David Lewis's Place in the History of Late Analytic Philosophy: His Conservative and Liberal Methodology

In 1901 Russell had envisaged the new analytic philosophy as uniquely systematic, borrowing the methods of science and mathematics. A century later, have Russell’s hopes become reality? David Lewis is often celebrated as a great systematic metaphysician, his influence proof that we live in a heyday of systematic philosophy. But, we argue, this common belief is misguided: Lewis was not a systematic philosopher, and he didn’t want to be. Although some aspects of his philosophy are systematic, mainly his pluriverse of possible worlds and its many applications, that systematicity was due to the influence of his teacher Quine, who really was an heir to Russell. Drawing upon Lewis’s posthumous papers and his correspondence as well as the published record, we show that Lewis’s non- Quinean influences, including G.E. Moore and D.M. Armstrong, led Lewis to an anti- systematic methodology which leaves each philosopher’s views and starting points to his or her own personal conscience

Psychophysical identity and free energy

An approach to implementing variational Bayesian inference in biological systems is considered, under which the thermodynamic free energy of a system directly encodes its variational free energy. In the case of the brain, this assumption places constraints on the neuronal encoding of generative and recognition densities, in particular requiring a stochastic population code. The resulting relationship between thermodynamic and variational free energies is prefigured in mind-brain identity theses in philosophy and in the Gestalt hypothesis of psychophysical isomorphism.Comment: 22 pages; published as a research article on 8/5/2020 in Journal of the Royal Society Interfac

Varieties of Cognitive Integration

Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration—cluster-model functionalism—which finds application in both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat

Substantivism about truth

Substantivism is a general philosophical methodology advocating a substantive approach to philosophical theorizing. In this article, I present an overview of this methodology with a special emphasis on the field of truth. I begin with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the substantivist–deflationist debate and describe the substantivist critique of deflationism. I then proceed to discuss contemporary substantivism as a positive methodology, present examples of recent substantivist theories of truth, delineate several principles of philosophical substantivism, and connect it to contemporary thought about the nature and methods of philosophy. Due to limitations of space, I am unable to discuss all the forms contemporary substantivism has taken. But I try to give a clear sense of the central principles, challenges, and promise of this methodology

Eligibility and inscrutability

The philosophy of intentionality asks questions such as: in virtue of what does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain way? The subquestion I focus upon here concerns the semantic properties of language: in virtue of what does a name such as ‘London’ refer to something or a predicate such as ‘is large’ apply to some object? This essay examines one kind of answer to this “metasemantic”1 question: interpretationism, instances of which have been proposed by Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and others. I characterize the “twostep” form common to such approaches and briefl y say how two versions described by David Lewis fi t this pattern. Then I describe a fundamental challenge to this approach: a “permutation argument” that contends, by interpretationist lights, there can be no fact of the matter about lexical content (e.g., what individual words refer to). Such a thesis cannot be sustained, so the argument threatens a reductio of interpretationism. In the second part of the article, I will give what I take to be the best interpretationist response to the inscrutability paradox: David Lewis’s appeal to the differential “eligibility” of semantic theories. I contend that, given an independently plausible formulation of interpretationism, the eligibility response is an immediate consequence of Lewis’s general analysis of the theoretical virtue of simplicity. In the fi nal sections of the article, I examine the limitations of Lewis’s response. By focusing on an alternative argument for the inscrutability of reference, I am able to describe conditions under which the eligibility result will deliver the wrong results. In particular, if the world is complex enough and our language suffi ciently simple, then reference may be determinately secured to the wrong things

The New Mechanical Philosophy

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of the scientist\u27s challenge is to balance the complexity and particularity of mechanisms with our need for representations of them that are abstract and general.This volume weaves together metaphysical and methodological questions about mechanisms. Metaphysically, it explores the implications of the mechanistic framework for our understanding of classical philosophical questions about the nature of objects, properties, processes, events, causal relations, natural kinds and laws of nature. Methodologically, the book explores how scientists build models to represent and understand phenomena and the mechanisms responsible for them. Using this account of representation, Glennan offers a scheme for characterizing the enormous diversity of things that scientists call mechanisms, and explores the scope and limits of mechanistic explanation