David Henderson and Terence Horgan set out a broad new approach to epistemology, which they see as a mixed discipline, having both a priori and empirical elements. They defend the roles of a priori reflection and conceptual analysis in philosophy, but their revisionary account of these philosophical methods allows them a subtle but essential empirical dimension. They espouse a dual-perspective position which they call iceberg epistemology, respecting the important differences between epistemic processes that are consciously accessible and those that are not. Reflecting on epistemic justification, they introduce the notion of transglobal reliability as the mark of the cognitive processes that are suitable for humans. Which cognitive processes these are depends on contingent facts about human cognitive capacities, and these cannot be known a priori.

The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual Analysis

Politics & Social Sciences

Henderson, David K.

Horgan, Terence

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

This volume brings together many of Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes: Newcomb's problem, the Monty Hall problem, the two-envelope paradox, the sorites paradox, and the Sleeping Beauty problem. Newcomb's problem arises because the ordinary concept of practical rationality constitutively includes normative standards that can sometimes come into direct conflict with one another. The Monty Hall problem reveals that sometimes the higher-order fact of one's having reliably received pertinent new first-order information constitutes stronger pertinent new information than does the new first-order information itself. The two-envelope paradox reveals that epistemic-probability contexts are weakly hyper-intensional; that therefore, non-zero epistemic probabilities sometimes accrue to epistemic possibilities that are not metaphysical possibilities; that therefore, the available acts in a given decision problem sometimes can simultaneously possess several different kinds of non-standard expected utility that rank the acts incompatibly. The sorites paradox reveals that a certain kind of logical incoherence is inherent to vagueness, and that therefore, ontological vagueness is impossible. The Sleeping Beauty problem reveals that some questions of probability are properly answered using a generalized variant of standard conditionalization that is applicable to essentially indexical self-locational possibilities, and deploys "preliminary" probabilities of such possibilities that are not prior probabilities. The volume also includes three new essays: one on Newcomb's problem, one on the Sleeping Beauty problem, and an essay on epistemic probability that articulates and motivates a number of novel claims about epistemic probability that Horgan has come to espouse in the course of his writings on paradoxes. A common theme unifying these essays is that philosophically interesting paradoxes typically resist either easy solutions or solutions that are formally/mathematically highly technical. Another unifying theme is that such paradoxes often have deep-sometimes disturbing-philosophical morals.

Essays on Paradoxes

Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology

Human cognition is soft. It is too flexible, too rich, and too open-ended to be captured by hard (precise, exceptionless) rules of the sort that can constitute a computer program. In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition. In place of the classical paradigm that take the mind to be a computer (or a group of linked computers), they propose that the mind is best understood as a dynamical system realized in a neural network.Although Horgan and Tienson assert that cognition cannot be understood in classical terms of the algorithm-governed manipulation of symbols, they don't abandon syntax. Instead, they insist that human cognition is symbolic, and that cognitive processes are sensitive to the structure of symbols in the brain: the very richness of cognition requires a system of mental representations within which there are syntactically complex symbols and structure-sensitive processing.However, syntactic constituents need not be parts of complex representations, and structure sensitive processes need not conform to algorithms. Cognition requires a language of thought, but a language of thought implicated in processes that are not governed by hard rules. Instead, symbols are generated and transformed in response to interacting cognitive forces, which are determined by multiple, simultaneous, (robustly) soft constraints. Thus, cognitive processes conform to soft (ceteris paribus) laws, rather than to hard laws. Cognitive forces are subserved by, but not identical with, physical forces in a network; the organization and the interaction of cognitive forces are best understood in terms of the mathematical theory of dynamical systems.The concluding chapter elaborates the authors' proposed dynamical cognition framework.A Bradford Book

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Tienson, John

Psychology & Counseling

Bradford Books

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