Authority (SEP)

Large social groups face many grave problems, such as violence, injustice, disorder, public bads, and war, that require a coordinated collective response. Because disagreement about the nature of and solutions to these problems is pervasive, mounting any such response is difficult in the absence of an authority empowered to issue and enforce coordinating directives. The basic question of political authority asks whether anyone has the right to impose such directives, and if so, under what conditions.

Some anarchist philosophers have thought that political authority is neither necessary nor sufficient for solving the social problems above. Indeed, some think that political authority is counterproductive because it debars better strategies for solving them (e.g. Marx and Engels 1846 [1972: 146–202] and Huemer 2012). This entry surveys the main frameworks that philosophers have developed in defense of a positive, non-anarchistic answer to the basic question of political authority. To this end, we discuss different concepts of the political authority’s right to impose directives on others (part 1) as well as different conceptions of who has the right and how it is grounded (part 2). In a supplement on legitimate political authority in international institutions, we highlight distinctive issues that arise when the basic question of political authority is posed at levels beyond the nation-state.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/

Attention

Attention is involved in the selective directedness of our mental lives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal points of disagreement between the existing theories of attention. Some of the most influential of those theories treat the selectivity of attention as resulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to process the complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli. Others take that selectivity to be the result of limitations in the thinking subject’s capacity to consciously entertain multiple trains of thought. A third group attempt to account for attention’s selectivity in ways that need not make any reference to limitations of capacity. These latter theories relate the selectivity of attention to the selectivity required to maintain a single coherent course of action, to the weighting of sensory information in accordance with its expected precision, or to competition between mutually inhibitory streams of processing.

Instances of attention differ along several dimensions. In some of its instances attention is a perceptual phenomenon; in some it is a phenomenon related to action; and in others it is a purely intellectual matter of giving thought to some question. In some instances the selectivity of attention is voluntary. In others it is driven, independently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience of attention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty of giving a unified theory of attention that applies to all of these instances makes attention a topic of philosophical interest in its own right.

Attention is also a topic of philosophical interest because of its apparent relations to a number of other philosophically puzzling phenomena. There are empirical and theoretical considerations suggesting that attention is closely related to consciousness, and there are controversies over whether this relationship is one of necessity, or sufficiency (or both or neither). There are also controversies—thought to be important to the viability of representationism about consciousness—over the ways in which the phenomenal character of a conscious experience can be modulated by attention. Different considerations link attention to demonstrative reference, to the experience of emotion, to the development of an understanding of other minds, and to the exercise of the will. Some work in the tradition of virtue ethics takes attention to be morally important, since there are at least some virtues that require one to attend appropriately. Attention has also been given a prominent role in some theories about the epistemic significance of emotional and perceptual experiences, and in some discussions of the epistemic peculiarities of self-attributed mental states.

The controversies concerning attention’s relations to these other phenomena often include debates about the philosophical significance of theories that have been developed through the empirical study of attention at the neuropsychological and cognitive levels. Attention’s cultural and economic aspects have also come to be a point of philosophical interest, with some theorists suggesting that the social and political significance of new media is primarily a consequence of the novel ways in which those media engage and compete for the attention that we individually and collectively pay.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/

Associationist Theories of Thought

Associationism is one of the oldest, and, in some form or another, most widely held theories of thought. Associationism has been the engine behind empiricism for centuries, from the British Empiricists through the Behaviorists and modern day Connectionists. Nevertheless, “associationism” does not refer to one particular theory of cognition per se, but rather a constellation of related though separable theses. What ties these theses together is a commitment to a certain arationality of thought: a creature’s mental states are associated because of some facts about its causal history, and having these mental states associated entails that bringing one of a pair of associates to mind will, ceteris paribus, ensure that the other also becomes activated.

Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based on principles of the organism’s causal history. Since its early roots, associationists have sought to use the history of an organism’s experience as the main sculptor of cognitive architecture. In its most basic form, associationism has claimed that pairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past experience. So, for example, a basic form of associationism (such as Hume’s) might claim that the frequency with which an organism has come into contact with Xs and Ys in one’s environment determines the frequency with which thoughts about Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together in the organism’s future.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/associationist-thought/

Assertion (SEP)

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about meaning, truth and inference.

The nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and linguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been subject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within speech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to present the current main accounts of assertion.^[1]

By an account of assertion is here meant a theory of what a speaker does (e.g., expresses a belief) in making an assertion. According to such accounts, there are deep properties of assertion: specifying those properties is specifying what asserting consists in. There must also be surface properties, which are the properties by which a competent speaker can tell whether an utterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of uttering a sentence in the indicative mood.

We shall classify accounts according to two parameters. Firstly, we distinguish between normative and descriptive accounts. Normative accounts rely on the existence of norms or normative relations that are essential to assertoric practice. Descriptive accounts don’t. Secondly, we distinguish between content-directed and hearer-directed accounts. Content-directed accounts focus on the relation between the speaker and the content of the proposition asserted, while hearer-directed accounts focus on the relations between speaker and hearer. Some theories have both normative and descriptive components. 

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/assertion/

The Definition of Art (SEP)

The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.

There is also disagreement, at a second-order level, about how to classify definitions of art. For present purposes, contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the dimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, the relational properties of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on the undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more traditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in contemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities across the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to both the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the institutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging neither.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

Argument and Argumentation

Argument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely heavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been motivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for millennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive elsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures, education, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, language theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and political scientists, among many others. 

An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker (“hence”, “therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises (Hitchcock 2007).^[1] The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible).

For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for instances of exchange of arguments is argumentation. In what follows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to structures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation” to refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as communicative actions will be adopted.

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My opinion

Animalists identify the “I” with the human animal, religious views identify it with a soul, and many naturalists identify it with the brain. I believe that the “I” is not a source or entity at all, but a word controled by grammer. Animalism is another sort of dualism in the sense that it still treats the “I” as something that has to be located, this time in the human animal rather than in a soul or a brain. Nochrisis

 

Animalism

Among the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal identity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental nature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist through time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of animalism and its rivals, this entry explores some of the arguments for and objections to this controversial account of our nature and persistence.

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Anaphora

Anaphora is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the interpretation of an occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of another or whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some other expression in the same or another sentence.^[1] However, these are at best very rough characterizations of the phenomena, since things other than anaphoric expressions satisfy the first characterization and many cases of anaphora fail to satisfy the second. For example, in some sense of “interpretation”, the interpretation of the expression “bank” in the following sentence depends on the interpretation of other expressions (in particular, “of the river”):

1. John is down by the bank of the river.

But no one would say this is an example of anaphora. And as to the second characterization, though all agree that the following is an example of anaphora (and “he” is an anaphoric pronoun here on one reading of the sentence), it is not a case of the referent of one expression being supplied by another expression, (since “he” is not a referring expression on the reading in question):

2. Every male lawyer believes he is smart.

Hence, rather than attempting to characterize anaphora generally and abstractly, we shall begin with some examples. There is generally thought to be many types of anaphora, though in some cases there is disagreement as to whether to classify those cases as anaphora or not.^[2]

Pronominal anaphora:

3. John left. He said he was ill. (The antecedent is “John” and the anaphoric expression is “he”.)

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The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/