosophyofbrains.com/2017/11/27/now-featured-7.aspx

Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation TOPOI Special Issue - Call For Papers Guest editors Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham) Deadline for manuscript submission: 31 July 2018 Numerous psychological studies establish that we are unaware of information that is relevant to the occurrence of an event, but we may nonetheless offer a sincere, often inaccurate, explanation for that event. [ 502 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/cfp-topoi-special-issue-phi…

Welcome to our fourth Ergo symposium, featuring Pendaran Roberts (University of Warwick), Keith Allen (University of York), and Kelly-Ann Schmidtke’s (University of Warwick) “Folk Intuitions about the Causal Theory of Perception” with commentaries by Eugen Fischer (University of East Anglia) and John Schwenkler (Florida State University). I’d like to thank each of the participants for all their hard work. [ 597 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/symposium-pendaran-roberts-…

Conceptual emergence occurs when, in order to understand or effectively represent some phenomenon, a different representational apparatus must be introduced at the current working level. Such changes in representation are common in the sciences but it has usually been considered in connection with changes in synchronic representations. Here, I’ll consider a diachronic example drawn from recent work on convolutional neural nets for image recognition. [ 915 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/4-conceptual-emergence-neur…

Today’s entry addresses a type of argument that will be familiar to most of you, the argument that all higher level natural facts in our world logically supervene on the fundamental physical facts.[1] Consider a very simple world, which we can call Checkers World. It behaves exactly like a game of checkers, except that there are laws of nature that apply to the fundamentalS particles rather than the functionally defined rules that govern games. [ 981 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/3-two-types-fundamentality.…

Yesterday we saw, via an example from social psychology, that diachronic approaches to emergence can avoid some of the major problems of synchronic approaches. That motivating example is not wholly convincing as an example of transformational emergence. Here is what I believe is a more robustly ontological example. The Standard Model of physics currently includes a number of different types of particles as fundamentalS where to be fundamentalS is to be noncomposite. [ 703 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/2-origin-universe-argument.…

I thank the editors of the Brains Blog for extending this invitation, despite the fact that I am not an expert in neuroscience and related areas of philosophy. This week I am going to present a friendly challenge to the readers by arguing that the emphasis on synchronic approaches to emergence, despite producing interesting and insightful results in the philosophy of mind, is unhelpful in addressing other examples of emergence. [ 757 more words ]

http://philosophyofbrains.com/…/1-transformational-emergenc…

We are grateful to Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia) for blogging this week on his book Emergence, new from Oxford University Press.

http://philosophyofbrains.com/2017/11/13/now-featured-6.aspx