Ronald De Sousa

Mangan draws his inspiration from James's account of fringe consciousness, but differs from James in focusing on something non-sensory, necessarily fuzzy, though not necessarily fleeting. A long tradition in philosophy has deemed non-sensory elements of consciousness to be indispensable to thought. But those, chiefly conceptual, forms of non-sensory fringe are not Mangan's focus. What then is Mangan talking about? This commentary envisages a number of possible answers, and tentatively concludes that fringe consciousness is essentially emotional. Emotional consciousness involves proprioception, however, hence is non-sensory only in the weak sense of excluding the five senses.

This paper turns the tables on the criticisms of sociobiology that stem from a sociological perspective; many of those criticisms lack cogency and coherence in such measure as to demand, in their turn, a psycho‐sociological explanation rather than a rational justification. This thesis, after a brief exposition of the main ideas of sociobiology, is argued in terms of four of the most prominent complaints made against it. Far from embodying tired prejudices about the psychological and sociological implications of biology, sociobiology actually reverses a number of naive assumptions about the consequences of natural selection. I surmise that what really provokes the critics of sociobiology is a certain philosophical relevance of sociobiology both in the broad sense (the application of natural selection principles to behaviour) and in the narrow sense (the insistence on the centrality of certain mechanisms, such as gene selection). In both cases, taking biology seriously affects our philosophical vision of the nature of human beings. At the deepest level, however, the distinction between the level at which rational criteria apply and those where we must have recourse to psycho‐social explanations probably breaks down.

For those of us who are sympathetic to the research program of cognitive science, it is especially useful to face the deepest and sharpest critic of that program. Charles Taylor, who defines himself as a ‘hedgehog’ whose ‘single rather tightly related agenda’ fits into a very ancient and rather elusive debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism, may well be that critic. My ambition in this paper is to distill Taylor’s central objection to the cognitive science approach to agency and the self as it is expressed throughout Human Agency and Language. After trying to set out the core of this objection, I want to remark on some rather curious aspects of the dispute of which it is a part, and then sketch, in relation to one or two examples, what I take to be the most promising line of resistance to Taylor’s attack. I conclude with a proposal as to how Taylor may – narrowly – escape one logical consequence of his position, according to which he should stop knocking the cognitive science program and instead go to work building a robot.

Despite the fact that common sense taxes emotions with irrationality, philosophers have, by and large, celebrated their functionality. They are credited with motivating, steadying, shaping or harmonizing our dispositions to act, and with policing norms of social behaviour. It's time to restore emotion's bad rep. To this end, I shall argue that we should expect that some of the “norms” enforced by emotions will be unevenly distributed among the members of our species, and may be dysfunctional at the individual, social, moral, or even species levels. I”ll adduce three considerations in support of that pessimistic view: The fallacy of adaptive fixation, the moral randomness of group selection, and the lack of fit between “natural norms” set up by evolution and those moral and social norms we would like philosophy to justify.

À quoi bon la pensée? Pour de nombreux chercheurs, inspirés par les théories évolutionnistes, la pensée réfléchie est utile à notre espèce. Elle lui confère des avantages importants et contribue à son succès reproductif. Pourtant ses avantages ne sont pas si évidents. La pensée ne figure ni dans les mécanismes de l'évolution qui ont façonné la vie, ni parmi les procédés dont se servent la plupart des organismes pour s'y maintenir. Dans Évolution et rationalité, Ronald de Sousa montre que, pour comprendre les avantages de la pensée réfléchie, il faut changer nos présupposés relatifs à la rationalité et reconnaître la multiplicité de ses dimensions. La rationalité ne nous sert pas seulement à avoir des croyances vraies et à agir de manière efficace dans un environnement changeant. Elle nous aide à gérer nos plaisirs et nos peines dans le temps et nous permet d'envisager des situations qui n'existent pas. En général, le statut de la rationalité comme ensemble de capacités ayant évolué dans le cours de l'histoire naturelle de notre espèce, passant des tropismes aux désirs et de la détection à la représentation, n'a pas été pris suffisamment au sérieux. Suivre ce processus d'évolution de la rationalité permet de comprendre comment elle est devenue une norme, mais aussi pourquoi il lui arrive aussi souvent d'échouer. Ronald de Sousa a profondément modifié nos façons de concevoir les émotions. Avec Évolution et rationalité, il pourrait avoir une influence aussi décisive sur nos façons de concevoir la rationalité.

Ainslie’s Picoeconomics presents an ingenious theory, based on a remarkably simple basic law about the rate of discounting the value of future prospects, which explains a vast number of psychological phenomena. Hyperbolic discount rates result in changes in the ranking of interests as they get closer in time. Thus quasi-homuncular “interests” situated at different times compete within the person. In this paper I first defend the generality of scope of Ainslie’s model, which ranges over several personal and subpersonal levels of psychological analysis. I raise a problem which results from the temporal relativity of assessments of value, and affects the possibility of objective values. Finally, I offer one example of a form of time-related irrationality on which Ainslie’s scheme does not seem to have a grip, namely one which relates not to a situation’s relative position in time, but to its temporal (‘progressive’ or ‘perfect’) temporal aspect.

Emotions are Janus‐faced. They tell us something about the world, and they tell us something about ourselves. This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truths of emotions, one of which is about self and the other about conditions in the world. On some views, the latter comes by means of the former. Insofar as emotions manifest our inner life, however, we are more inclined to speak of authenticity rather than truth. What is the difference? We need to distinguish the criteria of correspondence or appropriateness suitable for authenticity from those that embody the criterion of truth. Furthermore there is also a question about the transitions – among states of mind, and between states of mind and behaviour – that emotions encourage. This realm of transitions concerns rationality. After sketching the relevant distinctions, I will endeavour to justify the view that emotions should be appraised in terms of all three terms.

The notion of representation lies at the crossroads of questions about the nature of belief and knowledge, meaning, and intentionality. But there is some hope that it might be simpler than all those. If we could understand it clearly, it might then help to explicate those more difficult notions. In this paper, my central aim is to find a principled criterion, along lines that make biological sense, for deciding just when it becomes theoretically plausible to ascribe to some process or state a representational role. I shall be especially concerned with some differences, in this regard, between classical and connectionist models. The relation between ‘standard’ artificial intelligence and connectionism turns out to illustrate a ‘first in, last out’ principle: What we most easily understand (and so can program) is what we have most recently invented; tasks we ourselves perform best, by contrast, are a lot harder to understand. Classical AI has modelled the former; connectionism tries to tackle the latter. I end with some speculations about the possible implications of these considerations for our understanding of understanding.

The question What is an individual? goes back beyond Aristotle’s discussion of substance to the Ionians’ preoccupation with the paradox of change -- the fact that if anything changes it must stay the same. Mere reflection on this fact and the common-sense notion of a countable thing yields a concept of a “minimal individual”, which is particular (a logical matter) specific (a taxonomic matter), and unique (an evaluative empirical matter). Individuals occupy space, and therefore might be dislodged. Even minimal individuals, therefore (Strawsonian individual or Aristotelian substance) already contain the potential for competition or conflict. What is added by biology to this basic notion? It emerges from some recent work on the evolution of metazoan animals that individuals as we know them are minimal individuals towhich four features have been added, and which appear to be inseparable: differentiated multicellularity; sexual reproduction; segregation of germ from somatic cells; and obligatory death. Whether or not individuals are to be counted as units of selection, they are not the beneficiaries of natural selection.

Philosophers like to warn against fools’ paradises: not places where fools can safely cavort, but rather conditions in which fools mistakenly think themselves happy. The warning presupposes that real and merely apparent happiness can be told apart. Of course that claim is not altogether disinterested, since philosophers have a professional investment in the distinction. Thus they have endorsed this or that attitude to death, holding up promises of ultimate comfort or threats of excruciating regret, to be dispensed at the last hour, just when the money-back guarantee expires.

The Philosophical search for Natural Kinds is motivated by the hope of finding ontological categories that are independent of our interests. Other requirements, of varying importance, are commonly made of kinds that claim to be natural. But no such categories are to be found. Virtually any kind can be termed ‘natural’ relative to some set of interests and epistemic priorities. Science determines those priorities at any particular stage of its progress, and what kinds are most ‘natural’ in that sense is always a real and lively scientific question. The general philosophical problem of scientific realism is also real; but between the scientific and the metaphysical, the ‘Problem of Natural Kinds’ sits otiose.

The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, truth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events and characters depicted. To have emotions is to care about certain things: we can wonder whether those things are really worth caring about. We can wonder whether our passions reflect who we are, and whether they constitute fitting responses to the vicissitudes of life. So there are two aspects to emotional truth: how well an emotion reflects the threats and promises of the world, and how well it reflects our own individual nature. That is the starting point of this book, which looks first at the analogies and disanalogies between strict propositional truth and a looser, "generic" sense of truth. As applied to emotions, generic truth is closer to those original meanings: as in a portrait's fidelity or friend's loyalty. Taken in this sense, the notion of emotional truth opens up large vistas on areas of life essential to our existence as social beings, and to our concerns with beauty, morality, love, death, sex, knowledge, desire, coherence, and happiness. Each of those topics illustrates some facet of the dominant theme of the book: the crucial but often ambivalent role of our emotions in grounding and yet also sometimes undermining our values. Emotions act, in holistic perspective, as ultimate arbiters of values where different and independently justified standards of value compete.