HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Largely this paper depends directly on what I learned and listened to during the conference whose1 proceedings the volume contains. I had the luck of speaking towards the end of Mind & World, Durban 2003. I am grateful to all who were there. I learned much from them. Thanks to David Spurrett for the organisation, the environment, and the hospitality provided in all sorts of ways, cognitive and non. Some of the ideas here have been conside...
A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded ration... more A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded rationality, and the adaptive toolbox.
... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] ... more ... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] 7 To the credit of the translators sometimes they give up, see for example, note a, on page 57: 'Untranslatable: redlich = honest, and also that which can be said, sayable.'
ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across t... more ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines, edited by Robert F. Goodman and Walter R. Fisher; 246 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. The more disciplines talk about their methods, the less they do. Observe the scarcity of methodological problems for dentistry. This book collects papers, originally delivered as talks at a conference organized around a loosely defined notion of epistemology in the social sciences, by economists, philosophers, ethnographers, and psychologists, either reflecting upon larger issues raised by their work or trying to explain why it is relevant in the first place. The papers belong to two gaggles of views. The first gaggle (including the economist Donald McCloskey, the philosopher Charles Taylor, George Marcus, and Michael Arbib) does something quite productive. They weigh the influence of certain rhetorical modes of thinking on their disciplines. In the second gaggle are those, including the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Jane Flax, who offer no view of anything much, but engage in the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon sport of pseudo-philosophy. They babble about the "West" and indulge a tendency to sheer narcissism. On to the good parts. An important recent advance is the demise of the pretense of neutrality and purity of interest among social scientists. In her essay, for instance, Marcus traces how ethnographers have progressively relinquished narratives of the exotic intended to reinforce a smug superiority of white civilizations. There is a danger: no one would be too interested in reading dozens of dissertations on the subject of graduate students in anthropology departments. Nonetheless, it is a real gain to mark the limits of an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of the "white men's burden" and all that. Similarly, McCloskey is good at pointing out that economics is not obvious at all, and that rhetorical devices, then, have helped to shape its present form. Taylor gives a quick though not trivial history of the birth in relatively recent times of a discourse of the self, distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and the discourse of the self. Arbib shows how recherché data about brain lesions can shed light on our cognitive structure. Now to the confusingly confused parts. There is the usual dogmatic nonsense backed by no evidence. I offer one example: ". . . the meanings or the existence of reason, science, knowledge, etc., . . . have been subjected to increasingly corrosive attacks," Flax says in his essay. "The challenge to Western political-economic hegemony by Japan and other countries, the rise of nationalist and anticolonialist movements in the Third World, women's movements everywhere, and antiracist struggles have disrupted the order of things" (p. 151). What worries me is the lack of thinking: can an instance be shown in which, say, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa made an impact and changed or kicked out of existence the concept of knowledge? Herrnstein Smith is guilty of a more interesting form of bad reasoning. On the one hand, we are told that all "value judgments" are relative, radically contingent, and blah blah. On the other, we are also told that this is not the same as relativism. The sloppiness is evident: it is a trivial point that lots of value judgments are relative to something else. That a dollar bill is worth a dollar is contingent upon the existence of federal reserve, a mint, and an immense set of background conditions, given all of which it is a dollar bill and not a simple piece of paper. If the contingency of judgments comes to nothing more, one is left to wonder why we need entire departments in top universities to discover it. The more insidious part is the claim that relativity is self-exemplified in discourse and that indeed all there is to assertions is the desire to satisfy one's chosen audience (p. 36). If this is so, is there any interest in professors talking to other professors about the methodological problems of their disciplines? Adriano P. PalmaNational Chung Cheng University, Taiwan .
A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded ration... more A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded rationality, and the adaptive toolbox.
... Said properties have been and are still perfectly visible to anybody. ... Likewise linguistic... more ... Said properties have been and are still perfectly visible to anybody. ... Likewise linguistics narrowly conceived offers a tiny window of opportunity to understand what minds are (can be), virtually nothing worthwhile about the ways in which the said faculty is put to use. ...
... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] ... more ... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] 7 To the credit of the translators sometimes they give up, see for example, note a, on page 57: 'Untranslatable: redlich = honest, and also that which can be said, sayable.'
In Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a conten... more In Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a content (such as an item of information) without having access to it. If this phenomenon can be correctly interpreted as having to do with consciousness, then there would be a P-conscious mental experience which is dissociated from access.
ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across t... more ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines, edited by Robert F. Goodman and Walter R. Fisher; 246 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. The more disciplines talk about their methods, the less they do. Observe the scarcity of methodological problems for dentistry. This book collects papers, originally delivered as talks at a conference organized around a loosely defined notion of epistemology in the social sciences, by economists, philosophers, ethnographers, and psychologists, either reflecting upon larger issues raised by their work or trying to explain why it is relevant in the first place. The papers belong to two gaggles of views. The first gaggle (including the economist Donald McCloskey, the philosopher Charles Taylor, George Marcus, and Michael Arbib) does something quite productive. They weigh the influence of certain rhetorical modes of thinking on their disciplines. In the second gaggle are those, including the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Jane Flax, who offer no view of anything much, but engage in the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon sport of pseudo-philosophy. They babble about the "West" and indulge a tendency to sheer narcissism. On to the good parts. An important recent advance is the demise of the pretense of neutrality and purity of interest among social scientists. In her essay, for instance, Marcus traces how ethnographers have progressively relinquished narratives of the exotic intended to reinforce a smug superiority of white civilizations. There is a danger: no one would be too interested in reading dozens of dissertations on the subject of graduate students in anthropology departments. Nonetheless, it is a real gain to mark the limits of an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of the "white men's burden" and all that. Similarly, McCloskey is good at pointing out that economics is not obvious at all, and that rhetorical devices, then, have helped to shape its present form. Taylor gives a quick though not trivial history of the birth in relatively recent times of a discourse of the self, distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and the discourse of the self. Arbib shows how recherché data about brain lesions can shed light on our cognitive structure. Now to the confusingly confused parts. There is the usual dogmatic nonsense backed by no evidence. I offer one example: ". . . the meanings or the existence of reason, science, knowledge, etc., . . . have been subjected to increasingly corrosive attacks," Flax says in his essay. "The challenge to Western political-economic hegemony by Japan and other countries, the rise of nationalist and anticolonialist movements in the Third World, women's movements everywhere, and antiracist struggles have disrupted the order of things" (p. 151). What worries me is the lack of thinking: can an instance be shown in which, say, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa made an impact and changed or kicked out of existence the concept of knowledge? Herrnstein Smith is guilty of a more interesting form of bad reasoning. On the one hand, we are told that all "value judgments" are relative, radically contingent, and blah blah. On the other, we are also told that this is not the same as relativism. The sloppiness is evident: it is a trivial point that lots of value judgments are relative to something else. That a dollar bill is worth a dollar is contingent upon the existence of federal reserve, a mint, and an immense set of background conditions, given all of which it is a dollar bill and not a simple piece of paper. If the contingency of judgments comes to nothing more, one is left to wonder why we need entire departments in top universities to discover it. The more insidious part is the claim that relativity is self-exemplified in discourse and that indeed all there is to assertions is the desire to satisfy one's chosen audience (p. 36). If this is so, is there any interest in professors talking to other professors about the methodological problems of their disciplines? Adriano P. PalmaNational Chung Cheng University, Taiwan .
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Largely this paper depends directly on what I learned and listened to during the conference whose1 proceedings the volume contains. I had the luck of speaking towards the end of Mind & World, Durban 2003. I am grateful to all who were there. I learned much from them. Thanks to David Spurrett for the organisation, the environment, and the hospitality provided in all sorts of ways, cognitive and non. Some of the ideas here have been conside...
A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded ration... more A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded rationality, and the adaptive toolbox.
... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] ... more ... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] 7 To the credit of the translators sometimes they give up, see for example, note a, on page 57: 'Untranslatable: redlich = honest, and also that which can be said, sayable.'
ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across t... more ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines, edited by Robert F. Goodman and Walter R. Fisher; 246 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. The more disciplines talk about their methods, the less they do. Observe the scarcity of methodological problems for dentistry. This book collects papers, originally delivered as talks at a conference organized around a loosely defined notion of epistemology in the social sciences, by economists, philosophers, ethnographers, and psychologists, either reflecting upon larger issues raised by their work or trying to explain why it is relevant in the first place. The papers belong to two gaggles of views. The first gaggle (including the economist Donald McCloskey, the philosopher Charles Taylor, George Marcus, and Michael Arbib) does something quite productive. They weigh the influence of certain rhetorical modes of thinking on their disciplines. In the second gaggle are those, including the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Jane Flax, who offer no view of anything much, but engage in the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon sport of pseudo-philosophy. They babble about the "West" and indulge a tendency to sheer narcissism. On to the good parts. An important recent advance is the demise of the pretense of neutrality and purity of interest among social scientists. In her essay, for instance, Marcus traces how ethnographers have progressively relinquished narratives of the exotic intended to reinforce a smug superiority of white civilizations. There is a danger: no one would be too interested in reading dozens of dissertations on the subject of graduate students in anthropology departments. Nonetheless, it is a real gain to mark the limits of an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of the "white men's burden" and all that. Similarly, McCloskey is good at pointing out that economics is not obvious at all, and that rhetorical devices, then, have helped to shape its present form. Taylor gives a quick though not trivial history of the birth in relatively recent times of a discourse of the self, distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and the discourse of the self. Arbib shows how recherché data about brain lesions can shed light on our cognitive structure. Now to the confusingly confused parts. There is the usual dogmatic nonsense backed by no evidence. I offer one example: ". . . the meanings or the existence of reason, science, knowledge, etc., . . . have been subjected to increasingly corrosive attacks," Flax says in his essay. "The challenge to Western political-economic hegemony by Japan and other countries, the rise of nationalist and anticolonialist movements in the Third World, women's movements everywhere, and antiracist struggles have disrupted the order of things" (p. 151). What worries me is the lack of thinking: can an instance be shown in which, say, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa made an impact and changed or kicked out of existence the concept of knowledge? Herrnstein Smith is guilty of a more interesting form of bad reasoning. On the one hand, we are told that all "value judgments" are relative, radically contingent, and blah blah. On the other, we are also told that this is not the same as relativism. The sloppiness is evident: it is a trivial point that lots of value judgments are relative to something else. That a dollar bill is worth a dollar is contingent upon the existence of federal reserve, a mint, and an immense set of background conditions, given all of which it is a dollar bill and not a simple piece of paper. If the contingency of judgments comes to nothing more, one is left to wonder why we need entire departments in top universities to discover it. The more insidious part is the claim that relativity is self-exemplified in discourse and that indeed all there is to assertions is the desire to satisfy one's chosen audience (p. 36). If this is so, is there any interest in professors talking to other professors about the methodological problems of their disciplines? Adriano P. PalmaNational Chung Cheng University, Taiwan .
A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded ration... more A short critical note on a recent book, containing several different approaches to bounded rationality, and the adaptive toolbox.
... Said properties have been and are still perfectly visible to anybody. ... Likewise linguistic... more ... Said properties have been and are still perfectly visible to anybody. ... Likewise linguistics narrowly conceived offers a tiny window of opportunity to understand what minds are (can be), virtually nothing worthwhile about the ways in which the said faculty is put to use. ...
... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] ... more ... Adriano Palma University of KwaZulu-Natal palma@ukzn.ac.za [DOI: 10.1080/ 05568641003669573] 7 To the credit of the translators sometimes they give up, see for example, note a, on page 57: 'Untranslatable: redlich = honest, and also that which can be said, sayable.'
In Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a conten... more In Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a content (such as an item of information) without having access to it. If this phenomenon can be correctly interpreted as having to do with consciousness, then there would be a P-conscious mental experience which is dissociated from access.
ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across t... more ABSTRACT Philosophy and Literature 19.2 (1995) 406-407 Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines, edited by Robert F. Goodman and Walter R. Fisher; 246 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. The more disciplines talk about their methods, the less they do. Observe the scarcity of methodological problems for dentistry. This book collects papers, originally delivered as talks at a conference organized around a loosely defined notion of epistemology in the social sciences, by economists, philosophers, ethnographers, and psychologists, either reflecting upon larger issues raised by their work or trying to explain why it is relevant in the first place. The papers belong to two gaggles of views. The first gaggle (including the economist Donald McCloskey, the philosopher Charles Taylor, George Marcus, and Michael Arbib) does something quite productive. They weigh the influence of certain rhetorical modes of thinking on their disciplines. In the second gaggle are those, including the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Jane Flax, who offer no view of anything much, but engage in the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon sport of pseudo-philosophy. They babble about the "West" and indulge a tendency to sheer narcissism. On to the good parts. An important recent advance is the demise of the pretense of neutrality and purity of interest among social scientists. In her essay, for instance, Marcus traces how ethnographers have progressively relinquished narratives of the exotic intended to reinforce a smug superiority of white civilizations. There is a danger: no one would be too interested in reading dozens of dissertations on the subject of graduate students in anthropology departments. Nonetheless, it is a real gain to mark the limits of an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of the "white men's burden" and all that. Similarly, McCloskey is good at pointing out that economics is not obvious at all, and that rhetorical devices, then, have helped to shape its present form. Taylor gives a quick though not trivial history of the birth in relatively recent times of a discourse of the self, distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and the discourse of the self. Arbib shows how recherché data about brain lesions can shed light on our cognitive structure. Now to the confusingly confused parts. There is the usual dogmatic nonsense backed by no evidence. I offer one example: ". . . the meanings or the existence of reason, science, knowledge, etc., . . . have been subjected to increasingly corrosive attacks," Flax says in his essay. "The challenge to Western political-economic hegemony by Japan and other countries, the rise of nationalist and anticolonialist movements in the Third World, women's movements everywhere, and antiracist struggles have disrupted the order of things" (p. 151). What worries me is the lack of thinking: can an instance be shown in which, say, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa made an impact and changed or kicked out of existence the concept of knowledge? Herrnstein Smith is guilty of a more interesting form of bad reasoning. On the one hand, we are told that all "value judgments" are relative, radically contingent, and blah blah. On the other, we are also told that this is not the same as relativism. The sloppiness is evident: it is a trivial point that lots of value judgments are relative to something else. That a dollar bill is worth a dollar is contingent upon the existence of federal reserve, a mint, and an immense set of background conditions, given all of which it is a dollar bill and not a simple piece of paper. If the contingency of judgments comes to nothing more, one is left to wonder why we need entire departments in top universities to discover it. The more insidious part is the claim that relativity is self-exemplified in discourse and that indeed all there is to assertions is the desire to satisfy one's chosen audience (p. 36). If this is so, is there any interest in professors talking to other professors about the methodological problems of their disciplines? Adriano P. PalmaNational Chung Cheng University, Taiwan .
DO NOT QUOTE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS IS NOT FINISHED WORK. The chapters preceding thi... more DO NOT QUOTE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS IS NOT FINISHED WORK. The chapters preceding this one give some view, and hopefully some insight, into what metaphysics is nowadays. Of the various subjects discussed by our collaborators some are ready even to be used as teaching tools, some are more speculative. In both cases they try to give an idea of what contemporary metaphysics looks like. Two big issues are wholly missing in these chapters, in the opinion of this writer. The first one is time. We simply do not have anything even approximating a consensus about its nature, and about its properties. Augustine, chapter 14 of Book XI of his Confessions expressed what many of us feel. We have an awareness of the passing of time, and yet upon reflection we do not know what it is, as if some weird medium
The text is the outline of the section metaphysics of the forthcoming introduction to philosophy,... more The text is the outline of the section metaphysics of the forthcoming introduction to philosophy, directed at undergraduates, to be published by REBUS, a community of free texts. There are chapters that do not have an author, if anyone is interested, do ot hesitate to contact me.
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There are chapters that do not have an author, if anyone is interested, do ot hesitate to contact me.