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The attempt of empiricist psychology to achieve scientific respectability through reliance on quantification is deeply flawed. Not only does it come at the expense of the phenomena, which, in the study of the mind, must reference subjectivity, but it is incommensurate with the basic scientific principles on which it claims to operate. Specifically, psychological theory typically cannot support prognostication beyond the binary opposition of "effect present/effect absent." Accordingly, the "numbers" assigned to experimental results often amount to affixing names (e.g., more than, less than) to the members of an ordered sequence of outcomes. This, I contend, is one reason why psychologists find it difficult to discriminate between competing theories: without a well-specified theory capable of enabling precise and detailed quantitative prediction, inferring underlying mental mechanisms from experimental outcomes becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task.

It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. Such an empiricist account, I argue, promises to explain much of the complexity of people’s moral and other normative attitudes.

Monothematic delusions involve a single theme, and often occur in the absence of a more general delusional belief system. They are cognitively atypical insofar as they are said to be held in the absence of evidence, are resistant to correction, and have bizarre contents. Empiricism about delusions has it that anomalous experience is causally implicated in their formation, whilst rationalism has it that delusions result from top down malfunctions from which anomalous experiences can follow. Within empiricism, two approaches to the nature of the abnormality/abnormalities involved have been touted by philosophers and psychologists. One-factor approaches have it that monothematic delusions are a normal response to anomalous experiences whilst two-factor approaches seek to identify a clinically abnormal pattern of reasoning in addition to anomalous experience to explain the resultant delusion. In this paper we defend a one-factor approach. We begin by making clear what we mean by atypical, abnormal, and factor. We then identify the phenomenon of interest (monothematic delusion) and overview one and two-factor empiricism about its formation. We critically evaluate the cases for various second factors, and find them all wanting. In light of this we turn to our one-factor account, identifying two ways in which ‘normal response’ may be understood, and how this bears on the discussion of one-factor theories up until this point. We then conjecture that what is at stake is a certain view about the epistemic responsibility of subjects with delusions, and the role of experience, in the context of familiar psychodynamic features. After responding to two objections, we conclude that the onus is on two-factor theorists to show that the one-factor account is inadequate. Until then, the one-factor account ought to be understood as the default position for explaining monothematic delusion formation and retention. We don’t rule out the possibility that, for particular subjects with delusions there may be a second factor at work causally implicated in their delusory beliefs but, until the case for the inadequacy of the single factor is made, the second factor is redundant and fails to pick out the minimum necessary for a monothematic delusion to be present.

In this paper, we take a closer look at Danish psychology students’ Master’s thesis projects. We do this by analysing 4,100 descriptions of all Master’s theses in Danish psychology study programs between 2014 and 2019. Via a sentiment analysis of the data material, we identify and categorize the different theses and attempt to identify their methodological focus. Initially, we describe the characteristics of the Danish Master’s thesis and discuss why an analysis of different theoretical and methodological orientations within the theses is relevant. The results we draw out in this article point to what we term a methodological discrepancy between psychological research published in journals and Danish psychology students’ Master’s thesis projects. The sentiment analysis also shows that Danish Master’s theses in many cases refer to one or more specific (meta)theoretical orientations in their problem statements. The paper discusses whether students’ (meta)theoretical orientation(s) can be interpreted as a sign of sound theoretical literacy among students or, conversely, if theory rather is applied in a routine-like manner in Master’s thesis projects. It is further discussed whether the methodological discrepancy is seen because of the more intuitive nature of qualitative methods, or if it caused by what could be termed a dustbowl (qualitative) empiricism. The article is concluded with a discussion on the social normativity of psychological research.

We argue why interpretability should have primacy alongside empiricism for several reasons: first, if machine learning (ML) models are beginning to render some of the high-risk healthcare decisions instead of clinicians, these models pose a novel medicolegal and ethical frontier that is incompletely addressed by current methods of appraising medical interventions like pharmacological therapies; second, a number of judicial precedents underpinning medical liability and negligence are compromised when ‘autonomous’ ML recommendations are considered to be en par with human instruction in specific contexts; third, explainable algorithms may be more amenable to the ascertainment and minimisation of biases, with repercussions for racial equity as well as scientific reproducibility and generalisability. We conclude with some reasons for the ineludible importance of interpretability, such as the establishment of trust, in overcoming perhaps the most difficult challenge ML will face in a high-stakes environment like healthcare: professional and public acceptance.

In this article, I put forward a basic philosophical claim: empirical scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge generated in experimental and observational practices, presupposes real causation. My discussion exploits two core notions from the philosophical analysis of scientific experimentation and observation: the aim of realizing object-apparatus correlations and the required control of the relevant interactions between environment and experimental or observational system. The conclusion is that, without the notion of real causation, acquiring epistemically sound empirical knowledge is impossible. Several empiricist objections to this conclusion are discussed and refuted. As a consequence, empiricism faces an unsolvable dilemma: either it cannot account for empirical knowledge or it should accept the existence of unobservable but real causal interactions.

Ciência do conhecimento humano, a epistemologia, também sustentáculo da prática pedagógica e das teorias da aprendizagem,é amparada por três vertentes conceituais - a inatista ou apriorista, a empirista e a interacionista - que, por sua vez, dão luz à diferentes abordagens de ensino e saberes pedagógicos que sustentam o processo de aprendizagem e ação docente na Educação Física e no esporte. O objetivo do estudo, assim, passou por elucidar os procedimentos de construção de um instrumento metodológico que mapeie as bases epistemológicas de profissionais e futuros profissionais de Educação Física e esporte, materializado pela aplicação de um questionário fechado com estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação dos cursos de Educação Física e Ciências do Esporte. O estudo, desse modo, tem natureza quali-quantitativa e caráter descritivo-exploratório.Ainda que tenham denotado maior aproximação aos preceitos pedagógicos interacionistas, houve, em maior ou menor medida, relevante identificação dos estudantes com as outras teorias do conhecimento. Evoca-se, assim, a importância de se fomentar reflexões quanto às teorias pedagógicas e epistemológica que sustentam a prática de ensino esportivo, de modo a minimizar contradições na ação docente.

This is a review of the book Mozg - kultura - socium. Kantianskaya programma v cognitivnykh issledovaniyakh by Bazhanov V.A. The author`s main aim is a reconsideration of some fundamental principles of epistemology and philosophy of science in the light of state-of-the-art advancements of neurosciences. According to the author of the book, social and cultural revolution in neurosciences has been crucially modifying the initial Kantian program of consciousness research and the modes of linguistic representation of its results. In particular, in epistemology the universal concept of transcendental subject has been altered with regard to neurobiological and social data, which concern some preconditions of cognitive activity. In philosophy of science such a shift of research perspective allows to implement a naturalistic interpretation of natural sciences, clarifies the problem of empirical foundations of mathematics and sheds a new light on the problem of apriori elements of mathematical thought. The analysis of evolutionary and neurobiological preconditions of logical thought leads to the sort of revival of psychologism program in logic, which enables author to put forward an original interpretation of the problem of plurality of logical systems. Finally, some topics of social sciences as well as problems of genesis of art, ethical and religious systems, can acquire new interpretation with respect to modern investigations in cognitive science.

This article aims to examine the relation between psychology and metaphysics. Despite psychology’s claim of being an exact science, like physics, it contains an implicit commitment to metaphysical assumptions, such as ahistorical universalism, ontological dualism, abstract individualism, and the fragmentation of the human mind. This paper proposes a dialectical perspective as a way to overcome the unidimensional examination of psychological phenomena as the sum of independent, fixed, and static elements. By revealing the shortcomings of reductionism and elementarism, dialectics highlight the complex and dynamic nature of psychological processes and provide an original way of conceptualizing crucial theoretical and methodological issues of psychology as a discipline.

Lloyd (The case of the female orgasm: bias in the science of evolution, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2005) analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose and characterize this additional error. In short, I think the error is using an imprecise definition of the trait in question. Further, Lloyd takes her analysis to support Longino’s (Science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990) contextual empiricist model of scientific objectivity. I consider what implications this analysis has for contextual empiricism. Finally, I argue that theorizing about female orgasm should be done from a conceptual engineering approach.

Empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics study two main issues: the valuation of sensory objects and art experience. These two issues are often treated as if they were intrinsically interrelated: Research on art experience focuses on how art elicits aesthetic pleasure, and research on valuation focuses on special categories of objects or emotional processes that determine the aesthetic experience. This entanglement hampers progress in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics and limits their relevance to other domains of psychology and neuroscience. Substantial progress in these fields is possible only if research on aesthetics is disentangled from research on art. We define aesthetics as the study of how and why sensory stimuli acquire hedonic value. Under this definition, aesthetics becomes a fundamental topic for psychology and neuroscience because it links hedonics (the study of what hedonic valuation is in itself) and neuroeconomics (the study of how hedonic values are integrated into decision making and behavioral control). We also propose that this definition of aesthetics leads to concrete empirical questions, such as how perceptual information comes to engage value signals in the reward circuit or why different psychological and neurobiological factors elicit different appreciation events for identical sensory objects.

The unprecedented challenges to accessing health care in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic have illuminated the longstanding debate around allocation of resources to persons with disorders of consc...

s The study of mental disorders’ relationship with terrorist engagement spans almost half a century. During this time, the explanatory emphasis of mental disorder has lurched from the center of psychological enquiry to the periphery. Many early published analyses on the terrorist placed psychopathy as the core explanatory variable. This opinion was derived mainly from popular culture, and the desire to attribute mental disorders to those committing such heinous, violent acts. Poor research designs and a lack of empiricism ultimately undermined the arguments in favor of terrorism being rooted in psychopathy. Despite the methodological issues, concluding remarks from research exploring psychopathy in terrorism continue to hold instinctive appeal across the research field. This chapter seeks to critically examine a series of in-depth case studies of terrorist actors who have shown traits of psychopathy. Examination of these case studies highlights that, much like all mental disorders, we are not able to treat psychopathy as a core explanatory factor in terrorism. We use this finding as a starting point for our discussion.

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

Sympathy and empathy are complex and entwined concepts with philosophical and scientific roots relating to issues in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For some, the two concepts are indistinguishable, the two terms interchangeable, but each has a unique history as well as qualities that make both concepts distinct. Although each is associated with feeling, especially the capacity to feel with others or to imaginatively put oneself “in their shoes,” the concepts’ sometimes shared, sometimes divergent histories reveal more complicated origins, as well as vexed and ongoing relations to feeling and emotion and to the ethical value of emotional sharing. Though empathy regularly is considered the more advanced and egalitarian of the two, it shares with sympathy a controversial role in historical debates regarding questions of an inborn or divine moral sense, prosocial behavior and the development of human communities, the relation of sensation to unconscious mental processes, brain matter, and neurons, and animal/human difference. In literary criticism, sympathy and empathy have been key components of aesthetic movements such as sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and of literary techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which are thought (by some) to enhance readerly intimacy and closeness to novelistic characters and perspectives. Both concepts have also received their fair share of suspicion, as the capacity to feel, or imagine feeling, the emotions of others remains a controversial basis for ethics.

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind might learn arbitrary color facts (e.g., marigolds are yellow) but would lack color understanding. Contrary to this intuition, we find that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to sighted people, blind individuals are less likely to generate “yellow” for banana and “red” for stop sign but make similar generative inferences about real and novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. For example, people infer that two natural kinds (e.g., bananas) and two artifacts with functional colors (e.g., stop signs) are more likely to have the same color than two artifacts with nonfunctional colors (e.g., cars). People develop intuitive and inferentially rich “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.

James J. Gibson, the founder of ecological psychology, introduced a radical empiricist approach to perception and action centered on direct perception in naturalistic environments that was counter to popular representational views of his time. This direct perception approach and the associated introduction of the affordance concept have been extremely influential in several fields of study. However, since its inception, the affordance concept has evolved in a manner such that it now deviates significantly from Gibson’s original intention. This review follows use of the affordance concept by four sets of influential experimental psychologists: Gibson, Donald Norman, Mike Tucker and Rob Ellis, and Daniel Bub and Michael Masson. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which they applied the concept and the contributions provided by each set of researchers. The primary goal of this review is to determine what cognitive psychologists can take away from developments within the field and what considerations should be taken into account when using the term affordance. Having a more thorough understanding of the factors that led to the concept of affordance and its recent reformulations will better equip cognitive psychologists and, by extension, human factors researchers to further advance the study of perception–action relations.

An understanding of how science is enacted and how scientific knowledge is generated, or the nature of science (NOS), is a major goal of science education. NOS views have almost exclusively been assessed using the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS) suite of instruments, which consists of open-ended questions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the utility of performing an Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) from VNOS-B responses, using the group as the unit of analysis. Traditional scoring of the VNOS responses demonstrated that overall, participants shifted from emerging to more sophisticated views across all elements. An ENA provided a quick visualization of how participants connected NOS ideas. With regard to accuracy of participants’ NOS understandings as a group, findings from traditional VNOS analysis and ENA converged on two main points, improvement of overall quality of knowledge and the identification of missing elements of NOS from responses. Some changes in participants’ NOS understanding were identifiable in results from only the ENA. For example, prior to instruction, ENA showed three naive ideas about empiricism. After instruction, no naive statements remained in the responses about the empirical nature of science. ENA extends the traditional VNOS analysis by enabling the pinpointing of particular ideas that are meaningful to the group, indicating clusters of ideas that are related, and illustrating the way informed, transitional and naive ideas intermingle.

The American physician, William James (1842-1910), a published philosopher and psychologist, will perhaps be forever remembered as the first psychologist in United States. But his influence on universal culture was much deeper. Together with the mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) he laid the foundation for pragmatism. James considers the human mind as a dynamic concept. James also contributed to functional psychology by attempting to define the subconscious in relation to the perception of personal existence. His medical studies led him to perceive psychology as a branch of biology. In the book he published only a year before he passed away, The Meaning of Truth (1909), James postulated radical empiricism. According to the American psychologist, human consciousness is a complex process, not just a data flow, but also the creation of networks and connections between these fragments, and human experience is a cumulative, non-random connection process. Numerous philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, logicians, mathematicians, and even literary writers are indebted to William James for his innovative ideas. The multidisciplinary of this visionary man’s theories is unquestionable. He managed to create a system of thinking which blended all the aspects encountered when studying human mind.

This paper proposes a conceptual model that fosters interdisciplinary thinking and critical thinking by connecting the three main philosophical traditions that impact modern thinking – British empiricism, Continental Europe subjective idealism, and realism – with their epistemological foundations and in combination with modern social disciplines: ethics, social responsibility, and political economy. Through a statistical analysis this paper shows which of the three epistemologies produces better social outcomes.

Esta investigación analiza las configuraciones gramaticales implementadas en la construcción de mensajes del lenguaje escrito, a través de la red social Facebook en un grupo de 100 estudiantes, el problema a investigar se definió: ¿Cuál es el impacto de la red social Facebook en el uso de abreviaturas comunicacionales del lenguaje escrito en los estudiantes de segundo y tercero bachillerato de la Unidad Educativa Pedro J. Montero? Objetivo General: estudiar la incidencia de las abreviaturas comunicacionales del lenguaje escrito en la red social Facebook. Hipótesis: los factores que inciden en el uso de abreviaturas comunicacionales del lenguaje escrito en la red social Facebook son el uso del chat como medio de comunicación virtual y la inmediatez en la codificación del mensaje. Variables: lenguaje escrito y Comunicación virtual. Tipo: descriptivo. Diseño: no experimental-transeccional. Metodología: empirismo. Técnicas: cuatro cualitativas y cuatro cuantitativas. Muestra: no probabilística-por cuota. Resultados: hipótesis comprobada.

There is a significant psychological aversion to English as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia. General weakness among learners opting for English majors and undergraduate learners of the English language is noted. Different learners are unaware of learning styles most suited to them. This research discussed the necessity for sensitizing university teachers towards the contributing factors in the success or failure of teaching and learning the English Language in Saudi Arabia. Teaching-learning processes would be fruitful if the syllabus designers, teachers, and learners become aware of important factors like teacher’s characteristics, learners’ characteristics, teaching materials, and educational institutions. This study aimed to emphasize the role of the English language teacher in facilitating learning processes, through conducting active research of English language learners at Wadi Ad-Dawasir in Saudi Arabia. This research enhances the prospects of pedagogical studies of different language learning and teaching.

The development of animal ethics has been characterized by both progress and absurdity. More activity in animal welfare has occurred in the past 50 years than in the previous 500, with large numbers of legislative actions supplanting the lone anti-cruelty laws. Nonetheless, there remains a tendency to confuse animal ethics with human ethics. I found this to be the case when my colleagues and I were drafting federal law requiring control of pain in invasive research. The history of animal ethics vacillates between Descartes’ denial of thought and feeling in animals and British empiricism, including the great skeptic David Hume, who affirmed in no uncertain terms the existence of animal mind. This approach was continued in British empiricism, culminating in the work of Charles Darwin. But despite Darwinian domination of biology and psychology, psychology was captured by denial of mind and consciousness by JB Watson, father of behaviorism. Denial of thought and feeling in animals continued in 20th century science and medicine while society in general became ever more firm in asserting their existence.

The nativist-empiricist debate has stimulated much research in developmental psychology. Although many classical behavioural studies propose face perception as a case of nativism, there is still evidence supporting opposing views. Considering the functional advantages of neuroscience techniques in investigating this topic, the author has conducted a critical review of several significant neuroscientific findings on face perception. This paper concludes that researchers can learn more from neuroscientific studies than behavioural research. Moreover, the results obtained from distinct neuroscience techniques suggest that face perception leans toward a nativist account. Neuroscience techniques should be encouraged in future research to resolve the nativism-empiricism debate regarding face perception and other topics.

From a classical phenomenological point of view, to reason is to have a conscious intentional experience. A conscious experience can be described as a predicative reconstruction of whatever reason might be concerned with while the intentional aspect can be deduced from the effort of disclosing specialized propositional insights into whatever reasoning is concerned with. Husserl argued that the task of phenomenology is to pave the way toward a science of consciousness in which reason as key feature of conscious life will be properly treated. However, contemporary phenomenology adopted an entirely different perspective on this matter. Conscious experiences are now described from a perspective reminiscent to traditional empiricism while the search for universal objectivity is abandoned in favor of contextual truths. The current situation raises several questions (a) how did we get here, (b) does making sense entail emotions, (c) does the emotivist reconsideration of consciousness solve the problem of objectivity, (d) should a future science of consciousness stress the role of emotions as a solution to subjectivism and yet to be considered a phenomenological science of consciousness. In this paper, I only begin to tackle these problems.

In order to understand the relationship between philosophy and experience, Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica (1732) is an extremely important text throughout the history of modern thought. Wolff then speaks of a connubium rationis et experientiae, appealing that both, reason and experience, contribute to the making of knowledge. Hence the references in Wolffian psychological science to astronomy and to a kind of psychometry, in the name of the experimental philosophy that Wolff hopes to extend to every field of knowledge and philosophy. This is a special relationship of philosophy with experience, which is not reduced to a pure empiricism, and which constitutes a fundamental mark of Wolff’s psychological, scientific and philosophical thought. This chapter is intended to contribute to the understanding and further discussion of this subject; first by reconstructing the reasons that lead Wolff to use the term “empirical psychology” and his response to the accusations of the Pietists of Halle. Secondly, with reference to the great Latin Logic, the relationships between historical, mathematical and philosophical knowledge and the typical characteristics of the so-called experimental philosophy are clarified. Hence the constant relationship between a posteriori and a priori that appears clear from Wolff’s typical intertwining between empirical psychology and rational psychology.

The fundamental standard of health care is health. Theories of health affect how we conceive of good health, ill health (and thus disease), Good patients, and Good providers. They also profoundly affect how we go about attempting to solve health problems once we’ve identified them. In this chapter, I argue that the way health care providers, bioethicists, and public health experts approach health relies on ideal theory despite the heavy knowledge that this world will never be ideal. We need a conception of health that accounts for this. I outline the weakness of ideal theory in general and with respect to theories of health, and argue in favor of a nonideal approach to health that is rooted in intersubjectivity, empiricism, inclusivity, contextual specificity, and reflexivity which are not entrusted to any one set of knowers. Throughout, I use the example of how we approach fatness, and medicalize obesity, to illustrate where we’ve gone wrong and to chart a path toward how we can go right.

There are two types of approaches to Artificial Intelligence, namely Symbolic AI and Statistical AI. The symbolic and statistical paradigms of cognition may be considered to be in conflict with each other; the recent debate between Chomsky and Norvig exemplifies a fundamental tension between the two paradigms (esp. on language), which is arguably in parallel with a conflict on interpretations of quantum theory as seen between Bohr and Einstein, one side arguing for the probabilist or empiricist view and the other for the universalist or rationalist view. In the present paper we explicate and articulate the fundamental discrepancy between them, and explore how a unifying theory could be developed to integrate them, and what sort of cognitive roles Integrated AI could play in comparison with present-day AI. We give, inter alia, a classification of Integrated AI, and argue that Integrated AI serves the purpose of humanising AI in terms of making AI more verifiable, more explainable, more causally accountable, more ethical, and thus closer to general intelligence. We especially emphasise the ethical advantage of Integrated AI. We also briefly touch upon the Turing Test for Ethical AI, and the pluralistic nature of Turing-type Tests for Integrated AI. Overall, we believe that the integrated approach to cognition gives the key to the next generation paradigm for AI and Cognitive Science in general, and that Categorical Integrated AI or Categorical Integrative AI Robotics would be arguably the most promising approach to it.

Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (cf. Chalmers, in: Gendler, Hawthorne (eds) Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars in Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Routledge, 1968, McDowell, in: Lindgard (ed) John McDowell: Experience, norm, and nature, Blackwell, 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add ‘object’ knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas, in: Knowles, Raleigh (eds), Acquaintance: new essays, Oxford University Press, 2019).

Contains fulltext : 220706.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Franz Joseph Gall used a broad variety of phenomena in support of his organology. Well known are his observations on anatomical features of the brain, species-specific behavioral patterns, the observation that some individuals may excel in one faculty while being mediocre in others, changes in the organs with development and aging, and how the organs associated with the faculties might be affected by diseases and acute brain lesions. We here present a widely overlooked source: his observations on individuals then classified as "deaf and dumb." We discuss how these observations were presented by Gall in support of his organology and in his disputes with empiricists and sensationalists about the nature of mind. 13 p.

The perception of space was a central topic in the philosophy, psychology, and sensory physiology of the nineteenth century. William James engaged all three of these approaches to spatial perception. On the prominent issue of nativism versus empirism, he supported nativism, holding that space is innately given in sensory perception. This chapter focuses on James’s discussions of the physiology and psychology of spatial perception in his Principles of Psychology. It first examines the historical context for James’s work, guided by (and commenting on) his own account of that history. Included here are his arguments for nativism. It then examines central aspects of his theory of spatial sensation, perception, and conception. Finally, it touches on the reception of his nativism, his phenomenological holism, his characterization of perception as involving active processes of discernment and construction, and his conception of perceiving organisms as environmentally embedded.

In an investigation (doi:10.1016/j.cbpra.2016.04.002) of the common difficulties clinicians have when learning CBT, Socratic questioning (also called guided discovery or collaborative empiricism) was identified as the hardest skill to learn. This finding led to a reformulation of how this skillset was taught. In doing so, a four-step model was developed: (1) Focusing on Key Content; (2). Developing a Phenomenological Understanding of the Cognition; (3). Fostering a Collaborative Curiosity; (4) Summary and Synthesis. The purpose of this book is to teach this four-step model and its many applications, and to do so in a clinician-friendly manner. The revised Socratic framework is presented, including the rationale for the framework, a macro-level description of the model, an overview of the specific steps that make up the framework, and several lengthy illustrative examples. The bird’s-eye view offered in this chapter sets the stage for the next four chapters which detail each step in the framework in extensive detail. Reproducible forms that relate to the revised framework are provided.

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.

Psychology was taught at the University of Copenhagen as part of a compulsory first-year course throughout the nineteenth century. In 1883, Harald Hoffding (1843–1931) became professor of philosophy at the University having the previous year brought out the first edition of his Outlines of psychology. The book went through numerous editions and received widespread acclaim through translations into a number of languages. It became one of the most widely used textbooks of psychology at the turn of the twentieth century. The book was characterized by its strictly empiricist approach to psychology, by its inclusion of findings from experimental research as well as numerous references to budding research on child development and psychopathology. The book was solidly anchored in classical philosophical approaches to psychology in basing its treatment of psychology on a three-fold division of the psyche into cognition, feeling, and will. Hoffding’s book showed the influence of both English associationism...

The aim of the article is to analyze the ethical system of Tadeusz Kotarbinski. In the reporting part of the article, the main theses of the system and additional remarks (which are present in Kotarbinski’s writings, but rarely cited in the studies on the Kotarbinski concept) are presented. I consider normative statements of the system (ethics of a reliable guardian), as well as metaethical assumptions (independent ethics). In the evaluative part of the paper, Kotarbinski’s normative proposal is evaluated as a good proposition of a secular counterpart of Christian ethics in its minimal version. The proposition is realistic and useful for those above all who are reluctant towards religious discourse. Analyzing the concept of independence of ethics, I emphasize the impact of reism on Kotarbinski’s ethical views, the inadequacy of his evaluation of religiosity and the overestimation of the role of empiricism in ethical cognition. I also discuss the educational dimension of the postulate of independence.

Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then “experience” meant both inner, or first person, and outer, or third person, experience. With the historical development, experience has come to mean only sense experience of outer reality. This has become associated with the ontology that matter is the most important substance in the universe, everything else—consciousness, mind, values, etc., —being derived thereof or reducible to it. This ontology is insufficient to explain the phenomena we are living with—consciousness, as a precondition of this idea, or anomalous cognitions. These have a robust empirical grounding, although we do not understand them sufficiently. The phenomenology, though, demands some sort of non-local model of the world and one in which consciousness is not derivative of, but coprimary with matter. I propose such a complementarist dual aspect model of consciousness and brain, or mind and matter. This then also entails a different epistemology. For if consciousness is coprimary with matter, then we can also use a deeper exploration of consciousness as happens in contemplative practice to reach an understanding of the deep structure of the world, for instance in mathematical or theoretical intuition, and perhaps also in other areas such as in ethics. This would entail a kind of contemplative science that would also complement our current experiential mode that is exclusively directed to the outside aspect of our world. Such an epistemology might help us with various issues, such as good theoretical and other intuitions.

In this article I examine an important episode in the growth of ‘mindfulness’ as a biomedical modality in Britain: the formation and establishment of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) by John Teasdale and his colleagues Mark Williams and Zindel Segal. My study, focusing on Teasdale’s contribution, combines ethnographic, oral historical and archival research to understand how mindfulness was disseminated or, to use a term sometimes used by mindfulness practitioners themselves, ‘transmitted’. Drawing on theoretical support from Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, I argue that transmission had a very specific form within the Buddhistic milieu that Teasdale occupied and within which he developed MBCT. To ‘transmit’ mindfulness was to transmit an experiential essence; a type of subjectivity that was seen as perennial, universal and radically distinct from its historical context. In tracing the recurring metaphysical, metaphorical and visual tropes of mindfulness and its transmission, I attempt to understand how Teasdale was embedded in both local and global networks of discourse and practice, and how his life and work contributed and depended upon an assemblage whose elements (institutional, technical, conceptual, textual) straddled empiricist psychology and religious mysticism. I also examine how authority, experience and knowledge were closely interwoven in the birth of British mindfulness, coming together to form an affectively compelling ‘diagram’ that shaped the way mindfulness was practiced and disseminated. In doing so, I aim to open up the possibility of studying the history of the human sciences from a new perspective: one which places an emphasis on the emotional impetus generated by metaphysical assumptions.

According to the embodied cognition hypothesis, the mental symbols used for higher cognitive reasoning, such as the making of deductive and inductive inferences, both originate and reside in our se...

Введение. В статье подчеркивается, что сосредоточение на подборе конкретных приемов в ущерб стратегическому планированию приводит к несистемности и непредсказуемости информационных кампаний по борьбе с влиянием ложных слухов. Теоретическое обоснование. Впервые анализируются три стратегии противодействия ложным слухам, соответственно, ориентированные на минимизацию факторов распространения неподтвержденных сведений, уменьшение их функционального потенциала и учет основных коммуникативных ролей в ситуациях многократных обсуждений. Обосновывается, что предлагаемая авторами коммуникативно-ролевая стратегия способна обеспечить понимание психологических аспектов организации борьбы с влиянием слухов. Подробно раскрывается содержание стратегии противодействия ложным слухам, предусматривающей вмешательство в диалогические процессы, сопровождающие распространение неподтвержденных сведений. На основе авторской модификации концепций Т. Шибутани и Ж.-Н. Кэпферера выделяются пять перспективных направлений, а именно: а) блокировка готовности «вестников» передавать сообщения; б) масштабное опережающее воздействие на «интерпретаторов» сведений; в) информационная поддержка «скептиков» в ролевом противостоянии со «сторонниками» слухов; г) приписывание характеристик гипотетическим авторам известий – «конфабуляторам»; д) стимулирование пассивности определившихся под влиянием слухов «акторов». Обсуждение результатов. В статье утверждается, что комплексные ориентиры для выстраивания кампании по противодействию ложным слухам обеспечивает каждая из рассматриваемых стратегий. Однако добиться соотнесения используемых на практике конкретных приемов с каким-то одним фактором возникновения слухов, определенной социальной функцией или единственной коммуникативной ролью не представляется возможным. В этом авторы видят причину недооценки специалистами теоретических основ противодействия ложным слухам. В то же время сугубый «эмпиризм» в деле борьбы со слухами чреват недостаточной эффективностью предпринимаемых информационных воздействий.

Empiricist models explain delusional beliefs by identifying the abnormal experiences which ground them. Recently, this strategy has been adopted to explain the false body size beliefs of anorexia nervosa patients. As such, a number of abnormal experiences of body size which patients suffer from have been identified. These oversized experiences convey false information regarding the patients’ own bodies, indicating that they are larger than reality. However, in addition to these oversized experiences, patients are also exposed to significant evidence suggesting their bodies are in fact thin. This situation poses a conundrum: why do patients appear strongly influenced by the former kinds of evidence while the latter has little effect? To solve this conundrum, I suggest a two-factor account. First, I discuss research on the biases patients exhibit in how they gather, attend to and interpret evidence related to their own body size. Such biases in evidence treatment, I suggest, cause oversized experiences to be sought out, attended to and accepted, while veridical body size experiences are ignored or explained away. These biases constitute the second factor for this empiricist model, accounting for the unwarranted conviction with which these beliefs are held. Finally, in line with recent research into self-deception, I propose that, paradoxically, these biases in evidence treatment arise from patients’ own desires.

Realism is generally assumed as the correct position with regards to psychological research and the measurement of psychological attributes in psychometrics. Borsboom et al. (Psychological Review, 110(2), 203–219 2003), for instance, argued that the choice of a reflective measurement model necessarily implies a commitment to the existence of psychological constructs as well as a commitment to the belief that empirical testing of measurement models can justify their correspondence with real causal structures. Hood (Erkenntnis, 78(4):739–761 2013) deemphasized Borsboom et al.’s position and argued that the choice of a reflective measurement model does not necessarily require ontological commitments, though, in his view, it does necessitate a commitment to minimal epistemic realism. Although these arguments are formulated with regard to psychological research, they can actually be generalized to other disciplines in social sciences that use similar methodologies and statistical techniques. In Hood’s opinion, empiricism does not suffice to provide an adequate account of the choice of reflective measurement models given that this choice requires an appeal to causal explanations. In this paper, we argue against Hood and answer this challenge, providing epistemic foundations for social science research that do not appeal to realism.

The ways in which group members experience and interact with one another has been explored in philosophy from Greek antiquity to the present. In modern European philosophy, beginning with the Enlightenment, the problem of ‘the Other’ has been taken up by empirical, idealist, phenomenological and existential philosophers. Based on such philosophical discourse, this article presents a fourfold schema of ‘modalities’ through which people acquire knowledge of one another in groups. The four modalities are as follows: (1) ‘Mind’, the use of reason, cognition and sense data to form a model of the other person’s mental processes; (2) ‘Body’, the intuitive, empathic, embodied perception of others; (3) ‘Gaze’, the establishment of power and authority by scrutiny of each other’s presentation of self; and (4) ‘Face’, the ethical imperative presented by the Other. The ideas of (1) Descartes, Locke and Kant; (2) Merleau-Ponty; (3) Sartre and Foucault; and (4) Levinas are discussed to elucidate each modality. The relationships between the modalities, group analytic theory and neuroscience are explored to build bridges between philosophy, group theory and practice, and the neuroscience of the social brain.