Facts Of Experience Research Articles

Objective Phenomenology

This paper examines the idea of objective phenomenology, or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap.

Gegenständliche Erkenntnis und transzendentale Einsicht. Zum Kantverständnis Joachim Koppers

Abstract This article provides a short survey of Joachim Kopper’s understanding of Kant’s theory of cognition in CPR. Kant’s critical thought is developed via a dogmatic method but marks a transition to transcendental thought delivered from dogmatic assertions. The assertion that cognition emerges from the relation between mind and objects is made at the beginning of CPR. Kopper holds that transcendental reflection starts not on the basis of this distinction but on the impossibility of logical assertion about existence as it is reached in antinomic. The fact of experience must thus be explained otherwise than by dogmatic assertions of relations between objects or between objects and thought. Reflection on necessity, affirmed by the law of causality, enables transcendental inspection to understand experience and human life in one unrelational meaning.

Neoliberalism

The criticism of neoliberalism is omnipresent. The term is seemingly self-explanatory, but its original use in public has been forgotten. Its form originated in the international movement of ordoliberalism in the 1930s, which used neoliberalism to describe its distinction from laissez-faire capitalism. This conceptual confusion has created considerable consequential problems that overlay today’s debate on the future of the market economy. The fact that the neoliberalism of the ordoliberals is today equated by its critics with the capitalism of the libertarians raises questions. Since the economic dogma of Milton Friedman, who was the inspiration for the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile, whose economic policy was first captured by today’s negatively connoted term neoliberalism, this approach needs to be looked at more closely. Should the ideas of the Chicago school of thought substantially distinguish themselves from the other currents of economic liberalism, a solution to the confusion of terms could be possible, giving a new twist to the debate on the market economy. Such a clarifiation would be of fundamental importance for the ethical question of the social orientation of the economic order, since ordoliberalism was in turn the godfather of the social market economy. Furthermore, this would have consequences for applied political ethics in the context of political theories of justice, whose theoretical constructs reflect the existing economic order as a fact of experience.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution as an Object of Philosophical Retrospection

The article deals with Kant's Copernican Revolution as an object of philosophical retrospection. It is suggested that Kant's Copernican Revolution can be understood in terms of the conditions of its possibility within the framework of a regressive transcendental argument. The regressive transcendental argument is equated with the universal philosophical method, which is circular in nature: starting with the facts of experience, it concludes about the necessary conditions for the possibility of a given experience and compares these conditions of possibility with what is given in experience. It is shown that in the framework of such an approach, falsification of the initial premises of the Kantian project becomes inevitable. It is shown that the character of this falsification is essentially dialectical. By falsifying the transcendental project of the “Copernican revolution” as a whole, we question the “once and for all” boundary drawn by Kant between the epistemological premises (“idealism”) and ontological foundations (“realism”).

The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence

In the study of political knowledge, the emphasis on facts is misplaced. Evidence has grown that predispositions and social contexts shape how individuals are exposed to and interpret facts about politics, and the ready availability of information in the contemporary media environment may exacerbate these biases. We reexamine political knowledge from the bottom up. We look at what citizens themselves treat as relevant to the task of understanding public affairs and how they use this information. We draw upon our research in three different projects involving observation of political talk and elite interviews to do so. We observe that people across a range of levels of political engagement process political information through the lens of their personal experience. Failing to acknowledge this aspect of the act of using political information presents an incomplete empirical understanding of political knowledge. We propose an Expanded Model of Civic Competence that presents an alternative interpretation for what it means to be an informed citizen in a democracy. In this model, the competence of listening to and understanding the different lived experiences of others cannot be considered separately from levels of factual knowledge.

Racionalidad de la inducción como minimización entrópica

Rationality of induction as entropic minimization In favour of a fundamental aspect of the epistemology of Mariano Artigas –his commitment to the quest for truth on the part of the scientific theory– I argue about the rationality of the process of induction, both the induction of general laws from particular facts of experience and the inference of postulates from the experimental laws which form the empirical basis of the theory. This is argued by showing that we minimize the entropy of the information when making an induction, so that we just do what usually the reason does.

Modern Money Theory and the facts of experience

This paper discusses Modern Money Theory (MMT) with a particular focus on the role of the state in its monetary system and the nature of money. It addresses the main differences between the orthodox, heterodox and MMT approaches to monetary theory while reconciling endogenous money theory with the state money approach. By emphasising the symmetry between how banks create money as they finance private spending and how the government creates money when it finances its own spending, we clarify some of the misconceptions surrounding MMT while showing that it is more consistent with the facts of experience. Furthermore, we argue that MMT’s insistence that government spending or lending must precede bond sales is consistent with the Keynesian emphasis on effective demand as the driving force behind income and saving. We delve into MMT’s implications for monetary and fiscal policy, with a particular focus on the eurozone. We conclude our paper by discussing two proposals of ‘monetary cranks’: narrow banking and government issue of debt-free money. This allows us to re-emphasise MMT’s views on the nature of money.

The Empirical Evidence Against Utility Maximization

Current Economics Textbooks and Economists justify a theory of consumer behavior based on utility maximization on a priori grounds. This methodology follows Lionel Robbins’ idea that economic theory is based on logical deduction from postulates which are 'simple and indisputable facts of experience.' Strong evidence has emerged from many different lines of research that these 'simple and indisputable facts of experience' are contradicted by human behavior. In this article, we summarize some of main contradictions between predictions of utility theory and actual human behavior. Efforts to resolve these contradictions continue to be made within orthodox frameworks, but it appears likely that a paradigm shift is required.

The limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’: stories from young South Africa

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with one another, this increased ‘contact’ does not amount to greater racial integration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which ‘whiteness’ continues to be privileged over ‘blackness’. The result is that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial ‘other’ than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcing their expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. While contact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict, racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrovertible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption that there exist different (biological) races which evince different forms of social behaviour and that these are essential properties of people rather than being historically or socially contingent.

A Constructivist Flight from `A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality'

Isabelle Stengers anchors the major stake in Whiteheadian philosophy in the notion of constructivism. In doing so, the relation of this philosophy of becoming — the first anti-substantialist principle of which is stated as `principle of process' — to the ideas of vitalist intuition as the self-expression of the world is announced as eminently problematic. This problematizing opening to Whitehead obliges us to think about the constructivist nature of his concepts because of their irreducibility to the expression of facts of experience since they must necessarily function as a machinic articulation of how things become implied in the `ontological principle' of reason; by the same token, it poses at the heart of the analysis the question of the pragmatic-speculative alterity in Whiteheadian constructivism.

Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama

Something was menacing the South during the Progressive Era. Southern physicians located the threat in the “germ plasm,” the genes, of the region's inhabitants. Writing in a now-infamous 1893 “open letter” published in theVirginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for “some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the negro of the present day.” McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of “[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes.” Lydston's solution to this problem was not lynching, but surgical castration which “prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind.” Eight years later in Alabama, Dr. John E. Purdon opined, “It is a proved fact of experience that the inveterate criminal tends to propagates a race of criminals, and that the undeveloped or degraded nerve-tissue will duplicate itself in the next generation.” Dr. Purdon then declared, “Emasculation is the simplest and most perfect plan that can be adopted to secure the perfection of the race.” Twenty-three years later, in 1924, Harry Hamilton Laughlin testified in support of a Virginia law providing for the eugenic sterilization of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South,” who allegedly created social problems for “normal” people. The multiplication of these “defective delinquents,” Laughlin and Virginia officials claimed, could only be controlled by restricting their procreation.

On the Ubiquity of Certain Total Type Structures: (Extended Abstract)

It is a fact of experience from the study of higher type computability that a wide range of approaches to defining a class of (hereditarily) total functionals over N leads in practice to a relatively small handful of distinct type structures. Among these are the type structure C of Kleene-Kreisel continuous functionals, its effective substructure C, and the type structure HEO of the hereditarily effective operations. However, the proofs of the relevant equivalences are often non-trivial, and it is not immediately clear why these particular type structures should arise so ubiquitously. In this paper we present some new results which go some way towards explaining this phenomenon. Our results show that a large class of extensional collapse constructions always give rise to C, C or HEO (as appropriate). We obtain versions of our results for both the “standard” and “modified” extensional collapse constructions. The proofs make essential use of a technique due to Normann. Many new results, as well as some previously known ones, can be obtained as instances of our theorems, but more importantly, the proofs apply uniformly to a whole family of constructions, and provide strong evidence that the above three type structures are highly canonical mathematical objects.

現象は説明しきれているか

In this paper, I examine van Fraassen's original version of modal interpretations, which have the increasing significance in the foundational research concerning elementary quantum mechanics. I argue that although van Fraassen's modal interpretation has a salient advantage over the standard Dirac-von Neumann interpretation with the projection postulate, it is confronted with two kinds of interpretive difficulties stemmed from one and the same fact of experience, repeatability of the first kind measurement.

St. Augustine's Novelistic Conversion

ST. AUGUSTINE'S NOVELISTIC CONVERSION Tyler Graham Syracuse University In his famous biography of St. Augustine, Peter Brown attempts to explainwhat set the Confessions "apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine belonged" (Augustine ofHippo 169). While he concedes that "the Confessions are a masterpiece ofstrictly intellectual autobiography" (167), he concludes that it is more important to realize that they "are, quite succinctly, the story of Augustine's 'heart,' or of his 'feelings'—his affectus"(169). He continues to explain that "in the Confessions, however, the evocation of Augustine's feelings forms part of the wider study of the evolution ofhis will" (172). Thus, Brown suggests that Augustine's central anthropological concern is to determine the origin and/or causes ofhuman desire (i.e. the "evolution of will"). Augustine's "exhaustive analysis ofhis motives" (as Brown describes it) is linked to his lifetime struggle to explain the complex interaction between his free will and a divine will (grace) to transform his "sinful" desires and create a "new heart" within him. In Brown's view, the Confessions reflect Augustine's struggle to discover whether desire originates in God or man. We can agree with Brown that this theological agenda is important to Augustine, for it will resurface in all of his theological struggles stretching from his pre-Christian engagement with the Manichees to his final battle with Pelagius. Nevertheless, I will argue in this paper that the Confessions reflect another important dimension to Augustine's morphology ofdesire. Regardless 136Tyler Graham of its divine or human source, Augustine's desires often begin with the imitation of another person. In portraying examples of his life up to and including his famous conversion in the year 386 (Book VIII), Augustine consistently shows that his desires have been copies or imitations ofvarious models whom he has chosen to follow. Writers such as Brown have considered the importance ofdesire (or the will) in the Confessions, and critics like Geoffrey Harpham (whom we will address later) have examined Augustine's interest in mimesis during various scenes in the book. Yet, with the exception ofAvitol Wohlman, no one (to my knowledge) has adequately considered the combination of the two: mimetic desire. In the first book ofthe Confessions, Augustine recounts his childhood, and, by the eighth chapter, he has already introduced a theme which will haunt the entire work: the link between desire and language. My desires were internal; adults were external to me and had no means ofentering into my soul. So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds, signs resembling my wishes. (1:8) Language is born as a result ofthe need to express desire. For Augustine, words, gestures, and all utterances connect the "internal" wants to the "external" object ofcommunication (in this case, adults). In fact, ifAugustine links desire with the soul (external adults could not "enter his soul"), then language becomes the bridge between souls: it communicates desire from soul to soul. When Augustine reaches boyhood, and he begins to learn the accepted modes of articulation, the link between language and desire remains: "By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavor to express the intentions ofmy heart to persuade people to bow to my will" (1:13). Language communicates desire, but it also seeks to transform and generate desire. Beyond simply explaining his wishes, Augustine's language is persuasive, seeking to get others to "bow to my will." Whereas some people would like to remember their childhood as a time of innocence, joy, and peace, Augustine depicts his early life as "sinful," unhappy, and fraught with tears and conflicting interests. For an infant ofthat age, could itbe reckoned good to use tears in trying to obtain what it would have been harmful to get? . . The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant's mind. (1:11) St. Augustine 's Novelistic Conversion137 Although he does notrememberbis own infancy, Augustine extrapolates from his analysis ofother children. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother's milk. Who is unaware ofthis fact ofexperience? Envy among infants is universal...

STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT FACTOR MIGRATIONS WITH RAPID INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC CONVERGENCE*

A model of persisting labour and capital migrations is proposed which relies on capital installation adjustment costs. Labour and capital markets are supposed internationally integrated with free factor movements imposing a ‘law of one price’ on the gross return to each factor. The development of infrastructure and other capital projects however is accompanied by adjustment costs that create a divergence between the gross and net returns to capital. This makes it optimal to accumulate capital only gradually. Thus, although there is rapid international economic convergence because returns on traded assets and labour are internationally determined, labour and capital immigrations persist. The consistency of this model with some stylised facts of experience is examined using data for four high factor immigration economies from 1870–1991.

Notes from the Studio

The external conditions which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist….

Personality types of family practice residents in the 1980s

This study was based on a nationwide sample of 778 family practice residents in the mid-1980s and was conducted to determine the personality types that were most common among those residents. The results showed that the single most common personality type was that in which the individual prefers to see the world in terms of challenges and future possibilities and to make decisions based upon his or her subjective values. These results showed that the sample differed significantly in Myers-Briggs personality type from both the general practitioners of the 1950s and the early family practice residents of the 1970s, who preferred to see the world in terms of the immediate facts of experience and to make decisions objectively. There were also significant differences between the civilian and military family practice residents, but not between the community-based and university-based residents. Implications regarding future practice styles, physicians' personal values, and manpower needs are discussed.

Pain, Private Language and the Mind-Body Problem

What I will call the Warner-Nagel thesis is the claim that, even with a true and exhaustive scientific description of the world, we will have failed to capture a fundamental and important aspect of it: the qualitative character of experience. Of the two, Nagel's thesis is stronger. For he claims that objective science cannot capture the qualitative character of our experience (facts of experience) because science moves away from facts which are accessible from only one point of view, and towards facts which are intersubjective or public. 1 Since understanding what it is like to be an X, requires facts which are accessible from only one point of view, X's, the methodology of science is simply unsuited for the sort of understanding required to capture the qualitative character of a thing's experiences. Hence reductionist programs were ill conceived from the very beginning: there is something about consciousness that cannot be captured in scientific accounts of the mind.

Relativity and the spatiality of mental events

I assume the correctness of special relativity for convenience. The local validity of special relativity (i.e., that spacetime is locally flat) would be sufficient. In order to avoid begging the question at issue, I am assuming only that special relativity gives the correct account of the spatial and temporal relations of (non-mental) psysical events. As for P2, I am simply taking it as an obvious fact of experience that mental events occur in the same field of temporal relations as (non-mental) physical events that a pain, for example, can occur ten minutes after a rain storm began but fifteen minutes before the beginning of the late Show.

Reinhardt Grossmann's Ontological Reduction

This book [1] is concerned to evaluate various attempts at "ontological reduction" and to elaborate a general ontology. After an Introduction which, to some extent, offers an epistemological underpinning to the ontology, there are three main Parts. The first deals with numbers, attacks as misconceived various ontologically parsimonious discussions of their status, and advances Grossmann's own positive views about their nature. The second deals with properties and classes, mounts a similar attack upon ontological parsimony here, and uses an invigorating discussion of Russellian-style paradoxes as a basis for arguing that not every class determines a property and vice versa, thus further emphasizing their ontological distinctiveness. The third Part distinguishes various different senses of "part" and "whole" and argues that, in each case, it is mistaken to assume that one need include only the parts and not the whole in an inventory of what fundamentally there is. (Grossmann does not discuss the monistic elimination of the parts in favor of the whole, which is surely both historically and intellectually quite as significant an attempted "reduction".) In conclusion, there is a list of the basic ontological categories recognized by Grossmann. The book can be recommended both for the interest of Grossmann's own ontological position and for the subtle discussions of a host of theories, new and old, about the matters indicated, including the work of such philosophers as Frege, Russell, Quine, and Goodman. It seems to me that Grossmann's is often the voice of a highly sophisticated common sense objecting to a wide variety of wild, and on occasion shabby, claims, including those which rest upon such suppositions as that definitions of certain sorts can somehow summon entities into being or construct them, as opposed to simply identify them (cf. passages starting at each of p. 64, p. 90, and p. 102) or that one can define Xs as Ys of a certain sort and dispense with a distinct category of the former, simply because the latter have all those formal properties of theirs which need to be considered in performing certain sorts of calculation (cf. pp. 102ff). It must be said, on the other hand, that there is something a trifle rigid and dogmatic about Grossmann's style of philosophizing in this book. Argument often proceeds from merely 'stated premisses of a quite controversial nature (cf. pp. 87, 90, and 161), supported sometimes by an appeal to the "obvious facts of experience" (cf. pp. 9 and 152), when Grossmann must know that there are any number of philosophers who will deny that experience reveals any such thing to them.