The Mind-Body Problem in the Origin of Logical Empiricism: Herbert Feigl and Psychophysical Parallelism

In the 19th century, "Psychophysical Parallelism" was the most popular solution of the mind-body problem among physiologists, psychologists and philosophers. (This is not to be mixed up with Leibnizian and other cases of "Cartesian" parallelism.) The fate of this non-Cartesian view, as founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner, is reviewed. It is shown that Feigl's "identity theory" eventually goes back to Alois Riehl who promoted a hybrid version of psychophysical parallelism and Kantian mind-body theory which was taken up by Feigl's teacher Moritz Schlick.

Rudolf Carnap’s incorporation of the Geisteswissenschaften in the Aufbau

This paper investigates the various ways in which Rudolf Carnap incorporated contemporary epistemological problems concerning the Geisteswissenschaften in Der logische Aufbau der Welt. I argue that Carnap defends a non-reductive incorporation of the Geisteswissenschaften within the unity of science. To this end Carnap aims to solve the problem of individuality, which was the focus of attention for important philosophers of the Geisteswissenschaften, like Dilthey, Rickert and Windelband. At the same time, Carnap also argues that his constitutional method, which transforms cultural objects to psychological or physical objects, does not imply a loss of autonomy for the Geisteswissenschaften. Besides this defense of autonomy, Carnap also incorporates several central notions of contemporary theory of the Geisteswissenschaften into his theory of the Aufbau: cultural manifestation, phenomenology of cultural experience, and the method of Verstehen

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)

Does information inform confirmation?

In a recent survey of the literature on the relation between information and confirmation, Crupi and Tentori (Stud Hist Philos Sci 47:81–90, 2014) claim that the former is a fruitful source of insight into the latter, with two well-known measures of confirmation being definable purely information-theoretically. I argue that of the two explicata of semantic information (due originally to Bar Hillel and Carnap) which are considered by the authors, the one generating a popular Bayesian confirmation measure is a defective measure of information, while the other, although an admissible measure of information, generates a defective measure of confirmation. Some results are proved about the representation of measures on consequence-classes

A consideration of two attacks upon the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this essay is to reply to the attacks upon the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction made by Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and by White in "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism". This essay attempts to show not only that these attacks are ill-conceived, but also that Carnap's semantic methods can be used to explain analytically in natural languages. The two attacks are, in effect, attacks upon the conception of the analytic as being definitely different from the synthetic. Quine's attack is directed primarily at three of Carnap's basic concepts -- state-description, explication, and semantic rule. These he regards as separate attempts to explain analytically. White attacks the claim that some natural language has the sharp analytic-synthetic distinction of an artificial language. He does this by considering primarily two imagined experiments [TRUNCATED

Nietzsche’s Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy

In this paper, I will try to show the ways in which Nietzsche prefigures the crucial moves made recently in postmodern" American philosophy. I will confine my remarks to two of Nietzsche's texts: Twilight of the Idols and The Will To Power. The postmodern American philosophers I will examine are W.V. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Wilfred Sellars, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. The three moves I shall portray are: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology; the move toward the demythologization of the Myth of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology; and the move toward the detranscendentalization of the subject or the dismissal of the mind as a sphere of inquiry. I then shall claim that Nietzsche believed such moves lead to a paralyzing nihilism and ironic skepticism unless they are supplemented with a new world view, a new "countermovement" to overcome such nihilism and skepticism. Lastly, I will suggest that postmodern American philosophy has not provided such a "countermovement," settling instead for either updated versions of scientism (Quine and Sellars), an aristocratic resurrection of pluralistic stylism (Goodman), a glib ideology of professionalism (Kuhn), or a nostalgic appeal to enlightened conversation (Rorty). Such weak candidates for a "countermovement" seem to indicate the extent to which postmodern American philosophy—similar to much of postmodern thought in the West—constitutes a dead, impotent rhetoric of a declining and decaying civilization