Download or read book Reduction Explanation and Realism written by David Owain Maurice Charles and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume evaluate the view that the phenomena studied in such varied fields as moral and mental philosophy, psychology, organic biology and social science are grounded in, but cannot be reduced to, phenomena that can be explained by the basic sciences.
Download or read book Reduction Realism and the Mind written by Rebecca Goldstein and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Teleological Realism written by Scott Robert Sehon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A non-reductionist account of mind and agency claiming that common-sense psychological explanations are teleological and not causal. Using the language of common-sense psychology (CSP), we explain human behavior by citing its reason or purpose, and this is central to our understanding of human beings as agents. On the other hand, since human beings are physical objects, human behavior should also be explicable in the language of physical science, in which causal accounts cast human beings as collections of physical particles. CSP talk of mind and agency, however, does not seem to mesh well with the language of physical science. In Teleological Realism, Scott Sehon argues that CSP explanations are not causal but teleological--that they cite the purpose or goal of the behavior in question rather than an antecedent state that caused the behavior. CSP explanations of behavior, Sehon claims, are answering a question different from that answered by physical science explanations, and, accordingly, CSP explanations and physical science explanations are independent of one another. Common-sense facts about mind and agency can thus be independent of the physical facts about human beings, and, contrary to the views of most philosophers of mind in recent decades, common-sense psychology will not be subsumed by physical science. Sehon defends his non-reductionist account of mind and agency in clear and nontechnical language. He carefully distinguishes his view from forms of "strong naturalism" that would seem to preclude it. And he evaluates key objections to teleological realism, including those posed by Donald Davidson's influential article "Actions, Reasons and Causes" and some put forth by more recent proponents of causal theories of action. CSP, Sehon argues, has a different realm than does physical science; the normative notions that are central to CSP are not reducible to physical facts and laws.
Download or read book Reduction of Mind written by David Kellogg Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind written by Paul M. Churchland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study in the philosophy of science, proposing a strong form of the doctrine of scientific realism' and developing its implications for issues in the philosophy of mind.
Download or read book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism written by Anjan Chakravartty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.
Download or read book Structural realism and eternalism can solve the mind brain problem written by Hiro Inuki and published by Hiro Inuki. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many theories concerning the mind-brain(mind-body) problem, but these theories have serious flaws because they view the problem as a relation between "mind" and "matter". This paper redefines the problem as a relation between "mind" and "reality" and attempts to solve the problem by combining structural realism and the eternalism of the philosophy of time.
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book The Concept of Reduction written by Raphael van Riel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-02-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the notion of reduction. Building on the idea that philosophers employ the term ‘reduction’ to reconcile diversity and directionality with unity, without relying on elimination, the book offers a powerful explication of an “ontological”, notion of reduction the extension of which is (primarily) formed by properties, kinds, individuals, or processes. It argues that related notions of reduction, such as theory-reduction and functional reduction, should be defined in terms of this explication. Thereby, the book offers a coherent framework, which sheds light on the history of the various reduction debates in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, and on related topics such as reduction and unification, the notion of a scientific level, and physicalism. The book takes its point of departure in the examination of a puzzle about reduction. To illustrate, the book takes as an example the reduction of water. If water reduces to H2O, then water is identical to H2O – thus we get unity. Unity does not come at the price of elimination – claiming that water reduces to H2O, we do not thereby claim that there is no water. But what about diversity and directionality? Intuitively, there should be a difference between water and H2O, such that we get diversity. This is required for there to be directionality: in a sense, if water reduces to H2O, then H2O is prior to, or more basic than water. At least, if water reduces to H2O, then H2O does not reduce to water. But how can this be, if water is identical to H2O? The book shows that the application of current models of reduction does not solve this puzzle, and proposes a new coherent definition, according to which unity is tied to identity, diversity is descriptive in nature, and directionality is the directionality of explanation.
Download or read book A Na ve Realist Theory of Colour written by Keith Allen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment. Keith Allen argues that a naive realist theory of colour best explains how colours appear to perceiving subjects, and that this view is not undermined by our modern scientific understanding of the world.
Download or read book Realism and Anti Realism written by Stuart Brock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are a bewildering variety of ways the terms "realism" and "anti-realism" have been used in philosophy and furthermore the different uses of these terms are only loosely connected with one another. Rather than give a piecemeal map of this very diverse landscape, the authors focus on what they see as the core concept: realism about a particular domain is the view that there are facts or entities distinctive of that domain, and their existence and nature is in some important sense objective and mind-independent. The authors carefully set out and explain the different realist and anti-realist positions and arguments that occur in five key domains: science, ethics, mathematics, modality and fictional objects. For each area the authors examine the various styles of argument in support of and against realism and anti-realism, show how these different positions and arguments arise in very different domains, evaluate their success within these fields, and draw general conclusions about these assorted strategies. Error theory, fictionalism, non-cognitivism, relativism and response-dependence are taken as the most important positions in opposition to the realist and these are explored in depth. Suitable for advanced level undergraduates, the book offers readers a clear introduction to a subject central to much contemporary work in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language.
Download or read book Reducing Realism written by Aaron-Dirk Boyden and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, the larger reductionist project of reducing everything to some fundamental physical base is examined. Like reductionism about mind, this project has many obvious virtues, and realist intuitions produce needless difficulties for the project. The conclusion is that in general reductionism and realism are in conflict, and that of the two, it is realism which should be abandoned.
Download or read book Seeing Things as They are written by John R. Searle and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field. Searle begins by criticizing the classical theories of perception and identifies a single fallacy, what he calls the Bad Argument, as the source of nearly all of the confusions in the history of the philosophy of perception. He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account. In the central theoretical chapters, he shows how it is possible that the raw phenomenology must necessarily determine certain form of intentionality. Searle introduces, in detail, the distinction between different levels of perception from the basic level to the higher levels and shows the internal relation between the features of the experience and the states of affairs presented by the experience. The account applies not just to language possessing human beings but to infants and conscious animals. He also discusses how the account relates to certain traditional puzzles about spectrum inversion, color and size constancy and the brain-in-the-vat thought experiments. In the final chapters he explains and refutes Disjunctivist theories of perception, explains the role of unconscious perception, and concludes by discussing traditional problems of perception such as skepticism.
Download or read book Psychoneural Reduction written by John Bickle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bickle presents a new type of reductionism, one that is stronger than one-way dependency yet sidesteps the arguments that sank classical reductionism.
Download or read book Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction written by Barry Stroud and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all have beliefs to the effect that if a certain thing were to happen a certain other thing would happen. We also believe that some things simply must be so, with no possibility of having been otherwise. And in acting intentionally we all take certain things to be good reason to believe or do certain things. In this book Barry Stroud argues that some beliefs of each of these kinds are indispensable to our having any conception of a world at all. That means no one could consistently dismiss all beliefs of these kinds as merely ways of thinking that do not describe how things really are in the world as it is independently of us and our responses. But the unacceptability of any such negative "unmasking" view does not support a satisfyingly positive metaphysical "realism." No metaphysical satisfaction is available either way, given the conditions of our holding the beliefs whose metaphysical status we wish to understand. This does not mean we will stop asking the metaphysical question. But we need a better understanding of how it can have whatever sense it has for us. This challenging volume takes up these large, fundamental questions in clear language accessible to a wide philosophical readership.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science written by Samir Okasha and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is science? -- Scientific inference -- Explanation in science -- Realism and anti-realism -- Scientific change and scientific revolutions -- Philosophical problems in physics, biology, and psychology -- Science and its critics.
Download or read book Introduction to New Realism written by Maurizio Ferraris and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new Enlightenment, has had an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience. Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism.
