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Self-Concernment without Self-Reference
No full textThis paper is a new defense of the old orthodox view that self-consciousness requires self-concepts. My defense relies on two crucial constraints. The first is what I call Bermúdez’s Constraint (2007), that is, the view that any attribution of content must account for the intentional behavior of the subject that reflects her own way of understanding the world. The second is the well-known Generality Constraint of Evans (1982), which is also termed the recombinability constraint. The claim I want to support in this paper is the following: Since whether and to what extent we can attribute to non-linguistic creatures and prelinguistic infants genuine knowing self-reference or de se contents is an open empirical question, the proponents of the nonconceptual self-consciousness face a dilemma. If we are convinced that the available empirical evidence is overwhelming, I argue--based on Evans’s Generality Constraint--that these self-representations are nothing but primitive prelinguistic self-concepts. However, if we are convinced that the available empirical evidence is not persuasive, I maintain--relying on Bermudez’s Constraint--that we do better by assuming that the subject is not self-represented. The content of her experiences and thoughts are best modeled as simple selfless propositional functions that are true or false relative to the subject of these experiences and thoughts. I refer to this as self-concernment without self-reference. Thus, against the recent ingenious work of Peacocke (2014), I claim that there is no compelling reason for postulating nonconceptual middle level self-representation, between self-concernment and conceptual self-reference. However, as I hope to make clear, my claim is quite different from those of other recent oppositions to the idea of nonconceptual self-consciousness. According to the thesis of self-concernment without self-reference, the contents of experiences and thoughts are selfless propositional functions, true or false relative to the bearer of the respective mental states
Multiple Realizability and Novel Causal Powers
No full textFramed within the dialectic of the causal exclusion argument (Kim 2005), this paper does two things. One, it clarifies some properties of multiple realizability based on its true origin (Turing 1950). And two, it challenges a form of argument Noordhof (1997), Clarke (1999), and Whittle (2007) employ to support the idea that the mental has causal powers not had by its physical realization base (Novel). The paper challenges Novel with ideas derived from multiple realizability, among others
Theory Assessment and Coherence
No full textOne of the most important questions in epistemology and the philosophy of science is: what is a good theory and when is a theory better than another theory, given some observational data? The coherentist‟s answer would be the following twofold conjecture: (i) A theory is a good theory given some observational data iff that theory coheres with the observational data and (ii) a theory is better than another theory given some observational data iff the first theory coheres more with the observational data than the second theory. In this paper we show that this answer is a good answer. More precisely, we argue that the coherence measures of Olsson (2002) and Shogenji (1999) are good measures for the purpose of comparing and evaluating theories, i.e. assessing theories. We do so by clarifying the sufficient and necessary conditions every assess-ment function must satisfy for being a good measure of the goodness of theories. Afterwards we will show that the coherence measures of Olsson and Shogenji are indeed good assessment functions for assessing theories
Fitch\u27s Paradox and the Problem of Shared Content
No full textAccording to the “paradox of knowability”, the moderate thesis that (necessarily) all truths are knowable – ‘∀p (p ⊃ ◊Kp) ’ – implies the seemingly preposterous claim that all truths are actually known – ‘∀p (p ⊃ Kp) ’ –, i.e. that we are omniscient. If Fitch’s argument were successful, it would amount to a knockdown rebuttal of anti-realism by reductio. In the paper I defend the nowadays rather neglected strategy of intuitionistic revisionism. Employing only intuitionistically acceptable rules of inference, the conclusion of the argument is, firstly, not ‘∀p (p ⊃ Kp)’, but ‘∀p (p ⊃¬¬Kp)’. Secondly, even if there were an intuitionistically acceptable proof of ‘∀p (p ⊃ Kp)’, i.e. an argument based on a different set of premises, the conclusion would have to be interpreted in accordance with Heyting semantics, and read in this way, the apparently preposterous conclusion would be true on conceptual grounds and acceptable even from a realist point of view. Fitch’s argument, understood as an immanent critique of verificationism, fails because in a debate dealing with the justification of deduction there can be no interpreted formal language on which realists and anti-realists could agree. Thus, the underlying problem is that a satisfactory solution to the “problem of shared content” is not available. I conclude with some remarks on the proposals by J. Salerno and N. Tennant to reconstruct certain arguments in the debate on anti-realism by establishing aporias
Nonconceptual Content, Fineness of Grain and Recognitional Capacities
No full textOne of the current debates in philosophy of mind is whether the content of perceptual experiences is conceptual or nonconceptual. The proponents of nonconceptual content, or nonconceptualists, typically support their position by appealing to the so-called Fineness of Grain Argument, which, in rough terms, has as its conclusion that we do not possess concepts for everything we perceive. In his Mind and World, John McDowell tried to give a response to the argument, and show that we do possess concepts for everything we perceive. His response is based on the idea that we have a capacity to recognize all that we perceive. However, a good number of people took this proposal as being empirically false. My aim in this paper is to show that McDowell’s proposal is not only not empirically false, but likely to be empirically true. We do have the capacity to recognize all that we perceive, but such recognition capacity is dependent on information stored in short-term memory, and not in longterm memory, as McDowell’s critics have mistakenly supposed
Regionale AfD-Milieus und die Dynamik der Corona-Ausbreitung – Eine Analyse auf der Basis kreisfreier Städte und Landkreise in Sachsen
No full textDer Beitrag geht der Frage nach dem Zusammenhang von AfD-Wahl und Corona-Infektionszahlen am Beispiel von Sachsen nach – jenem Bundesland, in dem die Pandemie Ende des Jahres 2020 Spitzenwerte erreichte und ein AfD-Zusammenhang verschiedentlich vermutet wurde. Auf der Basis bundesweiter Umfragedaten wird die Frage nach den Einstellungen der AfD-Wähler zu Corona und den staatlichen Maßnahmen näher beleuchtet und untersucht, inwieweit die Regionen, die sich durch überproportionale AfD-Wahlergebnisse auszeichnen, ebenfalls in den Corona-Inzidenzen überproportional hohe Werte einnahmen. Dabei ist nicht nur der Stellenwert der AfD-Affinität per se von Interesse, sondern ebenso die Dynamik der Entwicklung: wie zeitlich beschränkt oder stabil ist der Effekt, so es ihn gibt? In welcher Phase der Corona-Entwicklung entfaltet er seine größte Wirkung
Grundlagen zum Parteienrecht
No full textDer Spiegel der Rechtsprechung zu den Grundlagen des Parteienrechts hat im Berichtsjahr 2020 sowohl Verfahren rund um Fragen der innerparteilichen Demokratie zum Gegenstand, so die Bestellung eines Notvorstandes, die Einberufung einer Mitgliederversammlung und eine Amtsenthebung, als auch Streitigkeiten um die Beendigung einer Parteimitgliedschaft, wobei nicht nur ein „regulärer“ Parteiausschluss die Gerichte beschäftigte, sondern auch die Aufhebung durch Vorstandsbeschluss bzw. durch Anfechtung wegen arglistiger Täuschung. Es finden sich auch Entscheidungen zu den Dauerbrennern parteienrechtlicher Auseinandersetzungen wie die Grenzen der Äußerungsbefugnis von Amtsträgern, die Beobachtung durch den Verfassungsschutz bzw. die Benennung in Verfassungsschutzberichten und die waffenrechtliche Zuverlässigkeit oder die Ungeeignetheit von Mitgliedern verfassungsfeindlicher Parteien für den öffentlichen Dienst. Seinen fachgerichtlichen Abschluss fand das Verfahren um die Sperrwirkung des Parteiengesetzes für eine Anwendbarkeit des Informationsfreiheitsgesetzes, die das BVerwG nun, anders als die Vorinstanzen, bejahte. Dem von der AfD betriebenen „Lehrer-Melde-Portal“ wurde in diesem Jahr auch im Hauptsacheverfahren – wie schon zuvor im einstweiligen Rechtsschutz – ein Verstoß gegen das Datenschutzrecht bescheinigt. Auch das Versammlungsrecht und das virtuelle Hausrecht des Betreibers eines sozialen Netzwerks, der wegen eines als „Hassrede“ zu wertenden Post das Nutzerkonto einer politischen Partei gesperrt hatte, fand Eingang in die Rechtsprechung
Self-Forming Actions, Non-Self-Forming Actions, and Indeterminism: A Problem for Kane’s Libertarianism
No full textCentral to Robert Kane’s libertarian free will is the distinction between two kinds of action: (1) undetermined self-forming actions by means of which we shape our characters, and (2) actions that are determined by our freely formed characters. Daniel Dennett challenges the coherence of this distinction, but I argue that his arguments rely on highly controversial assumptions. In an effort to improve on Dennett’s criticism, I argue that some considerations about non-self-forming actions, when coupled with Kane’s naturalistic framework, imply that all choices are undetermined, which undercuts the distinction between his two categories of action. I then show that this conclusion threatens to undermine the very idea of self-formation Kane seeks to develop