History and hermeneutics : the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood and its theological application.

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The Generative Programs Framework

Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal structure already places significant constraints on the form that theory may take. Thus in this paper, we aim to set out a more general structural framework. We argue that any quantitative physical theory can be represented in the form of a generative program, i.e. a list of instructions showing how to generate the empirical data; the information-processing structure associated with this program can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We suggest that these graphs can be interpreted as encoding relations of `ontological priority,' and that ontological priority is a suitable generalisation of causation which applies even to theories that don't have a natural causal structure. We discuss some applications of our framework to philosophical questions about realism, operationalism, free will, locality and fine-tuning.Comment: 42 pages, 15 figures, 19 pages of supplementary materia

Hard-Incompatibilist Existentialism: Neuroscience, Punishment, and Meaning in Life

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos

Archaeological knowledge and its representation an inter-disciplinary study of the problems of knowledge representation

The thesis is a study of archaeology viewed from a perspective informed by (a) social constructionist theory and pragmatism; (b) techniques of Belief and Knowledge Representation developed by Artificial Intelligence research and (c) the conception of history and historical practice propounded by the philosopher, historian and archaeologist, R.G. Collingwood. It is argued that Gibsonian affordances and von Uexkull's notion of the Umwelt, recently discussed by Rom Harré, provide the basis for a description and understanding of human action and agency. Further, belief and knowledge representation techniques embodied in Expert Systems and Intelligent Tutoring Systems provide a means of implementing models of human action which may bridge intentionality and process and thereby provide a unifying learning environment in which the relationships of language, social action and material transformation of the physical world can be explored in a unified way. The central claim made by the thesis is that Collingwood's logic (dialectic) of Question & Answer developed in 1917 as a hermeneutic procedure, may be seen as a fore-runner of Newell and Simon's Heuristic Search, and thereby amenable to modem approaches to problem solving. Collingwood's own approach to History/ Archaeology is grounded on many shared ideas with pragmatism and a social constructionist conception of mind and is conducted within a problem solving framework. Collingwood is therefore seen as a three-way bridge between Social Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Archaeology. The thesis concludes that Social Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Archaeology can be integrated through the use of Intelligent Tutoring Systems informed by a Collingwoodian perspective on Archaeology, Mind and History - construed as Mind's self-knowledge

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered

This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life

Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience

This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism. Readership: All interested in the philosophy of sciences, in the philosophy of mind, in the philosophy of language, in the cognitive sciences, in anthropology, and anyone interested by the question of the relation between brain and free will