Introverted Metaphysics: How We Get Our Grip on the Ultimate Nature of Objects, Properties, and Causation

This paper pulls together three debates fundamental in metaphysics and proposes a novel unified approach to them. The three debates are (i) between bundle theory and substrate theory about the nature of objects, (ii) dispositionalism and categoricalism about the nature of properties, and (iii) regularity theory and production theory about the nature of causation. The first part of the paper (§§2-4) suggests that although these debates are metaphysical, the considerations motivating the competing approaches in each debate tend to be epistemological. The second part (§§5-6) argues that the two underlying epistemological pictures supporting competing views lead to highly unsatisfying conceptions of the world. The final part (§§7-10) proposes an alternative epistemological picture, which I call ‘introverted empiricism,’ and presents the way it provides for a more satisfying grasp of the ultimate nature of objects, properties, and causation. It is a consequence of this alternative picture that there is a kind of intimate self-understanding that underlies our understanding of the deep nature of reality

The philosophy of perceptions a Wittgensteinian perspective

The aim of this thesis is to balance a positive account of the family of concepts included in and logically involved with the concept of perception, with critical considerations of accounts that are philosophically problematic. The problematic accounts in question will range from those of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries, or near contemporaries, such as Russell, Janes and Kohler, to those of psychologists and philosophers of our own time, some, but not all, of whom profess to embrace Wittgenstein’s position; these will include the authors of a standard textbook on visual perception (Bruce and Green), Quine, Peacocke, Vesey, Anscombe, Martin, McDowell, Mulhall and Candlish, Additionally, the general nature of the problems in question will be reflected in a positive account of the concepts of acceleration (chapter 1), identity and personal identity (chapter 5), in relation to problematic accounts given by Leibniz and Parfit respectively. Crucial to this aim will be an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s position that is distinct from all those positions that profess to be Wittgensteinian, but that in fact remain in the grip of the very Cartesian / empiricist preconceptions that Wittgenstein diagnoses as the source of the problems. This will be the key to the positive account, and will depend on showing that Wittgenstein's diagnosis is essentially the same for all problems of a philosophical nature, despite its highly specific application to problems concerning various concepts in different parts of the Investigations, whose subtle differences it is equally important to discern clearly

Another look at color primitivism

This article is on a precise kind of color primitivism, ‘ostensivism.’ This is the view that it is in the nature of the colors that they are phenomenal, non-reductive, structural, categorical properties. First, I differentiate ostensivism from other precise forms of primitivism. Next, I examine the core belief ‘Revelation,’ and propose a revised version, which, unlike standard statements, is compatible with a yet unstated but plausible core belief: roughly, that there are interesting things to be discovered about the nature of the colors. Finally, I show that ostensivism is the only view on color that can accommodate both proposed core beliefs

Relatively Speaking: An Account of the Relationship between Language and Thought in the Color Domain

This chapter is divided into six sections. The first sets out the background of the debate about the relationship between language and cognition in the color domain. The second explains how recent studies of color recognition employing visual search tasks have clarified this relationship. This section also argues that these studies point to the existence of two separate systems that influence perception and categorization of color; one of which is linguistically based, and one of which is not affected by language. The third section critically evaluates recent claims that there are similarities between color terms in the world's languages that point to the existence of color universals. The fourth section examines children's color term acquisition in an attempt to trace the mechanisms bywhich color categories are acquired. It also discusses whether infants have an innate prepartitioned organization of color categories that is overridden during the learning process. The two final sections outline some outstanding questions, note some methodological constraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from the accumulated evidence, and argue that much more empirical investigation is still needed in this field

The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories

Using neural nets to simulate learning and the genetic algorithm to simulate evolution in a toy world of mushrooms and mushroom-foragers, we place two ways of acquiring categories into direct competition with one another: In (1) "sensorimotor toil,” new categories are acquired through real-time, feedback-corrected, trial and error experience in sorting them. In (2) "symbolic theft,” new categories are acquired by hearsay from propositions – boolean combinations of symbols describing them. In competition, symbolic theft always beats sensorimotor toil. We hypothesize that this is the basis of the adaptive advantage of language. Entry-level categories must still be learned by toil, however, to avoid an infinite regress (the “symbol grounding problem”). Changes in the internal representations of categories must take place during the course of learning by toil. These changes can be analyzed in terms of the compression of within-category similarities and the expansion of between-category differences. These allow regions of similarity space to be separated, bounded and named, and then the names can be combined and recombined to describe new categories, grounded recursively in the old ones. Such compression/expansion effects, called "categorical perception" (CP), have previously been reported with categories acquired by sensorimotor toil; we show that they can also arise from symbolic theft alone. The picture of natural language and its origins that emerges from this analysis is that of a powerful hybrid symbolic/sensorimotor capacity, infinitely superior to its purely sensorimotor precursors, but still grounded in and dependent on them. It can spare us from untold time and effort learning things the hard way, through direct experience, but it remain anchored in and translatable into the language of experience

Risks of Friendships on Social Networks

In this paper, we explore the risks of friends in social networks caused by their friendship patterns, by using real life social network data and starting from a previously defined risk model. Particularly, we observe that risks of friendships can be mined by analyzing users' attitude towards friends of friends. This allows us to give new insights into friendship and risk dynamics on social networks.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. To Appear in the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM

Associative and repetition priming with the repeated masked prime technique: No priming found

Wentura and Frings (2005) reported evidence of subliminal categorical priming on a lexical decision task, using a new method of visual masking in which the prime string consisted of the prime word flanked by random consonants and random letter masks alternated with the prime string on successive refresh cycles. We investigated associative and repetition priming on lexical decision, using the same method of visual masking. Three experiments failed to show any evidence of associative priming, (1) when the prime string was fixed at 10 characters (three to six flanking letters) and (2) when the number of flanking letters were reduced or absent. In all cases, prime detection was at chance level. Strong associative priming was observed with visible unmasked primes, but the addition of flanking letters restricted priming even though prime detection was still high. With repetition priming, no priming effects were found with the repeated masked technique, and prime detection was poor but just above chance levels. We conclude that with repeated masked primes, there is effective visual masking but that associative priming and repetition priming do not occur with experiment-unique prime-target pairs. Explanations for this apparent discrepancy across priming paradigms are discussed. The priming stimuli and prime-target pairs used in this study may be downloaded as supplemental materials from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc