Non-reductive View Research Articles

The Personal Identity Dilemma for Transhumanism

AbstractTranshumanists claim that futuristic technologies will permit you to live indefinitely as a nonbiological ‘posthuman’ with a radically improved quality of life. Philosophers have pointed out that whether some radically enhanced posthuman is really you depends on perplexing issues about the nature of personal identity. In this paper, I present an especially pressing version of the personal-identity challenge to transhumanism, based on the ideas of Derek Parfit. Parfit distinguishes two main views of personal identity, an intuitive, nonreductive view and a revisionary, reductive view. I argue that the standard rationale for wanting to become a posthuman makes sense only if the intuitive view is correct, but that the standard rationale for thinking that it is possible to become a posthuman makes sense only if the revisionary view is correct. Following this, I explain why the obvious responses are unsatisfactory or imply the need to rethink transhumanism in ways that make it much less radical and less appealing.

The Mirror Account of Hope and Fear

AbstractI provide a unified account of hope and fear as propositional attitudes. This “mirror account” is based on the historical idea that the only difference between hope and fear is the conative attitude involved, positive for hope and negative for fear. My analysis builds on a qualified version of the standard account of hope. The epistemic condition is formulated in terms of live possibility and the conative according to a non-reductive view on desire and aversion. The account demonstrates the theoretical fruitfulness of accepting Jack M. C. Kwong’s distinction between hope and fear as propositional attitudes and experiential states.

Joint attention without recursive mindreading: On the role of second-person engagement

ABSTRACT On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided increasing evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the development of perspective-taking. Yet, there is a striking discrepancy between the general agreement that joint attention is critical in various domains, and the lack of theoretical consensus on how to account for it. This paper pursues three interrelated aims: (i) it examines the contrast between reductive and non-reductive views of (triadic) joint attention, by bringing into focus the notion of recursive mindreading; (ii) it assembles, advances, and discusses a number of arguments against reductive views; (iii) finally, in dialogue with some prominent non-reductive views, it outlines the case for a non-reductive view that gives pride of place to the idea that co-attenders relate to one another as a ‘you’.

Virtuous Persons and Virtuous Actions in Business Ethics and Organizational Research

ABSTRACT:The language of virtue is gaining wider appreciation in the philosophical, psychological, and management literatures. Ethicists and social scientists aim to integrate normative and empirical approaches into a new “science of virtue.” But, I submit, they are talking past each other; they hold radically different notions of what a virtue is. In this paper, I shall examine two conflicting conceptions of virtue, what I call the reductive and the non-reductive accounts of virtue. I shall critically study them and argue that the non-reductive view is the best philosophical account of virtue and the only one that can account for the way we talk about virtue in business and in everyday life. We can only understand what it means to act virtuously through the examination of the attitudes, beliefs, desires, and inclinations of the virtuous agent. I shall illustrate the differences between the reductive and non-reductive accounts by considering the virtue of gratitude.

Willing, Wanting, Waiting, by Richard Holton.

Richard Holton is willing to tell you, he's wanting to tell you, he's waiting to tell you, why the hoary philosophical concept of the will is psychologically legitimate and the seemingly metaphorical notion of ‘will-power’ a real cognitive capacity. Against sceptics who find talk of the will occult or suppose that it must be reducible to more familiar psychological concepts, Holton's book is a wide-ranging and empirically informed defence of a capacity for choice that cannot be identified with practical judgement, belief, desire, or any combination thereof. The real interest of this claim lies not in its novelty but in the details of the account, and here Holton's development of the non-reductive view of the will is fresh and resourceful. The primary focus is on the role of the will in controlling future behaviour and thereby overcoming temporary shifts in evaluative judgement due to temptation and addiction. Holton argues that we accomplish this by forming special practical attitudes he calls ‘resolutions’, and that the correct account of what resolutions are, how we maintain them, and why it is rational to do so provides insight into the phenomena of weakness and strength of will, temptation, and the experience of freedom.

Moral capacity and its dilemmas

The book contains an interesting collection of essays focusing on the definition of moral capacity and the problems involved in determining whether a particular individual or a particular category of individuals has moral capacity. The book is divided into three parts. Part one discusses problems with the definition of moral capacity and various challenges to the concept. Part two carries the title ‘‘Professional Morality and Criteria for Health Care Decision’’. Part three discusses categories of individuals whose moral capacity is in question. The book does not systematically discuss q\uestions of moral ontology and epistemology. These questions are, however, implicit in the various conceptualizations and criteria for moral capacity presented in the book. As is to be expected, the various authors in the book take different standpoints with regard to these basic issues. It would have helped the reader if these differences in fundamental starting points had been made more explicit and their implications pursued in more detail. There are two questions that crucially influence the issues under consideration. The first question deals with the moral realism – antirealism debate. Is there anything real in the fabric of the world that serves as the foundation for moral capacity? The second deals with the question of reductionism. Is morality a relatively autonomous aspect of human experience that can serve as the basis for explaining human behavior? Or are moral phenomena to be explained in terms of some other aspect? Reductive explanations of moral phenomena assume that moral phenomena are not ontologically basic but need to be explained in terms of nonmoral data and principles. The nonreductive view of morality assumes that

Conscious Reflection and Implicit Learning in Teacher Preparation. Part II: Implications for a balanced approach

A previous linked paper (Tomlinson, 1999) considered recent work in psychology on implicit learning and connectionism as renewed support for the anti-rationalist tradition associated with Ryle and others. By way of a re-consideration of the knowing how-knowing that distinction, it proposed a non-reductive view embracing various kinds of interplay between procedural and descriptive kinds of knowledge in the acquisition and implementation of skilful capability. The present paper examines the implications of these ideas for our understanding of what student teachers bring to their courses of initial preparation, further underlining Lortie's 'apprenticeship of observation' idea. It goes on to suggest that the medium of interactive video offers much-needed help to counter this by simultaneously harnessing the power of implicit learning and providing a concrete, flexible resource for reflective analysis.