Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

A New Theory of Content II: Model Theory and Some Alternatives

Articl

Hypothetico-deductivism: incomplete but not hopeless

Alleged counter-examples deployed in Park (2004) against the account of selective hypothetico deductive confirmation offered in Gemes (1998) are shown to be ineffective. Furthermore, the reservations expressed in Gemes (1998) and (1993) about hypothetico-deductivism are retracted and replaced with the conclusion that hypothetico-deductivism is a viable account of confirmation that captures much of the practice of working scientists. However, because it cannot capture cases of inference to the best explanation and cases of the observational confirmation of statistical hypotheses, it is concluded that hypothetico-deductivism cannot supply a complete theory of confirmation

Meditation Matters: Replies to the Anti-McMindfulness Bandwagon!

A critical reply to the anti-mindfulness critics in the collection, who oppose the popular secularized adoption of mindfulness on various grounds (it is not Buddhism, it is Buddhism, it is a tool of neo-capitalist exploitation, etc.), I argue that mindfulness is a quality of consciousness, opposite mindlessness, that may be cultivated through practice, and is almost always beneficial to those who cultivate it

The Methodological Roles of Tolerance and Conventionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics: Reconsidering Carnap\u27s Logic of Science

This dissertation makes two primary contributions. The first three chapters develop an interpretation of Carnap\u27s Meta-Philosophical Program which places stress upon his methodological analysis of the sciences over and above the Principle of Tolerance. Most importantly, I suggest, is that Carnap sees philosophy as contiguous with science—as a part of the scientific enterprise—so utilizing the very same methods and subject to the same limitations. I argue that the methodological reforms he suggests for philosophy amount to philosophy as the explication of the concepts of science (including mathematics) through the construction and use of suitably robust meta-logical languages. My primary interpretive claim is that Carnap\u27s understanding of logic and mathematics as a set of formal auxiliaries is premised upon this prior analysis of the character of logico-mathematical knowledge, his understanding of its role in the language of science, and the methods used by practicing mathematicians. Thus the Principle of Tolerance, and so Carnap\u27s logical pluralism, is licensed and justified by these methodological insights. This interpretation of Carnap\u27s program contrasts with the popular Deflationary reading as proposed in Goldfarb & Ricketts (1992). The leading idea they attribute to Carnap is a Logocentrism: That philosophical assertions are always made relative to some particular language(s), and that our choice of syntactical rules for a language are constitutive of its inferential structure and methods of possible justification. Consequently Tolerance is considered the foundation of Carnap\u27s entire program. My third chapter argues that this reading makes Carnap\u27s program philosophically inert, and I present significant evidence that such a reading is misguided. The final chapter attempts to extend the methodological ideals of Carnap\u27s program to the analysis of the ongoing debate between category- and set-theoretic foundations for mathematics. Recent criticism of category theory as a foundation charges that it is neither autonomous from set theory, nor offers a suitable ontological grounding for mathematics. I argue that an analysis of concepts can be foundationally informative without requiring the construction of those concepts from first principles, and that ontological worries can be seen as methodologically unfruitful

A Grammatical Paradigm

Avram Noam Chomsky is known for his work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his political pursuits, and most importantly, for his theories in the discipline of linguistics. Chomsky linguistic pursuits aimed to answer the following linguistic studies: how a person learns and develops a language, how a person structures and understands a sentence, and what the purpose of linguistics is as a whole. His theories dramatically changed the linguistic paradigm. Due to this change, this paper also attempts to illustrate the correlation between scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s belief in ‘paradigm shifts’ and the subsequent change in linguistic thought spurred by Chomsky’s grammatical theories

What's Right With a Syntactic Approach to Theories and Models?

Syntactic approaches in the philosophy of science, which are based on formalizations in predicate logic, are often considered in principle inferior to semantic approaches, which are based on formalizations with the help of structures. To compare the two kinds of approach, I identify some ambiguities in common semantic accounts and explicate the concept of a structure in a way that avoids hidden references to a specific vocabulary. From there, I argue that contrary to common opinion (i) unintended models do not pose a significant problem for syntactic approaches to scientific theories, (ii) syntactic approaches can be at least as language independent as semantic ones, and (iii) in syntactic approaches, scientific theories can be as well connected to the world as in semantic ones. Based on these results, I argue that syntactic and semantic approaches fare equally well when it comes to (iv) ease of application, (iv) accommodating the use of models in the sciences, and (vi) capturing the theory-observation relation