Search Results

The view that past environmental conditions fix the contents of our memory states (in conjunction with the conceptual replacement view) has the consequence that an environmental shift brings about a conceptual shift which, in turn, can rob us of the ability to remember some of our past thoughts. Some may find this idea rather implausible. Boghossian's memory argument purports to show that externalism about memory yields the absurd consequence that a subject can know the contents of his current thoughts only if the environmental conditions determining these contents will not change in the future. This chapter shows that worries concerning the externalist thesis that environmental switching can cause memory failures are misplaced because there are neither philosophical nor psychological reasons to substantiate them. Pastist externalism corresponds with psychological data (context dependence, state dependence) and is compatible with the psychological criterion of personal identity.

This introductory chapter provides a systematic overview of the issue of contemporary truth-relativism. It first outlines the standard approach to semantics, modifications of which have been demanded. Then it looks at one of the cases, matters of taste, and examines what the motivations for modifying standard semantics are. The chapter then outlines the parallel reasoning in some of the other cases, among them: epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, moral values, and future contingents. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume.

It is argued that externalism about the contents of propositional attitudes is supported not only by examples and thought experiments, but also by an intuitively plausible theoretical account of intentionality: the idea that the contents of intentional mental states should be explained in terms of the information that those states are disposed to carry. The theoretical account helps to bring out what is paradoxical about the externalist's thought experiments, and to show why attributions of content are essentially context‐dependent.

The justification of deliberate expansion is the topic of this chapter, and it is argued that any possible expansion should be assessed with respect to two desiderata: the enquirer should seek to avoid error by adding new information that is false; and the enquirer should seek to acquire new, valuable information. The ways in which the legitimacy of an inductive expansion is heavily dependant on contextual parameters are set out, and five such parameters are identified. The notions of “degrees of surprise” and “degrees of belief” (plausibility) are defined and discussed.

It is argued that belief attributions are context‐dependent. To interpret the sentential clauses embedded in statements attributing belief, we need a derived context, different from the basic context relative to which the statement as a whole is interpreted. Derived contexts are defined, and the apparatus is used to defend a pragmatic account of de re belief attributions.

Knowing how to do something is, like knowing whether or not to do something, knowing who came to the party knowing when the party is, a kind of knowing-wh. This chapter provides an introduction to some of the standard semantic theories of embedded questions by Karttunen and Groenendijk and Stokhof. It argues that marrying such theories with the correct account of quantifier domain restriction explains most of the context-dependence associated with sentences that ascribe states of knowing-wh. The resulting morals are applied to recent challenges to standard theories of knowing-wh by Jonathan Schaffer and Jonathan Ginzburg.

The real challenge for developmental psychology is to understand the how of development, and not just the what of development. Such causal theories need to explain behaviours at multiple timescales. They must explain how and why behaviours unfold online, as observed in real time, as well as how they unfold in developmental time — across the lifespan of the individual. Volume 1 of this book briefly tackled the importance of models in several places, and even sketched a few key models that illustrated the processes. In this book, Volume 2, nine different research labs with objectives broadly consistent with the neuroconstructivist approach present their computational modelling work.

This chapter summarizes all the material dealt with so far to attempt to determine the central principles that guide the emergence of representations. It specifically discusses some general lessons that will guide the way for future approaches to the study of brain and cognitive development. Based on the conclusions of the previous chapters, it discovers the underlying principle of neuroconstructivist development; namely context-dependence. In addition, it reports each of the three domain-general and level-independent mechanisms, namely cooperation, competition and chronotopy, and processes. The processes that are omnipresent in development include proactivity and progressive specialization. The operation of one mechanism does not prevent the operation of others. Indeed, it is thought that development frequently implies the operations of all these mechanisms. Moreover, both the mechanisms and processes that are determined can function on several levels. Finally, at this stage, it is better to report these mechanisms and processes as a ‘collection’ of different animals rather than as part of a systematic hierarchy. It can be concluded from exploring the development at three levels of description (single cells, brain systems, and the whole child) that the primary principle guiding development is context-dependence.

This is an introduction that sets out the problems, the aim, and the approach of the book. The problem is that most of us are more or less dissatisfied with how we live and want to make it better than it is. We are uncertain about how to make it better because we are committed to conflicting economic, legal, moral, personal, political, religious, and other modes of evaluation of the available possibilities of life. The aim is to find a fit between our personal attitude to how we think we should live and the evaluative framework of our society that limits how we can live. The approach is to compare what we take to be our possibilities with possibilities as they are conceived in different anthropological, historical, and literary contexts. In that way we can deepen our understanding and enrich the possibilities of life we might pursue.

The widely held assumption in our evaluative framework is that the reasonable way of making difficult choices between valued and conflicting possibilities of life is to make a personal commitment to living in a particular way and then act accordingly. In the Hindu and Balinese evaluative frameworks there is limited scope for conflicting possibilities, difficult choices, and personal commitments. How individuals should live is decided by the roles into which they are born or by the burden of their inheritance. Comparing these evaluative frameworks with ours allows us to understand that our problems involved in having to make personal commitments, difficult choices, and cope with conflicts are the unavoidable by-products of our evaluative framework. We may come to understand that the burdens we carry in our evaluative framework are the price we have to pay for living as we do.

The object of fear is the loss of the meaning of life. It threatens if our evaluative framework is called into question. This chapter is about the prudent strategy for coping with this fear. A reasonable strategy is exemplified by the cases of the Azande, the Kalabari, Montaigne, Descartes, and Hume. These cases show that there may be good reasons for prudently decentering the fear. An unreasonable strategy that avoids facing the fear is exemplified by Reid. The difficult question is how to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable strategies for coping with the fear. The answer is context-dependent. There can be no ideal theory of a reasonable prudent strategy that should be followed in all contexts. Our vulnerability to this fear is an unavoidable problem in our evaluative framework. The search for an ideal theory that would enable us to avoid the fear is doomed to failure.

The account of human wisdom is developed further by giving reasons against the widely held assumption that wisdom is knowledge of the ideal of The Good that reason requires everyone, always, in all circumstances to aim at. The contrary assumption of human wisdom is that all goods are plural and context-dependent. Human nature is varied, and human aims are many, ambivalent, and varied depending on changing psychological and social circumstances. Human nature is not basically good or bad, but basically complicated and ambivalent. Human wisdom is needed to form a reasonable view of our context, guide how we want to live, and enable us to cope as well as we can with adverse circumstances that prevent us from living as we think we should.

If perception is a matter of prediction error minimization, then the mechanism must have resources to deal with the fact that the noise and uncertainty is state-dependent. That is, the prediction error minimization mechanism must be able to learn and evaluate the levels of uncertainty in the different contexts it finds itself in — it must engage in second order statistics. This chapter describes this key ingredient of prediction error minimization in terms of expected precisions of prediction error. It also discusses other issues pertaining to context-dependence; in particular, cases of non-linear interaction between causes (such as occlusion) are discussed. This gives a richer account of the statistical inference that is needed for perception to be possible. The chapter ends with a presentation of issues that arise now that a more full description of the mechanism is available; these issues will inform discussion in later chapters.

This chapter discusses the intuitive idea of context, and two contrasting theoretical representations of context: first, a notion of context as a representation of the concrete situation at a point in time at which a discourse is taking place, modeled by a centered possible world (a representation that contains all of the information that might be relevant to the interpretation of any context-dependent expressions); second, the notion of context as common ground: a body of information that is presumed to be shared (at a particular time) by the participants in a discourse. The chapter considers the relation between the two notions of context, and some tensions between them.

There are two broad questions that can be asked about the relationship of mutualism and community ecology: What do community interactions do for mutualisms? Conversely, what do mutualisms do for communities? This chapter addresses both questions, using examples ranging from giraffes nibbling on ant-laden acacias, to rapidly shifting coral-algal symbioses, to models of stage-structure interactions among mutualists. For an interaction between a pair of species to be mutualistic, benefits must exceed costs for each partner. Yet any benefits or costs often depend upon interactions with species outside just the interacting pair. This leads to context dependence in mutualisms, since the presence and abundance of these third (or more) parties change over space and time. Evaluating costs and benefits requires accounting for shifting suites of interactions over the lifetimes of focal species. Mutualisms can arise between guilds, not just species pairs, and guild diversity can influence mutualism functioning in ways analogous to the routes by which biodiversity impacts ecosystem functioning. Mutualisms influence communities in many ways. For starters, maintenance of diversity within mutualist guilds is itself an important slice of the general issue of biodiversity maintenance. Moreover, mutualisms modulate other mechanisms that influence diversity, at times enhancing dominance of some species over others (thus reducing diversity), and at times by providing additional avenues for niche differentiation, enhancing diversity. Mutualisms can alter species range limits and thus define the species pool available for local community assembly, and even alter community stability. The chapter ends with key open questions.