Ordinary Concepts Research Articles

Semantic Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Inter-personal Mental Ascription: A Neglected Puzzle

In this article, to revitalize the discussion on semantic externalism’s implications on the issue of content self-knowledge, I will argue that semantic externalism generates in fact two related but distinct skeptical puzzles concerning the presumption of truth attached to our mental self-ascriptions. The first is to explain how I can correctly ascribe mental states to myself, and the second is to explain how others can ascribe thoughts to me by taking my expressions of such self-ascriptions at face value. In my view, although the first has been sufficiently addressed in the literature, the second has been more or less neglected. Furthermore, as I will argue, theorists must respond to both of the questions to fully show the compatibility of our ordinary conception of self-knowledge and semantic externalism. As a case study, I will introduce Dorit Bar-On’s neo-expressivism as an account of self-knowledge that provides a promising answer to the first question and argue that it is still incomplete in that it does not address the second skeptical puzzle. To shed light on the nature of the puzzle in question further, I will also explore its possible solutions in the neo-expressivist framework.

Delving into depth: an empirical investigation of the ordinary concepts of depth and profundity

We sometimes say about certain things (such as philosophical questions) that they are ‘deep’ or ‘profound’. But what does it mean exactly? Surprisingly, philosophers have been quite silent on this topic and there is neither consensual nor prominent conceptual analysis of ‘depth’. After surveying different proposals that have tried to capture depth in terms of explanatory depth, subject matter, emotional impact, understanding or complexity, we present the results of three studies in which we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the everyday concept of ‘depth’. Our results suggest that depth and profundity are generally characterized as (i) something with a meaning, (ii) that stimulates cognitive activity, to (iii) promote epistemic progress about (iv) important issues, thus (v) having an emotional impact. Based on these findings, we propose a first characterization of the ordinary concepts of depth and profundity.

On the Logic of the Unconscious Conception of Causation Part I: The Oedipal Meta-Wish and the Sexualization of Asymmetric Time.

The direction of time is often defined by describing asymmetries between past and future events, referred to as "time-arrows." Two important time-arrows are the mutability time-arrow, which specifies that the past is unalterable, while the future is not; and the causal time-arrow, which stipulates that past events may cause future events, but not vice versa. The author argues that the unconscious conception of causation expressed in both the oedipal myth and certain oedipal wishes negates the mutability and causal time-arrows. The author suggests, therefore, distinguishing between oedipal phantasies that undermine the ordinary conceptions of causation and time (such as the wish of being one's own parent), and classical content that is in line with our time perception (such as sexual and aggressive wishes toward parents). Analyzing clinical examples suggests that some patients' oedipal phantasies are combined with unconscious sexual satisfaction from the asymmetric conception of time. When this sexual satisfaction is analyzed, they might expose the oedipal phantasies founded on the symmetric conception of time.

Statutory Interpretation and Levels of Conceptual Categorisation: The Presumption of Legal Language Explained in Terms of Cognitive Linguistics

AbstractThis article probes the usefulness of selected theories from Cognitive Linguistics in the context of statutory interpretation. The presumption of legal language is a well-established rule of statutory construction in Polish legal practice that comes from the internationally recognised theory by Jerzy Wróblewski. It rests on a controversial assumption that there are different levels of generality in legal language (i.e. the language of statutes) and a single term may be given different meanings depending on the level of generality that is referred to. The authors use the notion of basic level categorisation from the cognitive theory of prototypes to explain this mechanism. Legal concepts, not unlike ordinary concepts, form hierarchical taxonomies. A single term may denote concepts that are situated at different levels in different conceptual taxonomies. In the absence of special circumstances, a legal term should be given the meaning that resides at a higher level of categorisation in the respective legal taxonomy. This way, the presumption of legal language is found to be justified on both linguistic and psychological grounds.

Artificial intelligence and identity: the rise of the statistical individual

AbstractAlgorithms are used across a wide range of societal sectors such as banking, administration, and healthcare to make predictions that impact on our lives. While the predictions can be incredibly accurate about our present and future behavior, there is an important question about how these algorithms in fact represent human identity. In this paper, we explore this question and argue that machine learning algorithms represent human identity in terms of what we shall call the statistical individual. This statisticalized representation of individuals, we shall argue, differs significantly from our ordinary conception of human identity, which is tightly intertwined with considerations about biological, psychological, and narrative continuity—as witnessed by our most well-established philosophical views on personal identity. Indeed, algorithmic representations of individuals give no special attention to biological, psychological, and narrative continuity and instead rely on predictive properties that significantly exceed and diverge from those that we would ordinarily take to be relevant for questions about how we are.

The KK Principle and the Strong Notion of Knowledge: Hintikka’s Arguments for KK Revisited

In his Knowledge and Belief (1962), Hintikka establishes his system of epistemic logic with the KK (Knowing that One Knows, in symbols, Kp→KKp) principle (KK for short). However, his system of epistemic logic and the KK principle are grounded upon his strong notion of knowledge, which requires that knowledge is infallible, that is, it makes further inquiry pointless, and becomes ‘discussion-stopper’; knowledge implies truth, to wit, cognitive agents will not be mistaken in their knowledge; cognitive agents will be ‘perfect logicians’, i.e. they have infinitive capability of logical inference. Hintikka calls the argument for KK from the strong notion of knowledge as the ‘transcendental argument’ for KK. Obviously, the strong notion of knowledge is far away from our ordinary conception of knowledge; based on such a strong sense of knowledge, epistemic logic has met the problem of logical omnipotence, and is difficult to apply in our ordinary cognitive practice. Moreover, there is no close connection of the KK principle with internalism or externalism.

Intimacy and Imagination

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the concept of intimacy, arguing that it concerns moments of mutual imaginings generative of desire. As a peculiar mode of shared conduct, it is difficult to categorize the value of such actions insofar as they fall outside our ordinary conception of the public and private spheres. Nonetheless, when achieved, intimacy is not only an expansion of the private and a realization of a good-in-itself, but also has a bearing on our orientation to the broader world.

Mutual entailment between causation and responsibility

The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.

Features and Bugs in Schnieder’s Theory of Properties

Although Benjamin Schnieder’s theory of the “ordinary conception” of properties successfully handles paradoxical properties—particularly, the property of non-self-instantiation—it fails to account for ordinary, non-pathological cases. The theory allows the inference of ‘a has the property of being F’ only given F(a) and the prior assertibility of ‘the property of being F can exist’. While this allows us to block an inference to a contradiction, it also blocks all of the non-pathological instances of the inference from ‘a is F’ to ‘a has the property of being F’. It thereby fails both as a theory of the ordinary conception and as a replacement of the ordinary notion, assuming the latter is defective.

The Availability of Jim Jarmusch’s Film-Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Derrida and Private Language in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility.

Crossed Wires: Blaming Artifacts for Bad Outcomes

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that responsibility and blame only apply to certain agents. But do our ordinary concepts of responsibility and blame reflect these assumptions? I investigate one recent debate where these assumptions have been applied—the back-and-forth over how to explain the impact of norms on ordinary causal attributions. I investigate one prominent case where it has been found that norms matter for causal attributions, but where it is claimed that responsibility and blame do not apply because the case involves artifacts. Across six studies (total N=1,492) more carefully investigating Hitchcock and Knobe’s (2009) Machine Case, I find that the same norm effect found for causal attributions is found for responsibility and blame attributions, with participants tending to ascribe both to a norm-violating artifact. Further, the evidence suggests that participants do so because they are using these terms in a broadly normative, but not distinctively moral, way.

The Non-cognition Explained as <i>kartṛsthakriyā</i> and <i>karmasthakriyā</i>

In the Hetubinduṭīkā, after the refutation of Īśvarasena and Kumārila from the viewpoint of kartṛsthakriyā and karmasthakriyā, the counterargument is developed by an anonymous opponent to avoid that problem. This rebuttal is based on ordinary conception: 1. Perception of a place alone; 2. Cognition of knowledge of a place alone; 3. Understanding of the non-existence of a pot; 4. Understanding of activity regarding the non-existence （abhāvavyavahāra） of the pot. Furthermore, by interpreting 1. the perception of a place alone as karmasthakriyā and 2. the perception of knowledge of a place alone as kartṛsthakriyā, the opponent claims that there is no difference from the theory of non-cognition maintained by Dharmakīrti. Also, the negative statements by four opponents, that is Īśvarasena, Kumārila, Nyāya, and the other, are introduced at the beginning of the annotation of the non-cognition argument in HBṬ. The content of that other’s theory, which is not identified, is also consistent with the ordinary conception mentioned above. This opponent would be the counterargument intentionally assumed by Arcata; on the other hand, he makes it efficient by pointing that this counterargument meets the requirements of kartṛsthakriyā and karmasthakriyā.

Protecting Sentient Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Lay Intuitions on Standing, Personhood, and General Legal Protection.

To what extent, if any, should the law protect sentient artificial intelligence (that is, AI that can feel pleasure or pain)? Here we surveyed United States adults (n = 1,061) on their views regarding granting 1) general legal protection, 2) legal personhood, and 3) standing to bring forth a lawsuit, with respect to sentient AI and eight other groups: humans in the jurisdiction, humans outside the jurisdiction, corporations, unions, non-human animals, the environment, humans living in the near future, and humans living in the far future. Roughly one-third of participants endorsed granting personhood and standing to sentient AI (assuming its existence) in at least some cases, the lowest of any group surveyed on, and rated the desired level of protection for sentient AI as lower than all groups other than corporations. We further investigated and observed political differences in responses; liberals were more likely to endorse legal protection and personhood for sentient AI than conservatives. Taken together, these results suggest that laypeople are not by-and-large in favor of granting legal protection to AI, and that the ordinary conception of legal status, similar to codified legal doctrine, is not based on a mere capacity to feel pleasure and pain. At the same time, the observed political differences suggest that previous literature regarding political differences in empathy and moral circle expansion apply to artificially intelligent systems and extend partially, though not entirely, to legal consideration, as well.

Blame mitigation: A less tidy take and its philosophical implications

ABSTRACT Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent – in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong – and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on the case strategy to support the Normative Competence theory of moral responsibility over the Deep Self theory. However, we also outline ways in which further empirical and philosophical work would shift the debate, by showing that there is a significant departure between ordinary concepts and corresponding philosophical concepts, or by focusing on a different type of coherence with ordinary judgments.

Can imagination be unconscious?

Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that we can find in the recent literature—three of which are based on cases and one that is based on considerations relating to action guidance. To my mind, none of these arguments is successful. I conclude that the case for postulating unconscious imagining has not yet been well motivated.

Psychiatric Diagnosis and Illness Narratives: Focusing on the Linkage between Professional and Ordinary Concepts

Psychiatric Diagnosis and Illness Narratives: Focusing on the Linkage between Professional and Ordinary Concepts

She told me about a singing cactus: Counterintuitive concepts are more accurately attributed to their speakers than ordinary concepts.

Communication is central to human life, yet it leaves humans vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Humans have therefore evolved a suite of psychological mechanisms for the evaluation of speakers and their messages. Here, we test a key hypothesized function of these "epistemic vigilance" mechanisms: the selective remembering of links between speakers and messages that are inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. Across four experiments, participants (N = 707) read stories associated with different contexts, with each story containing concepts that violate core knowledge intuitions ("counterintuitive concepts") and ordinary concepts. Experiment 1 revealed that after a brief distractor (2 min) participants more accurately attributed counterintuitive concepts to their speakers than ordinary concepts. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated this finding and found that this attribution accuracy advantage also extended to counterintuitive versus ordinary concepts associated with other contextual details-places and dates. Experiment 3 then tested whether this attribution accuracy advantage was more stable over time for speakers than for places. After a short distractor (20 min), there was a counterintuitive versus ordinary concept attribution accuracy advantage for both speakers and places. However, when participants were tested again after a long delay (48 hr), this attribution accuracy advantage more than doubled for speakers but disappeared entirely for places. We discuss the implications of these findings to the set of psychological mechanisms theorized to monitor and evaluate communication to guard our database of beliefs about the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Protected and Unprotected Elements of a Work of Art

The paper specifies the issues of the balance between the form and content of a work of art, as well as attribution of certain system elements of its structure to protected and unprotected elements. It is noted that the existing doctrinal discussion regarding Fichte’s idea about protected form and unprotected content of the work does not lose its relevance. The author highlights that in modern literature this idea has been repeatedly revised as not meeting the purpose of determining the circle of protected elements. Some researchers point to the use of philosophical, philological or ordinary concepts of the form and content of the work rather than legal ones as a weak point of this doctrine. The author justifies the doctrine of protected form and unprotected content, presents criticism of attempts to revise it, proves that the weak point of this theory involves invalidity of the critics’ arguments that the use of philosophical categories and concepts by the proponents of the theory of unprotected content and protected form, as well as philological and art terms and categories. It is concluded that the doctrinal system of protected and unprotected elements of the work requires clarification in relation to their individual types. The author suggests the idea of distinguishing non-trivial plots as elements of the internal form of the work which together with the characters and the title form a single system of artistic images allowing us to separate creative works from reproductive results of intellectual activity. The author proposes criteria for legal protection of the name and character of the work depending on the ability to cause in the public association with the work itself.

Situations d’assistance médicale à la procréation en pédopsychiatrie : une clinique particulière ?

BackgroundIn daily practice, the clinical impression suggests an over-representation of children from medically assisted procreation (MAP) in the population consulting in child psychiatry. This raises the question of the reality of this over-representation and the impact of the MAP on the psychic child's development. Based on the different reflections that have been carried out in the case of adoption, the study presented here attempts to provide a reflection on the current state of families and how the MAP comes to upset our representations. MethodsThis is a non-interventional descriptive cross-sectional study including a population of 262 families whose children are followed at the Alfred Binet Center, a child psychiatry consulting center in Paris. The main outcome measure is the over-representation of children from MAP in the Alfred Binet Center active queue. The secondary judgment criteria is: whether or not the consulting physicians know the MAP birth status of their patients. This criterion was measured by evaluating a difference between the two methods of collecting information (consulting physicians vs questionnaires) as well as by describing the population of children from Alfred Binet Center MAP, by comparing it to the population of children of ordinary conception. ResultsChildren from MPA were significantly more represented in the Alfred Binet Center population between 1997 and 2015 (p<0.05) and between 2006 and 2015 (p<0.0001). There are other significant differences between MAP patients and naturally conceived children with a higher rate of prematurity respectively (43.7% vs 3.7%), a younger average age (4.8 years vs 9.76 years) and an over-representation of single-parent families (25% vs 6.1%). The results of this study are important but have certain limitations. Firstly, it is a unicentric study. Secondly, the cofactors identified are insufficient to explain the real impact of the MPA on the child's psychic development. ConclusionThere is an overrepresentation of children from MAP in the population of the Alfred Binet Center. However, these results do not explain a specific psychic development. Additional multicentric, quantitative and qualitative studies are necessary to support these results. In this perspective, research is underway at the Alfred Binet Center on the development and the future of children born from MAP.

Using Mathematical Equations to Communicate and Think About Karma

Two equations are presented in this article to communicate a particular understanding of karma. The first equation relates future experiences to past and present actions. Although the equation uses variables and mathematical symbols such as the integral sign and summation symbol, it reads more like a literal translation of an English sentence. Based on the key idea in the first equation, a second equation is then created to highlight the viability of using math to communicate concepts that are not readily quantifiable. Analyzing such equations can stimulate thinking, enhance understanding of spiritual concepts, raise issues, and uncover tensions between our ordinary conceptions of external reality and transcendental aspects of spirituality.