Money and mental contents

It can be hard to see where money fits in the world. Money seems both real and imaginary, since it has obvious causal powers, but is also, just as obviously, something humans have just made up. Recent philosophical accounts of money have declared it to be real, but for very different reasons. John Searle and Francesco Guala disagree over whether money is just whatever acts like money, or just whatever people believe to be money. In developing their accounts of institutions as a part of social reality, each uses money as a paradigm institution, but they disagree on how institutions exist. Searle argues that the institution of money belongs to an ontological level separate from the physical world, held up by the collective intentions of a group, while Guala claims that money is a part of the ordinary physical world and is just whatever performs a “money-like function” in a group, regardless of what that group believes about it. Here, we argue that any purely functional account like Guala’s will be unable to capture the distinctive phenomenon of money, since monetary transactions are defined by the attitudes transactors hold toward them. Money will be obscured or misidentified if defined functionally. As we go on to show by examining recent work by Smit et al., belief in money does not require taking on all of Searle’s ontological commitments, but money and mental contents will stand or fall together

Ölüm Ötesi İnancının Bilişsel Açıklamalarının Eleştirel Bir Analizi

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a scientific approach to the study of religion that seeks to provide causal explanations of religious beliefs and practices. Proponents of CSR seek to explain the process of the formation, acceptance, transmission, and prevalence of religious beliefs by explaining the natural features of the human mind and how it functions. One of the religious beliefs that exists in all human cultures, and has attracted the attention of many CSR scholars in the last decade, is the belief in afterlife. According to CSR researchers, this belief is rooted in the natural structures of the human mind. They see the belief in life after death as a non-reflective or intuitive belief that results from the functioning of mental tools. They have proposed various theories to explain the formation, development, spread, and transmission of belief in life after death. But among these theories, two theories have been more widely accepted, intuitive dualism theory and simulation constraint theory. Intuitive dualism theory says that all humans have the two mental tools: Intuitive Biology and Intuitive Psychology. Intuitive Biology in the face of a dead person makes us believe that he is no longer alive because he cannot move and act. Intuitive Psychology continues to attribute invisible features (such as desires, thoughts, beliefs, and emotions) to the dead person automatically. The simultaneous functioning of the above two mental tools makes the human mind believe that a part of the dead person is immaterial and remains after the physical death. Simulation constraint theory says that all humans have the mental tools to process information from the environment and acquire religious beliefs. None of the mental tools can imagine or simulate the nonexistence of one's desires, thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Therefore, the human mind in the face of the dead person, although easily imagining his physical death, continues to believe in the existence of another part of the person (thoughts, desires, etc.). Both of these theories seem to face challenges and limitations in explaining the formation of belief in afterlife. These include inability to provide causal explanation, the lack of distinction between the natural and the rational foundations of belief in afterlife and disregarding the supernatural foundations of the afterlife belief. Neither of the two theories seems to provide a sufficient causal explanation for the formation of belief in the afterlife. Both theories attempt to present a possible story about the formation of afterlife beliefs based on how mental tools function. They provide only a reasonable story of the process that has led to the belief in afterlife. What these two theories offer is a description (not causal explanation) of the human mind and its tools and how they function. This in itself does not explain that these tools have produced a belief in the afterlife. Therefore, the claim that belief in the afterlife is the result of the functioning of mental tools requires a causal relationship between mental tools and this belief. Neither of these two theories can explain this causal relationship, and they merely describe a reasonable story of the relationship between them. Furthermore, distinction between rational foundations of religious belief and natural foundations of religious belief shows that finding a natural origin for believing in the afterlife or describing the cognitive mechanisms associated with it does not in any way mean rejecting or discrediting that belief. Cognitive theories about the natural origins of the belief in the afterlife cannot show us whether this belief is rational or irrational. These explanations can only (if they can) show us the natural roots of the formation and prevalence of this belief. Also Religious belief is a complex notion. Firstly, it is a natural notion, in that sense it is rooted in the human nature and is related to human cognitive systems and mental tools. Secondly, it is a cultural and social notion, in that sense it is both influenced by cultural and social change, and also affects it. Thirdly, it is a supernatural notion, in that sense it is deeply connected with both revelation and prophecy, and with the immaterial aspect of human. Belief in afterlife seems to require all three levels of explanation

Assertion: a function first account

This paper aims to develop a novel account of the normativity of assertion. Its core thesis is that assertion has an etiological epistemic function, viz. to generate knowledge in hearers. In conjunction with a general account of etiological functions and their normative import, it is argued that an assertion is epistemically good if and only if it has the disposition to generate knowledge in hearers. In addition, reason is provided to believe that it makes sense to regulate the practice of assertion by a speaker rule—and, more specifically, by a knowledge rule—as so regulating assertion contributes to ensuring that assertion fulfils its etiological function reliably

Epistemic Teleology: Synchronic and Diachronic

According to a widely held view of the matter, whenever we assess beliefs as ‘rational’ or ‘justified’, we are making normative judgements about those beliefs. In this discussion, I shall simply assume, for the sake of argument, that this view is correct. My goal here is to explore a particular approach to understanding the basic principles that explain which of these normative judgements are true. Specifically, this approach is based on the assumption that all such normative principles are grounded in facts about values, and the normative principles that apply to beliefs in particular are grounded in facts about alethic value––a kind of value that is exemplified by believing what is true and not believing what is false. In this chapter, I shall explain what I regard as the best way of interpreting this approach. In doing so, I shall also show how this interpretation can solve some problems that have recently been raised for approaches of this kind by Selim Berker, Jennifer Carr, Michael Caie, and Hilary Greaves

DELIBERATION, JUDGEMENT AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE

A normative Bayesian theory of deliberation and judgement requires a procedure for merging the evidence of a collection of agents. In order to provide such a procedure, one needs to ask what the evidence is that grounds Bayesian probabilities. After finding fault with several views on the nature of evidence (the views that evidence is knowledge; that evidence is whatever is fully believed; that evidence is observationally set credence; that evidence is information), it is argued that evidence is whatever is rationally taken for granted. This view is shown to have consequences for an account of merging evidence, and it is argued that standard axioms for merging need to be altered somewhat

The Epistemology of Alvin Plantinga

In this article we intend to present Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology by showing the way in which its central concepts: the Reidian foundationalism, the partial critique of evidentialism, warrant, proper function, reliability and externalism - are logically interrelated. A section of this article is reserved to the critiques of his account of warrant brought by Peter Klein and Richard Feldman and to the way in which Plantinga answered them, by developing the concepts of cognitive maxi- and mini-environment. In the end we will see the way in which Plantinga’s epistemology relates to both modernism and postmodernism

Fictional Persuasion and the Nature of Belief

Psychological studies on fictional persuasion demonstrate that being engaged with fiction systematically affects our beliefs about the real world, in ways that seem insensitive to the truth. This threatens to undermine the widely accepted view that beliefs are essentially regulated in ways that tend to ensure their truth, and may tempt various non-doxastic interpretations of the belief-seeming attitudes we form as a result of engaging with fiction. I evaluate this threat, and argue that it is benign. Even if the relevant attitudes are best seen as genuine beliefs, as I think they often are, their lack of appropriate sensitivity to the truth does not undermine the essential tie between belief and truth. To this end, I shall consider what I take to be the three most plausible models of the cognitive mechanisms underlying fictional persuasion, and argue that on none of these models does fictional persuasion undermine the essential truth-tie

Group disagreement: a belief aggregation perspective

The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it means for groups to be epistemic peers and to disagree with each other. In this paper, we explore what group peer disagreement amounts to given that we think of group belief in terms of List and Pettit’s ‘belief aggregation model’. We then discuss how the so-called ‘equal weight view’ of peer disagreement is best accommodated within this framework. The account that seems most promising to us says, roughly, that the parties to a group peer disagreement should adopt the belief that results from applying the most suitable belief aggregation function for the combined group on all members of the combined group. To motivate this view, we test it against various intuitive cases, derive some of its notable implications, and discuss how it relates to the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement

An Instrumentalist Account of How to Weigh Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner