Jonathan Cohen

Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe a different work around, wherein a rational decision about one decision problem can be reached by ‘interpolating’ information from another problem that the agent believes has already been rationally solved.

The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence establishment, that thinkers use to make sense of the world. Attention to such cases provides a richer and more varied landscape of extrasemantic enrichment than has been appreciated to date.

Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps unique, claim to reveal their true colors. In this note we argue that, whatever else its merits, this appeal to daylight is not a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by perceptual variation.

Molyneux asked whether a newly sighted person could distinguish a sphere from a cube by sight alone, given that she was antecedently able to do so by touch. This, we contend, is a question about general ideas. To answer it, we must ask (a) whether spatial locations identified by touch can be identified also by sight, and (b) whether the integration of spatial locations into an idea of shape persists through changes of modality. Posed this way, Molyneux’s Question goes substantially beyond question (a), about spatial locations, alone; for a positive answer to (a) leaves open whether a perceiver might cross-identify locations, but not be able to identify the shapes that collections of locations comprise. We further emphasize that MQ targets general ideas so as to distinguish it from corresponding questions about experiences of shape and about the property of tangible (vs. visual) shape. After proposing a generalized formulation of MQ, we extend earlier work (“Many Molyneux Questions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2020) by showing that MQ does not admit a single answer across the board. Some integrative data-processes transfer across modalities; others do not. Seeing where and how such transfer succeeds and fails in individual cases has much to offer to our understanding of perception and its modalities.

In "Analyticity, Necessity, and the Epistemology of Semantics," Jerrold Katz argues against the Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. He proposes a reconception of sense, uses this to give a non-standard understanding of analyticity, and then goes on to show how these moves block arguments for semantic externalism, evade Quine's attacks on analyticity, and ground a "rationalist/internalist" conception of semantic knowledge. For these reasons it seems that quite a lot hangs on the viability of Katz's proposal. Therefore, the question whether his program can be sustained is of considerable philosophical interest. This paper argues that Katz's program cannot succeed. Because he rejects the Fregean thesis, Katz ends up with an impoverished account of analyticity incapable of doing the work Katz requires of it. If this is right, then we have no reason to endorse Katz's idiosyncratic notions of sense and analyticity over their traditional competitors.

We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to thc scientific special case. Construing scientific representation in this way makes the so-called “problem of scientific representation” look much less interesting than it has seerned to many, and suggests that some of the (hotly contested) debates in the literature are concerned with non-issues.

In this dissertation I defend a functionalist theory of color, on which colors are the properties that dispose things to look colored. ;I begin in chapter 1 by saying what I think colors are, and why my view should count as a primary quality theory of color---one on which colors are objective and mind-independent properties of objects in the world. In addition, since my view differs substantially from the sorts of primary quality theories most discussed by philosophers, I spend some time setting out features that distinguish my functionalist view from more traditional forms of primary quality theories and arguing for the superiority of my own account. In chapter 2, I consider some of the structural relations between the colors that have led many to argue that no primary quality theory of color can succeed, and attempt to defend the functioanlist theory of color of chapter 1 from these considerations. Next, in chapter 3, I turn to arguments against various theories of color turning on the requirement that colors must be causally efficacious; I conclude that these arguments can make very little headway in ruling out any theory of color at all. In chapter 4, I begin to consider the nature of color experience; here I argue that a prominent and popular family of physicalist theories of color experience that is incompatible with my views should be rejected on the grounds that it falls victim to classic worries about inverted spectra, and that recent attempts to defang such worries fail. Finally, in chapter 5, I offer a positive theory of color experience that identifies color experiences with states of the visual system; after connecting this account with the theory of color of chapter 1, I defend it against several objections. ;By attempting to formulate a functionalist theory of color in some detail, and showing how it can meet several of the most important challenges it faces, I hope what I say will go some distance toward showing that that theory is not obviously wrong, and indeed that it might even be right!

An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we'll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer's theory. After arguing that none of the above fully succeed, we consider the conspiracy problem through the lens of our preferred view of laws, an elaboration of the MRL view that we call the Better Best System (BBS) theory. BBS offers a picture on which, although all events supervene on a fundamental level, there is no one unique locus of projectibility; rather there are a large number of loci corresponding to the different areas (ecology, economics, solid-state chemistry, etc.) in which there are simple and strong generalizations to be made. While we expect that some amount of conspiracy-fear-inducing special science projectibility is inevitable given BBS, we'll argue that this is unobjectionable. It follows from BBS that the laws of any particular special or fundamental science amount to a proper subset of the laws. From this vantage point, the existence of projectible special science generalizations not guaranteed by the fundamental laws is not an occasion for conspiracy fantasies, but a predictable fact of life in a complex world.

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws.

Molyneux's Question (MQ) concerns whether a newly sighted man would recognize/distinguish a sphere and a cube by vision, assuming he could previously do this by touch. We argue that (MQ) splits into questions about (a) shared representations of space in different perceptual systems, and about (b) shared ways of constructing higher dimensional spatiotemporal features from information about lower dimensional ones, most of the technical difficulty centring on (b). So understood, MQ resists any monolithic answer: everything depends on the constraints faced by particular perceptual systems in extracting features of higher dimensionality from those of lower. Each individual question of this type is empirical and must be investigated separately. We present several variations on MQ based on different levels of dimensional integration—some of these are familiar, some novel adaptations of problems known elsewhere, and some completely novel. Organizing these cases in this way is useful because it unifies a set of disparate questions about intermodal transfer that have held philosophical and psychological interest, suggests a new range of questions of the same type, sheds light on similarities and differences between members of the family, and allows us to formulate a much-augmented set of principles and questions concerning the intermodal transfer of spatiotemporal organization.

Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” ([Bazin, 1967], 14). Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs. We take as our starting place (in §1) Kendall Walton’s startling proposal that photographs are special because they are “transparent” [Walton, 1984] — that is, that they are special because, unlike other depictive representations, they enable us literally to see their depicta.1 Walton’s proposal has not convinced many; however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong about the transparency thesis. In §§2–4 we’ll rise to this challenge and show why photographs are not transparent in Walton’s sense. Finally, in §§5–7 we’ll propose and defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemically special about photographs.

This chapter presents a theory of prefrontal cortex function using the connectionist computational modeling framework. This modeling approach involves three components: computational analysis of the critical processing mechanisms required for cognitive control; use of neurobiologically plausible principles of information processing; and implementation and simulation of cognitive tasks and behavioral performance. The chapter describes behavioral and neuroimaging data on healthy young adults that validate critical components of the model. It then summarizes the application of the model to the clinical domain. These studies highlight the power of the cognitive neuroscience approach by demonstrating how a single, integrated account of PFC function can capture a wide range of data from different methodologies and multiple populations.

The law has taken a long-standing interest in the mind. Cognitive neuroscience, the study of the mind through the brain, has gained prominence in part as a result of the advent of functional neuroimaging as a widely used tool for psychological research. Existing legal principles make virtually no assumptions about the neural bases of criminal behavior, and as a result they can comfortably assimilate new neuroscience without much in the way of conceptual upheaval: new details, new sources of evidence, but nothing for which the law is fundamentally unprepared. Neuroscience challenges ultimately reshape our intuitive sense of justice. It draws a familiar distinction between the consequentialist justification for state punishment, according to which punishment is merely an instrument for promoting future social welfare, and the retributivist justification for punishment, according to which the principal aim of punishment is to give people what they deserve based on their past actions.

An important motivation for relational theories of color is that they resolve apparent conflicts about color: x can, without contradiction, be red relative to S1 and not red relative to S2. Alas, many philosophers claim that the view is incompatible with naive, phenomenally grounded introspection. However, when we presented normal adults with apparent conflicts about color (among other properties), we found that many were open to the relationalist's claim that apparently competing variants can simultaneously be correct. This suggests that, philosophers' claims to the contrary notwithstanding, introspection does not supply authoritative and unambiguous reason to reject color relationalism.

It can happen that a single surface S, viewed in normal conditions, looks pure blue (“true blue”) to observer John but looks blue tinged with green to a second observer, Jane, even though both are normal in the sense that they pass the standard psychophysical tests for color vision. Tye (2006a) finds this situation prima facie puzzling, and then offers two different “solutions” to the puzzle.1 The first is that at least one observer misrepresents S’s color because, though normal in the sense explained, she is not a Normal color observer: her color detection system is not operating in the current condition in the way that Mother Nature intended it to operate. His second solution involves the idea that Mother Nature designed our color detection systems to be reliable with respect to the detection of coarse-grained colors (e.g., blue, green, yellow, orange), but our capacity to represent the fine-grained colors (e.g., true blue, blue tinged with green) is an undesigned spandrel. On this second solution, it is consistent with the variation between John and Jane that both represent the color of S in a way that complies with Mother Nature’s intentions: both represent S as exemplifying the coarse-grained color blue, and since (we may assume) S is in fact blue, both represent it veridically. Of course, they also represent fine-grained colors of S, and, according to Tye, at most one of these representations is veridical (Tye says that only God knows which). But at the level of representation for which Mother Nature designed our color detection systems, both John and Jane (qua Normal observers) are reliable detectors.

o (2000), 243). In particular, the idea is that binding interactions between the relevant expressions and natural lan- guage quantifiers are best explained by the hypothesis that those expressions harbor hidden but bindable variables. Recently, however, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore have rejected such binding arguments for the presence of hid- den variables on the grounds that they overgeneralize — that, if sound, such arguments would establish the presence of hidden variables in all sorts of ex- pressions where it is implausible that they exist (Cappelen and Lepore (2005), Cappelen and Lepore (2002)).1 In what follows we respond to Cappelen’s and Lepore’s attempted reductio by bringing out crucial disanalogies between cases where the binding argument is successful and cases where it is not. But we have a deeper purpose than merely to respond to Cappelen and Lepore: we think the attempted reductio goes wrong by not taking sufficiently seriously the nature of the binding relation that holds between quantifiers and arguments/variables, and that our criticism will serve to highlight the nature and importance of this relation.

What is the relationship between sounds and time? More specifically, is there something essentially or distinctively temporal about sounds that distinguishes them from, say, colors, shapes, odors, tastes, or other sensible qualities? And just what might this distinctive relation to time consist in? Apart from their independent interest, these issues have a number of important philosophical repercussions. First, if sounds are temporal in a way that other sensible qualities are not, then this would mean that standard lists of paradigm secondary qualities offered by Locke, Galileo, and other modern philosophers — lists which include colors, odors and sounds without any significant distinctions — overlook significant metaphysical differences. This, in turn, would threaten to undermine the coherence of the modern understanding of secondary qualities itself. Moreover, a number of authors have recently urged that the essential temporality of sounds makes it impossible to understand sounds as properties (except on a trope theory of properties; see note 3). If true, and given the more or less universal view that colors are properties, this last conclusion would make potentially inapplicable to sounds much of the comparatively well-developed philosophical taxonomy and apparatus that has arisen in philosophical disputes over the status of colors (for presentations of this taxonomy and apparatus see, for example, Byrne and Hilbert (2003); Cohen (2008b)).1 Therefore, the conclusion that sounds are distinctively temporal would be a serious blow to hopes for a theoretically unified treatment of the sensory qualities.2 For all these reasons, quite a lot seems to hang on the question of the temporality of sounds.

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3)