Dave Beisecker

Bruno Mölder’s Mind Ascribed offers an important and impressive criticism of substantial naturalistic accounts of mental activity that predominate much recent philosophy of mind, as part of a defense of a relatively deflationary form of interpretivism. However, I suspect that Mölder has overly downplayed normative aspects of mental ascription, and that he could profitably enlist the work of those who take Sellars seriously to explain how the actual behavior of subjects of ascription can depart so dramatically from the norms of rationality to which they are properly held.

We argue for a reconsideration of the claim that Spinoza’s perfectionist conception of education was ushering in a form of radical humanism distinctly favorable to democratic ideals. With the rise of democratic societies and the corresponding need to constitute educational institutions within those societies, a more thoroughgoing commitment to democratic social ideals arose, first and foremost in American educational thought. This commitment can be seen especially in Dewey’s philosophy of education. Specifically, Dewey and Spinoza had strikingly distinct conceptions of the overall aims of schooling. While Spinoza takes the aim of education to be the perfection of a student’s original nature, Dewey takes education to involve the collective acquisition of an additional nature, reflecting the norms and expectations of one’s specific community. In this paper, we juxtapose these two distinct conceptions of education alongside one another, with an eye towards illuminating the limitations of a perfectionist theory of education for the individual, as we find it in Spinoza, within a democratic society.

Lewis Carroll has been credited for developing a “Method of Trees” for solving multi-literal sorites problems, which anticipates several aspects of contemporary “tableau” or tree systems of logical proof. In particular, Carroll’s method pioneers the use of branching paths as a means of displaying or illustrating inclusive disjunction. However, rather than focusing on the respects in which Carroll’s tree diagrams resemble contemporary tree systems, I propose to focus instead on significant aspects in which they differ. In particular, I will show how the sorts of multi-literal sorites problems that Carroll’s method of trees is designed to solve are particularly ill-suited for resolution by more contemporary tree methods. I will also show how Carroll likely used something like this method, not only to solve but also to craft some of the trickier logical puzzles for which he is also famous.

In early 2021, a Canadian investigation revealed the discovery of over a thousand grave sites of indigenous children on the grounds of Indian residential schools across Canada. These discoveries prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce a similar investigation into the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of federally sponsored Indian boarding schools in the United States. In addition to documenting the legacy of abuse, neglect and dominance of indigenous peoples, we believe that such reflection upon the impact of Indian boarding schools should also include the justifications that were used to promote the government policy of compelling indigenous children to leave family, tribe, customs and even language behind to be acculturated in remote boarding schools far from home or reservation. For while in hindsight these policies can be both deplored and regretted, they were not crafted in a philosophical vacuum. Specifically, it might come as a surprise to scholars today that Hegelian thought actually featured in the support and promotion of such policies. We propose to tell at least part of this story, by focusing on the leading American Hegelian of the time, William Torrey Harris, who—as director of the famed Concord School of Philosophy and also longtime US Commissioner of Education—was highly influential in both philosophical and educational circles. In that latter capacity, Harris penned a defence of the boarding school system, which drew upon broadly Hegelian ideas and language. So while we have elsewhere defended and lauded Harris and the St Louis Hegelians for their contributions to American philosophy and democratic educational thought, here is one respect in which this influence has not stood up well to the test of time.

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi characterizes grief as a “questioning attitude”; it calls attention to and prompts questions about the significance of the departed specifically to the griever. Accordingly, Cholbi assigns grief a largely self-directed cognitive purpose: grief’s goodness is that it leads—when things go well—to greater self-knowledge. In this paper, I question this claim. Calling upon an ordinary episode of grief, I argue that there are at least a few cases of grief in which greater self-knowledge is neither likely nor reasonably expected.

Brandom contends that the classical American pragmatists subscribe to a semantic program that is insufficiently one-sided in that it focuses exclusively on the down-stream consequences of concept application, while neglecting its upstream conditions. Focusing on passages from Peirce’s later work, I show that, while Peirce does unpack meaning in terms of the consequences of concept application, his inclusion of the consequences of denying claims involving a concept allow him to capture the inferential space that Brandom contends the classical pragmatists miss. Thus at least Peirce is one classical pragmatist who would not seem to suffer from that particular semantic blindspot.

In at least a few of his formulations of the pragmatic maxim around 1905—those in which he sought to inoculate his brand of pragmatism against misappropriation by other pragmatists and also to supply a demonstration of its truth—Charles Peirce instructs us to look not only at the consequences of affirming some claim or concept, but also at the consequences of denying it. Referring to himself in the third person as "the author," Peirce writes: Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing on the conduct of life; so that, since...

The question of animal belief (or animal intentionality) often degenerates into a frustrating and unproductive exchange. Foes of animal intentionality point out that non-linguistic animals couldn’t possibly possess the kinds of mental states we linguistic beings enjoy. They claim that linguistic ability enables us to become sensitive to intensional contexts or to the states of mind of others in a way that is unavailable to the non-linguistic, and that would be necessary for proper attributions of intentionality. To attribute mental states to non-linguistic brutes, no matter how natural it comes to us, would be grossly anthropomorphic. In the face of these challenges some friends of animal intentionality have attempted to show that at least a few animals (chimpanzees, vervet monkeys, honeybees) are capable of engaging in quasi-linguistic, communicative practices that ought to be accorded at least a minimal degree of intentionality. Others have questioned the foes’ necessity claims; linguistic ability, claim these animal friends, isn’t required for sensitivity to intensional contexts, surprise, or belief about belief after all, or if it is, then these features aren’t really requisite for mental capacity. Indeed, if we focus exclusively upon linguistic ability, then we are apt to miss the primitive kinds of mental capacities from which our own full-blooded intentional capacities likely evolved. Animals certainly seem to interact intelligently with their surroundings, so much so that we ought to follow our natural (brute?) anthropomorphic inclinations to credit them with minds. Failing to recognize their genuine intentional capacities would be "brutishly" anthropocentric.

In several recent pieces, Daniel Dennett has advanced a line of reasoning purporting to show that we should reject the idea that there is a tenable distinction to be drawn between the manner in which we represent the way things are and the manner in which "blessedly simple" intentional systems like thermostats and frogs represent the way things are. Through a series of thought experiments, Dennett aims to show that philosophers of mind should abandon their preoccupation with "real meaning as opposed to ersatz meaning, 'intrinsic' or 'original ' intentionality as opposed to derived intentionality. " In this paper, I lay out the case that Dennett builds against original intentionality, with the aim of showing that, once it has been properly clarified, the notion of original intentionality isn't nearly the myth that Dennett makes it out to be.

In recent discussions of the concept of original intentionality, Dennett raises an intelligible challenge to intentional realists, one that has not been adequately addressed by naturalistic theories of mental representation how can something be correct or mistaken about the way things are, where the applicable normativity is intelligible as such, without ultimately appealing to the background of purposes for which a subject has been designed or selected? I respond directly and constructively to this challenge by profiling in suitably informative vocabulary how creatures with certain expectation-based educable capacities could be originally intentional. By explaining how we can understand such critters as engaging in a kind of rational goal-directed activity that is intelligible quite apart from their designed purposes, I show how they are susceptible to two types of corresponding to distinct ways in which expectations can fail to pick out regularities in their environments. I then expand this simple account to show how critters with more sophisticated means of exploiting their environments are capable of further types of errors. I can therefore capture several distinct kinds of intentional activity, corresponding to different ways in which critters can be seen as getting things right or wrong, including primitive inferential capacities. I also sketch a meow by which members of a community can become beholden to norms that are socially instituted and maintained, although I don't pretend to capture our most sophisticated intentional capacities---those inferential and linguistic capacities in virtue of which we are able to reason with one another about how the world is---my account nevertheless shows that there are interesting pre-linguistic boundaries separating the relative intentional capacities of critters, boundaries that are liable to be overlooked by those who insist that thought or reason is somehow limited to linguistic beings. This project, since it articulates the boundaries around the pre-linguistic intentional capacities from which our full-blown conceptual capacities plausibly evolved, is of evident value for the study of animal cognition, and should prove useful for the task of setting reasonable targets for AI research.