A Defense of Shepherd’s Account of Cause and Effect as Synchronous

Lady Mary Shepherd holds that the relation of cause and effect consists of the combination of two objects to create a third object. She also holds that this account implies that causes are synchronous with their effects. There is a single instant in which the objects that are causes combine to create the object which is their effect. Hume argues that cause and effect cannot be synchronous because if they were then the entire chain of successive causes and effects would all collapse into a single moment, and succession would not be possible. I argue that Shepherd has a ready, although implicit response, to Hume’s argument. Since causation is combination on Shepherd’s view, she is free to hold that there are times in between those instants in which combinations occur, during which times other, non-combinatory changes occur, which changes account for succession

Sellars' Argument for an Ontology of Absolute Processes

Scholars have rejected Wilfrid Sellars’ argument for an ontology of absolute processes on the grounds that it relies on a dubious and dogmatic appeal to the homogeneity of color. Borrowing from Rosenthal’s recent defense, but ultimate rejection of homogeneity, I defend this claim of on Sellarsian/Kantian transcendental grounds, and reconstruct the remainder of his argument. I argue that Sellars has good reason to suppose that homogeneity is a necessary condition of any possible experience, including indirect experience of theoretical-explanatory posits, and therefore good reason to hold that Reductive Materialism, as he conceives it, is an untenable account of color. The remainder of his argument aims to answer the question of what the metaphysical relation is between the state of an experiencing subject that we take color to be and the colorless microphysical particles that we take to constitute that subject. After rejecting Substance Dualism, Epiphenomenalism, and Wholistic or Emergent Materialism as explanatorily inadequate, Sellars proposes that both color-states and micro-physical particles should be understood as manifestations of an underlying ontology on absolute processes

Scientific Realism without Rigid Designation in Kant's Analogies

In Kant, Science, and Human Nature, Robert Hanna argues against a version of scientific realism founded on the Kripke/Putnam theory of reference, and defends a Kant-inspired manifest realism in its place. I reject Kriple/Putnam for different reasons than Hanna does, and argue that what should replace it is not manifest realism, but Kant‘s own scientific realism, which rests on a radically different theory of reference. Kant holds that we picture manifest objects by uniting manifolds of sensation using concepts-qua-inferential-rules. When these rules are demonstrated to be invalid, we replace the picture of the macroscopic world with a picture of the microscopic entities of theoretical science that unites the very same manifolds using different rules of inference. Thus, we refer to "unobservable" theoretical entities in the same way that we do manifest ones: by specifying both their determinate location in space and time and the concepts by which they are understood

Cutting Operating Costs for Automatic Stock Waterers

Results of tests on the amounts of electrical energy needed to keep water ice-free in automatic stock waterers furnish some tips on how to keep operating costs down whether your waterer uses electricity or some other fuel

What makes Hume an External World Skeptic?

What would it take for Hume to be an external world skeptic? Is Hume\u27s position on knowledge sufficient to force him to deny that we can acquire knowledge of (non-logical) propositions about the external world? After all, Hume is extremely restrictive about what can be known because he requires knowledge to be immune to error. In this paper, I will argue that if Hume were a skeptic, then he must also deny a particular kind of view about what is immediately present to the mind. I will argue that direct realisms—views that maintain that mind-independent (i.e. ontologically distinct) things are immediately present to the mind—combine with Hume\u27s position on knowledge to entail the negation of skepticism. So, despite his position on knowledge, Hume could still consistently reject skepticism, if he were to endorse direct realism

Conceptual discontinuity involves recycling old processes in new domains

We dispute Carey's assumption that distinct core cognitive processes employ domain-specific input analyzers to construct proprietary representations. We give reasons to believe that conceptual systems co-opt core components for new domains. Domain boundaries, as well as boundaries between perceptual–motor and conceptual cognitive resources may be useful abstractions, but do not appear to reflect constraints respected by brains and cognitive systems

Shepherd on Hume’s Argument for the Possibility of Uncaused Existence

Shepherd’s argument against Hume’s thesis that an object can begin its existence uncaused has received short shrift in the secondary literature. I argue that the key to understanding that argument’s success is understanding its dialectical context. Shepherd sees the dialectical situation as follows. Hume presents an argument against Locke and Clarke the conclusion of which is that an object can come into existence uncaused. An essential premise of that argument is Hume’s theory of mental representation. Hume’s theory of mental representation, however, is itself implausible and unsupported. Therefore, one need not accept this premise or this conclusion. Thus, Shepherd proceeds to her discussion of the relation of cause and effect free to help herself to the thesis that every beginning of existence must have a cause. Additionally, she elsewhere pays down the debt she incurs in that argument by presenting her own alternative theory of mental representation, which is both plausible in its own right, and can account for the error that she takes Hume to make

The synthesis of concepts: inferentialism and semantic theory in Hume, Kant, and Hegel

I re-cast the history of Modern philosophy as a debate about the nature and content of mental representations, a debate that is first made explicit by Hume, and which crescendos with the contrasting theories of Hume and Kant. Hume is a sophisticated relationalist who believes that content is fixed by a relation between a mental entity and that which it represents. Kant, on the other hand, rejects relationalism on the grounds that it makes impossible our representing as such a world of objects bearing lawful relations to one another. Since he argues that this is necessary for representing oneself as a single, unified subject of experience persisting through time, he concludes that relationalism is untenable. Kant presents inferentialism—the thesis that the content of a representation is constituted by that representation’s role in a system of inference—as a viable alternative to relationalism. Hegel accepts the Kantian picture, emphasizes the normativity involved in the inferential articulation of concepts, and argues that this is an essentially social affair. By reading these figures in this way I am able to reveal the motivations behind their semantic programs and uncover arguments that have been underappreciated in scholarship on Modern philosophy and in contemporary semantic theory. The most significant of these is Kant’s argument from the necessary co-representation of self and world to an inferentialist theory of conceptual content

Isotropic-medium three-dimensional cloaks for acoustic and electromagnetic waves

We propose a generalization of the two-dimensional eikonal-limit cloak derived from a conformal transformation to three dimensions. The proposed cloak is a spherical shell composed of only isotropic media; it operates in the transmission mode and requires no mirror or ground plane. Unlike the well-known omnidirectional spherical cloaks, it may reduce visibility of an arbitrary object only for a very limited range of observation angles. In the short-wavelength limit, this cloaking structure restores not only the trajectories of incident rays, but also their phase, which is a necessary ingredient to complete invisibility. Both scalar-wave (acoustic) and transverse vector-wave (electromagnetic) versions are presented.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure