Lexical Flexibility, Natural Language, and Ontology

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics

The interpretation of artifacts : a critique of Dennett's design stance

The Interpretation of Artifacts; A Critique of Dennett’s Design Stance Technological artifacts are a pervasive part of human life. They are, however, largely ignored in the analytic philosophical tradition, especially by philosophical naturalists. Being mind-dependent phenomena, tied up with human intentionality, analytic philosophers have largely found the topic unscientific, not objective, or simply trivial. An important exception is Daniel Dennett, who puts design at the heart of his naturalistic theory of mind

The Obesity Crisis and Semiotic Corruption

Is there an obesity crisis?  Postmodernists like Michael Gard argue that there is not while epidemiologists argue that there is and it is growing.  In this paper, I argue that such polarized positions are not a sign of healthy dialectic, but a sign of an increasingly fragmented and reductionist obesity research field.  As a further example, I draw on long term seemingly unresolvable disputes within nutrition brought about through reductionist approaches.  I argue that there is an obesity crisis, that it is linked to other major global crises and that to meaningfully address it will require greater unity within the obesity research field.  I therefore put forward the post-reductionist general concept of semiotic corruption developed by process philosopher, Arran Gare and drawn from the emerging post-reductionist field of biosemiotics, as a potential unifying concept for the field.  In doing this I explore the history and nature of biosemiotics and its links to other holistic traditions which all seek to mend the gross philosophical errors committed by those such as Descartes who ruptured the relationship between living and non-living processes.  I then discuss some implications of this holistic approach for better understanding obesity as semiotic corruption, particularly focusing on the concepts of embodied, anticipatory systems and the need for a new ethics of health which understands and augments the real complexity and irreducibility of life

The Nature and Implementation of Representation in Biological Systems

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory

Here be dragons: exploring the hinterland of science

This dissertation is an exploration of the hinterland of science and the strange ‘creatures’ dwelling there. In philosophical circles, the subject of pseudoscience has stirred relatively little philosophical excitement. The demarcation project has fallen on hard times, and many philosophers have grown suspicious of the very term ‘pseudoscience’, as it is believed to suggest a naïve conception of science and its borderlines. In this dissertation, I argue that, instead of abandoning the demarcation project altogether, we should search for more sophisticated tools to distinguish pseudoscience from bona fide science. The ‘silver bullet’ approach to pseudoscience is criticized, particularly with regard to the principle of methodological naturalism in science and the controversy about supernaturalism and intelligent design. I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the structure of pseudosciences, based on the concepts of immunizing strategies and epistemic defense mechanisms. The recurrence of these theoretical features, which is illustrated with a number of case studies, demonstrates the surprising resilience of pseudoscience and other ‘irrational’ belief systems. These epistemological considerations are then integrated with cognitive and psychological findings on irrationality, in order to construct a broader framework for the generation and dissemination of belief systems (epidemiology of representations). I argue that the self-validating nature and internal epistemic rationale of certain ‘weird’ belief systems go some way to explaining their wide appeal and pervasiveness. We conclude that pseudosciences are worthy of philosophical investigation, and that the rumors of the death of demarcationism have been greatly exaggerated

Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies

First paragraph: To my mind, being wrong is nowhere near as disheartening as being boring, so I am encouraged by the fact that, in the four chapters immediately preceding this one, four thinkers for whom I have nothing but the utmost intellectual respect have found my ongoing project to articulate the philosophical groundwork for a genuinely Heideggerian cognitive science interesting enough that they have taken the trouble to explain precisely why it is flawed. Just how deep the supposed flaws go depends on which set of criticisms one chooses to read. For Ratcliffe and Rehberg they go very deep indeed, since, for these thinkers, there is a sense in which the very idea of a Heideggerian cognitive science borders on the incoherent. Dreyfus and Rietveld, on the other hand, seem to agree with me that something worth calling a Heideggerian cognitive science is certainly possible; it's just that my version of it is seriously defective

The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism

Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait. Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision. It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within it

Creationism and evolution

In Tower of Babel, Robert Pennock wrote that “defenders of evolution would help their case immeasurably if they would reassure their audience that morality, purpose, and meaning are not lost by accepting the truth of evolution.” We first consider the thesis that the creationists’ movement exploits moral concerns to spread its ideas against the theory of evolution. We analyze their arguments and possible reasons why they are easily accepted. Creationists usually employ two contradictive strategies to expose the purported moral degradation that comes with accepting the theory of evolution. On the one hand they claim that evolutionary theory is immoral. On the other hand creationists think of evolutionary theory as amoral. Both objections come naturally in a monotheistic view. But we can find similar conclusions about the supposed moral aspects of evolution in non-religiously inspired discussions. Meanwhile, the creationism-evolution debate mainly focuses — understandably — on what constitutes good science. We consider the need for moral reassurance and analyze reassuring arguments from philosophers. Philosophers may stress that science does not prescribe and is therefore not immoral, but this reaction opens the door for the objection of amorality that evolution — as a naturalistic world view at least — supposedly endorses. We consider that the topic of morality and its relation to the acceptance of evolution may need more empirical research

Inductive Pattern Formation

With the extended computational limits of algorithmic recursion, scientific investigation is transitioning away from computationally decidable problems and beginning to address computationally undecidable complexity. The analysis of deductive inference in structure-property models are yielding to the synthesis of inductive inference in process-structure simulations. Process-structure modeling has examined external order parameters of inductive pattern formation, but investigation of the internal order parameters of self-organization have been hampered by the lack of a mathematical formalism with the ability to quantitatively define a specific configuration of points. This investigation addressed this issue of quantitative synthesis. Local space was developed by the Poincare inflation of a set of points to construct neighborhood intersections, defining topological distance and introducing situated Boolean topology as a local replacement for point-set topology. Parallel development of the local semi-metric topological space, the local semi-metric probability space, and the local metric space of a set of points provides a triangulation of connectivity measures to define the quantitative architectural identity of a configuration and structure independent axes of a structural configuration space. The recursive sequence of intersections constructs a probabilistic discrete spacetime model of interacting fields to define the internal order parameters of self-organization, with order parameters external to the configuration modeled by adjusting the morphological parameters of individual neighborhoods and the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory point sets. The evolutionary trajectory of a configuration maps the development of specific hierarchical structure that is emergent from a specific set of initial conditions, with nested boundaries signaling the nonlinear properties of local causative configurations. This exploration of architectural configuration space concluded with initial process-structure-property models of deductive and inductive inference spaces. In the computationally undecidable problem of human niche construction, an adaptive-inductive pattern formation model with predictive control organized the bipartite recursion between an information structure and its physical expression as hierarchical ensembles of artificial neural network-like structures. The union of architectural identity and bipartite recursion generates a predictive structural model of an evolutionary design process, offering an alternative to the limitations of cognitive descriptive modeling. The low computational complexity of these models enable them to be embedded in physical constructions to create the artificial life forms of a real-time autonomously adaptive human habitat