Reductionist Theories Research Articles

Towards a New Kind of Semantic Normativity

Hannah Ginsborg has recently offered a new account of normativity, according to which normative attitudes are essential to the meaningful use of language. The kind of normativity she has in mind –– not semantic but ‘primitive’ — is supposed to help us to avoid the pitfalls of both non-reductionist and reductive dispositionalist theories of meaning. For, according to her, it enables us both to account for meaning in non-semantic terms, which non-reductionism cannot do, and to make room for the normativity of meaning, which reductive dispositionalism cannot do. I argue that the main problem with Ginsborg’s account is that it fails to say what makes it possible for expressions to be governed by conditions of correct application to begin with. I do believe, however, that normative attitudes are essential to meaning, but they have to be thought of as fully semantic. And I suggest that conditions of correct application can be present only when those attitudes are present.

Anti-Individualism and Perceptual Representation: Interview With Tyler Burge

Tyler Burge's anti-individualism – the view that individuating many of a creature's mental kinds is necessarily dependent on relations that the creature bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment – backs his theory of perceptual representation, i.e. perceptual anti-individualism. Perceptual anti-individualism articulates a framework that, according to Burge, perceptual psychology assumed without articulation. In this interview, Burge talks about the main tenets and underpinnings of perceptual anti-individualism in relation to classic representational theories of perceptual experience, reductive theories of mental content, theories of phenomenal consciousness, and other associated topics.

A contemporaneidade das teorias reducionistas a partir da teoria jurídica bobbiana

O presente estudo objetiva apresentar, a partir da Teoria da Norma Juridica de Norberto Bobbio, a correlacao entre as teorias reducionistas apontadas pelo autor a epoca e as teorias juridicas contemporâneas de relevo para a Hermeneutica Juridica. Assim, o Jusnaturalismo, teoria que enfoca a experiencia juridica no criterio de justica, aperfeicoa-se no Neoconstitucionalismo; o Positivismo Juridico, por sua vez, que defende a face da validade como central a teoria da norma juridica, e seguido pelo Garantismo Juridico; e o Realismo Juridico, finalmente, assumindo a importância da eficacia, e antecessor da Analise Economica do Direito. Nas correspondencias referidas, mais do que uma multifacetada exposicao da experiencia juridica, aduz-se a sutil correlacao entre os significados das problematicas centrais de cada teoria explanada.Palavras-chave: teoria da norma juridica, reducionismo juridico, teorias hermeneuticas.

Does business education cultivate environmental citizenship?

Please cite as follows: Lillah, R. & Viviers, S. 2014. Does business education cultivate environmental citizenship? African Journal of Business Ethics, 8(1):5-28, doi:10.15249/8-1-14.

Nacionalismo objetivo en la danza característica de Leo Brouwer: un estudio analítico a través de las propuestas teóricas de Larue y Schenker

The present paper shows an analysis of Leo Brouwer’s Characteristic dance whereby are evident different ways where the Cuban composer involves in his guitar sound discourse, archetypal elements of traditional music from his country and its internal configuration. For that purpose, and highlighting a brief overview of Antillean’s popular music context, two specific analytical proposals as theoretical references were used articulately: Jan LaRue’s method by categories and Heinrich Schenker’s reductionist theory. In this regard, we believe that our research will allow an approach to brouwerian sound discourse through a different light than those currently found, wherewith we hope to have contributed in some way to the study of the Iberomerican musical world from systematic musicology as the main framework of understanding and reasoning.

The Neurogenetic Substructures of Human Consciousness

There are many interpretations of what consciousness is. In the past decade materialist and reductionist theories have gained in popularity as many neurological correlates of consciousness have been identified experimentally. This article presents a neurogenetic account of the underpinnings of neuron-based consciousness. In this paradigm, human consciousness is supported by genes that are involved in three distinct neurogenetic phases: 1) the emergence of neuron-based consciousness, 2) the continuum of neuronbased consciousness, and 3) the neurodegeneration of human consciousness. The methodology implemented to establish these three neurogenetic phases was a systematic search and evaluation of genes that have been proven to support an active role in one or more of these three phases. This article demonstrates that there is a substructure of gene-based correlates that functions in the three neurogenetic phases. These phases work in tandem with the conscious experience. Consequently, it is established that explanations of human consciousness that rely solely on regions of the brain and neurons are deficient without taking into consideration the neurogenetic element of human consciousness. This presentation of the neurogenetic dimensions of human consciousness is the first of its kind.

How is Recalcitrant Emotion Possible?

A recalcitrant emotion is an emotion that we experience despite a judgment that seems to conflict with it. Having been bitten by a dog in her childhood, Jane cannot shake her fear of dogs, including Fido, the cute little puppy that she knows to be in no way dangerous. There is something puzzling about recalcitrant emotions, which appear to defy the putatively robust connection between emotions and judgments. If Jane really believes that Fido cannot harm her, what is she afraid of? This article seeks to show how recalcitrant emotion is possible. I argue that reductive theories that identify emotions with judgments, desires, or some combination thereof, cannot explain the possibility of emotional irrationality without contradiction. I then show that the appeal to sui generis attitudes also fails to solve the puzzle of recalcitrant emotions, and diagnose this failure as stemming from a misleading analogy between emotions and perceptions, and in particular, between recalcitrant emotions and perceptual illusions. The solution can be found in a different analogy: between emotions and actions; more specifically, between recalcitrant emotions and weakness of the will, akrasia. Like akratic actions, recalcitrant emotions entail responding to reasons, but to inferior reasons. Irrational but non-contradictory emotions are possible just as weakness of will is possible.

From Combinatorialism to Primitivism

Modal primitivism is the view that metaphysical modality cannot be reduced to something entirely non-modal. It is often rejected for reasons of ideological simplicity: the fewer primitive notions a theory requires, the better. Reductive theories of modality like Armstrong's combinatorialism are thus thought to hold the ideological high ground. According to combinatorialism, what's possible is reducible to recombinations of objects with fundamental properties and relations. If this reduction succeeds, we have a theory that uses no primitive ideology in its explanation of the modal beyond what we already need to explain the non-modal. Combinatorialism faces two problems: the problem of spatio-temporal relations and the problem of determinates. I argue that in order to get around these problems the combinatorialist must adopt two primitive non-modal notions of her own. I then defend a modal primitivist theory, incompatibility primitivism, which takes as its primitive notion that of incompatibility between properties and relations. Such a theory is systematic and may reduce the combinatorialist's primitive non-modal notions, showing that with respect to number of primitive notions, the modal primitivist comes out ahead. Finally, I argue against reasons to think that there is something especially problematic about primitive modal notions as compared to primitive non-modal notions.

Ethnic Cleansing, Ethical Smearing and Irish Historians

AbstractDo most academic historians of twentieth‐century Ireland conform to a ‘constitutional narrative’, driven by a moral imperative to subvert republican interpretations? Has their shared political agenda led to widespread distortion, suppression, ‘elision’ and falsification of the evidential record? Is it high time to root out ‘the insidious influence of Irish public histories presented as objective historical evidence'? In the view of John M. Regan, the answer in all cases is an emphatic ‘yes’. This riposte to his recent article in History examines the credibility of Regan's critique, with particular attention to his claim that the late Peter Hart was guilty of ‘academic fraud’ in his controversial analysis of republican sectarianism and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Irish revolution. When closely examined, Regan's analysis seems perverse and untenable, implicitly relying on a reductionist conspiracy theory which ignores the rich variety and sound scholarship displayed by several generations of historians of modern Ireland.

Mental realities—the concept of mental disorder and the mind-body problem

Mental realities—the concept of mental disorder and the mind-body problem

Viciousness and the structure of reality

Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of viciousness cast in terms of contradictions, dependence, failed reductive theories and parsimony. I argue that no one of these accounts adequately captures the conditions under which an infinite regress—any infinite regress—is vicious as opposed to benign. In their place, I suggest an account of viciousness in terms of explanatory failure. If this account is correct, infinite grounding regresses are not necessarily vicious; and we must be much more careful employing such arguments to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental.

Working-memory capacity and island effects: A reminder of the issues and the facts

1. UNDERSTANDING THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE. In their response to our article (Sprouse et al. 2012), Hofmeister, Staum Casasanto, and Sag (2012, henceforth HSS) level three primary criticisms at our studies: (i) that working-memory (WM) correlations are not predicted by reductionist theories, (ii) that theWM tasks that we chose are inappropriate for showing the predicted correlation, and (iii) that our results do, in fact, show the predicted correlation. We note that these three criticisms appear to be contradictory—if any one were true, the other two would very likely be false—but here we focus on an attempt to clarify why all of them are unjustified: (i) theWM correlation is exactly what a viable account of the island effects predicts; (ii) the diversity of noncorrelations that have now been documented forces the reductionist account to abandon independently motivated memory mechanisms in favor of currently undefined ‘mystery’mechanisms; (iii) HSS’s characterization of our results is selective and misleading, and it inaccurately describes the predictions of the reductionist account of island effects. But before addressing these specific arguments it is worthwhile to briefly remind the reader of the central question of this debate. This is already discussed at length in our original article, but a number of the issues raised by HSS appear to be orthogonal to the central question. ISLAND EFFECTS are the sharp declines in acceptability that are found when WHdependencies and similar linguistic dependencies span certain structural domains, such as relative clauses, interrogative clauses, complex subjects, adjoined phrases, and many others. These structural domains are commonly known as syntactic islands. The empirical fact to be explained is uncontroversial: extraction from island structures is much less acceptable than would be predicted by the simple summation of the acceptability cost of (i) WH-extraction and (ii) the presence of island structures. We refer to this as the SUPERADDITIVE property of island effects, and the focus of the debate is on the source of this property. A long-standing view is that the superadditivity reflects a linguistic constraint that specifically targets the combination of extraction and islands (i.e. island violations). A huge literature has arisen from this starting point. An equally long-standing competing view is that island effects reflect limits on language processing resources. According to this REDUCTIONIST view, island effects can be explained without appeal to domain-specific linguistic constraints. The superadditive property of island effects cannot, of course, be explained by simply summing the processing cost of extraction and island structures, so the simplest reductionist view is a nonstarter. But a variant of this reductionist hypothesis is more promising. Perhaps the superadditivity is a consequence of resource overload: to the extent that simultaneously processing extraction and an island structure exceeds the available memory resources, the extra acceptability cost (i.e. the superadditivity) might be explained as the cost for exceeding the available memory resources (Kluender & Kutas 1993). This account makes a straightforward prediction: the degree of superadditivity should vary as a function of the WM resources available to an individual. We tested this prediction in two experiments with over three hundred speakers, and the results were not encouraging for the reductionist approach: individual differences in WM capacity accounted for an average of only around 1% of the variance

II—Adrian Haddock: Meaning, Justification, and‘Primitive Normativity’

I critically discuss two claims which Hannah Ginsborg makes on behalf of her account of meaning in terms of ‘primitive normativity’(2011; 2012): first, that it avoids the sceptical regress articulated by Kripke's Wittgenstein; second, that it makes sense of the thought—central to Kripke's Wittgenstein—that ‘meaning is normative’, in a way which shows this thought not only to be immune from recent criticisms but also to undermine reductively naturalistic theories of content. In the course of the discussion, I consider and attempt to shed light on a number of issues: the structure of the sceptical regress; the content of the thought that ‘meaning is normative’, and its force against reductive theories; the connection between meaning and justification; and the notion of ‘primitive normativity’.

A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation

A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation Alexandra Walsham (bio) Brad Gregory has written a brave and provocative book that is destined to stimulate debate for decades to come. Sweeping in scale and striking in its erudition, The Unintended Reformation is a longitudinal study of how the past has shaped the present. It is an absorbing and sophisticated investigation of the complex historical legacies of the religious revolution inaugurated by the Protestant reformers in 16th-century Europe. It centers on the paradox that a movement that was designed to renew and purify religious truth and to intensify spirituality had the unforeseen consequence of creating the increasingly secular societies in which we live today. In tracing the process by which religious faith and theology have gradually been marginalized from public life over the course of the last five centuries, it provides a fresh perspective on the enduringly relevant question of the origins of modernity, albeit one self-consciously indebted to previous work by the economist Albert Hirschman, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and the historian of science Amos Funkenstein.1 Breaking out of conventional molds, The Unintended Reformation is a hybrid work of history, philosophy, and contemporary moral and political commentary. In tackling this topic Gregory has two underlying agendas. One is a determination to discredit what he calls "supersessionist" models of historical change: models predicated upon teleology and upon the assumption that the steady displacement of "medieval" by "modern" ideas, practices, and structures is a wholly positive development. He conceives of his book as an answer to calls for a history of the Reformation with the notion of "progress" left out (366) and as a counterpoint to triumphalist post-Enlightenment narratives that celebrate the emancipation of Western society from the grip of "ignorance" and "superstition" and approvingly chart the rise of liberal democracy. They tell a story Click for larger view View full resolution Hans Holbeins, The Preacher (1547). From George Edward Woodberry, A History of Wood-Engraving (New York, 1883). of incremental Weberian disenchantment and of the inexorable growth of post-Darwinian atheism. Following in the footsteps of Herbert Butterfield and others, Gregory recognizes the roots of this whiggish historical vision in the very eras under his examination and regards its tenacity as a reflection of its success as a form of "ideological imperialism" (386).2 Against the sense of inevitability that underpins such accounts, he is at pains to draw our attention to a set of more interesting long-term trajectories: the tangled "web of rejections, retentions and transformations" by which a traditional Christian culture was slowly transfigured into something quite different, and by which the efforts of Luther, Calvin, and their disciples to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity and build a new Jerusalem led, inadvertently, to the emergence of a world in which God has, to a greater or lesser extent, become an irrelevance— a world that the reformers themselves would have abominated. Expanding a theme of his first book, Salvation at Stake, Gregory's second agenda is a robust critique of what he regards as reductionist theories of religion derived from the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, and of postmodern social and cultural constructionism.3 The Unintended Reformation is a sharply edged rejection of interpretive tendencies that, implicitly if not explicitly, refuse to accept the reality of belief in absolute truths in the past and reduce them to mere symbols, categories, "languages," and "discourses." It repudiates such approaches as insufficient to the task of understanding and capturing historical realities. Indeed, it denounces them as evidence of a secular bias that is no less "confessional" than that which marks histories written by committed believers themselves.4 For Gregory, the intellectual trends that now dominate the academy are extensions of the very same processes that his book seeks to explain and illuminate. They are no less historically contingent and arbitrary than the faith convictions that secular academics denounce as inimical to the writing of "sound" history. Gregory's analysis here is incisive and penetrating, and it is certainly true that postmodernism has not been free of internal inconsistency. It has encouraged us to acknowledge the rationality of past belief systems, but it has not always...

The biological myth of human evolution

The most significant paradox in the study of human evolution is that human evolution over the last few million years has been bio-cultural evolution, and it is thus perversely unscientific to try and imagine it as simply a succession of biological processes and effects. Without confronting the cultural aspects of human evolution, one cannot approximate the reality of human origins or human nature. The failure to do so explains why biologically reductive theories of human evolution are generally rejected by anthropology.

A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects

The source of syntactic island effects has been a topic of considerable debate within linguistics and psycholinguistics. Explanations fall into three basic categories: grammatical theories, which posit specific grammatical constraints that exclude extraction from islands; grounded theories, which posit grammaticized constraints that have arisen to adapt to constraints on learning or parsing; and reductionist theories, which analyze island effects as emergent consequences of non-grammatical constraints on the sentence parser, such as limited processing resources. In this article we present two studies designed to test a fundamental prediction of one of the most prominent reductionist theories: that the strength of island effects should vary across speakers as a function of individual differences in processing resources. We tested over three hundred native speakers of English on four different island-effect types ( whether , complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using two different acceptability rating tasks (seven-point scale and magnitude estimation) and two different measures of working-memory capacity (serial recall and n -back). We find no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects using a variety of statistical analysis techniques, including resampling simulations. These results suggest that island effects are more likely to be due to grammatical constraints or grounded grammaticized constraints than to limited processing resources.

Reducing Truth Through Meaning

Horwich has attempted to combine an anti-reductionist deflationism about sentential truth with a reductionist theory of meaning. Price has argued that this combination is inconsistent, but his argument is fallacious. In this paper I attempt to repair Price’s argument.

ATVIROJO KLAUSIMO ARGUMENTAS IR REDUKTYVIZMO GALIMYBĖ

Šiame straipsnyje nagrinėjama, kokių reduktyvizmo formų galimybę blokuoja vadinamasis atvirojo klausimo argumentas (AKA) – tiek savo istoriniu, tiek šiandieniais pavidalais – ir kokiu pagrindu. Išskirtos keturios svarbiausios AKA interpretacijos ir išanalizuotas jų poveikis vertinamųjų savybių reduktyvistinių teorijų galimybei. Teigiu, jog AKA kelia didelę grėsmę semantiniam etiniam natūralizmui, tačiau ne metafiziniam etiniam natūralizmui (nors ir pasmerkia jį tam tikrai „šizofrenijai“).

REDUKTYVIZMO RAIŠKA ŠIUOLAIKINĖJE PRIEŽASTINGUMO FILOSOFIJOJE

Straipsnyje apžvelgiama, kaip terminas „redukcija“ vartojamas šiuolaikinėje priežastingumo filosofijoje. Svarstoma, kaip, jeigu atsižvelgiama į šią vartoseną, priežastingumo teorijas galima skirstyti į reduktyvias ir nereduktyvias ir kokias galima išskirti reduktyvių teorijų rūšis. Remiantis atlikta metateorine analize, pateikiamas dviejų rūšių reduktyvizmo – vadinamojo „hiumiškojo reduktyvizmo“ ir „empirinės analizės“ – teorinių perspektyvų įvertinimas.

L’adattabilità delle superstizioni

In this paper I discuss a widespread cultural phenomenon, superstition, from an adaptive point of view. At first, I propose a general interpretative framework, based on the concept of abduction. Then, I analyze two reductionist theories. The first one, Sociobiology, considers superstition as a strategy to control the population growth, an extension of an adaptive biological behavior. The second one, Memetics, transfers the adaptive role of superstition to an evolutionary mechanism separated from the biological one. I criticize both proposals and I suggest an alternative non-reductionist interpretation: superstitions can be considered as strategies aimed at the cohesion of a population.