On Self-Awareness and the Self

Some philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, phenomenologists as well as Buddhist philosophers have claimed that an awareness of an object is not just an experience of that object but also involves self-awareness. It is sometimes argued that being aware of an object without being aware of oneself is pathological. As anyone who has been involved in martial arts, as well as any sports requiring quick responses such as cricket and tennis, can testify, however, awareness of the self at the time of acting becomes problematic: you would not be able to respond to the slight movement of your opponent if you were aware of yourself responding to it. This suggests that it must be possible for us to be aware without being aware of ourselves. The aim of this paper is to clarify the notion of self-awareness and its relation to the self by investigating the phenomenology of the martial artist who is ‘in the act’. I shall argue that we can make sense of self-awareness without invoking awareness of oneself

Logically Impossible Worlds

What does it mean for the laws of logic to fail? My task in this paper is to answer this question. I use the resources that Routley/Sylvan developed with his collaborators for the semantics of relevant logics to explain a world where the laws of logic fail. I claim that the non-normal worlds that Routley/Sylvan introduced are exactly such worlds. To disambiguate different kinds of impossible worlds, I call such worlds logically impossible worlds. At a logically impossible world, the laws of logic fail. In this paper, I provide a definition of logically impossible worlds. I then show that there is nothing strange about admitting such worlds

Davidson and Chinese Conceptual Scheme

In one of his influential works ‘One the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Donald Davidson argues against conceptual relativism. According to Davidson, ‘we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own’. Davidson’s thesis seems to have a consequence for comparative philosophy, particularly in a comparative study between Chinese and Western traditions of philosophy which are often considered to differ conceptually. If Davidson is correct, it is not clear whether or not we can have insight into how and why concepts differ between these traditions. In this paper, I philosophically reflect on Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism. Though this paper retains the backbone of his argument, I reject Davidson’s thesis that different ways of conceptualisation cannot be compared. I do this through a discussion of the comparative studies conducted by David Hall and Roger Ames. In conclusion, I self-reflectively examine the nature of the demarcation between different traditions of philosophy and show how the activities of comparative philosophy can proceed

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic

On An Error In Grove's Proof

Nearly a decade has past since Grove gave a semantics for the AGM postulates. The semantics, called sphere semantics, provided a new perspective of the area of study, and has been widely used in the context of theory or belief change. However, the soundness proof that Grove gives in his paper contains an error. In this note, we will point this out and give two ways of repairing it

Computational Complexity in the Design of Voting Rules

This paper discusses an aspect of computational complexity in social choice theory. We consider the problem of designing voting rules, which is formulated in terms of simple games. We prove that it is an NP-complete problem to decide whether a given simple game is stable, or not.

Mutual Knowledge of Rationality in the Electronic Mail Game

This paper reexamines the paradoxical aspect of the electronic mail game (Rubinstein, 1989). The electronic mail game is a coordination game with payoff uncertainty. At a Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the game, players cannot achieve the desired coordination of actions even when a high order of mutual knowledge of payoff functions obtains. We want to make explicit the role of knowledge about rationality of players, not only that of payoff functions. For this purpose, we use an extended version of the belief system model developed by Aumann and Brandenburger (1995). We propose a certain way of embedding the electronic mail game in an belief system. And we show that for rational players to coordinate their actions, for any embedding belief systems, it is necessary that the upper bound order of mutual knowledge of payoff functions exceeds the upper bound order of mutual knowledge of rationality. This result implies that under common knowledge of rationality, the coordination never occurs, which is similar to Rubinstein's result. We point out, however, that there exists a class embedding belief systems for which the above condition is also sufficient for the desired coordination.