Bodily Awareness (SEP)

At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information about our own body through external and internal perceptions. Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several inner receptors that convey information about the position of our limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition. Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether we pay attention to it or not. In that respect, our body qualifies as the object that we know best. Yet, despite numerous sources of information, the phenomenology of bodily awareness is limited. In painful and learning situations, our body appears at the core of our interest, but when we walk in the street, we are rarely aware of the precise position of our legs and of the contact of the floor on our feet. Schwitzgebel (2007), for instance, asked how frequently participants wearing a device beeping at random intervals had tactile experiences in their left foot just before the beeping sound. He found a high variability in the answers, but one participant reported tactile sensations only 16% of the time. Our conscious field is primarily occupied by our environment, instead of the bodily medium that allows us to perceive it and to move through it. Hence, the most permanent and preponderant object in life may also be the most elusive one (Leder 1990; Merleau-Ponty 1945; O’Shaughnessy 1980).

One may then question whether we are completely unaware of it. Except in rare illusory or pathological cases, we never feel fully disembodied. James (1890: 242), for instance, claims that we are constantly conscious of the presence of our body, although at the margin of the stream of our consciousness:

Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know.

What is the content of this marginal body consciousness? James (1890: 242) alludes to a “feeling of the same old body always there” or a mere “feeling of warmth and intimacy” but can we go beyond this rough and metaphorical description?

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodily-awareness/

Personal Autonomy

Autonomous agents are self-governing agents. But what is a self-governing agent? Governing oneself is no guarantee that one will have a greater range of options in the future, or the sort of opportunities one most wants to have. Since, moreover, a person can govern herself without being able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, it seems that an autonomous agent can do something wrong without being to blame for her action. What, then, are the necessary and sufficient features of this self-relation? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/

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.

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