John H. Campbell

In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference. We argue that niche construction can be described using a variational approach. We propose new arguments to support the niche construction perspective, and to extend the variational approach to niche construction to current perspectives in various scientific fields.

Descartes made vivid that my certainty as to which psychological states are mine seems to outrun by far my certainty about which body is mine, or even that I have a body. This can make it seem compelling that in our ordinary use of the first person, we are referring to purely psychological subjects, which just so happen to be specially related to particular bodies. This would explain why your certainty about your ownership of a particular psychological life can outrun your certainty about your ownership of a body. The problem is that it is difficult to make sense of this notion of the self as a purely psychological subject.

My project in this paper is to extend the interventionist analysis of causation to give an account of causation in psychology. Many aspects of empirical investigation into psychological causation fit straightforwardly into the interventionist framework. I address three problems. First, the problem of explaining what it is for a causal relation to be properly psychological rather than merely biological. Second, the problem of rational causation: how it is that reasons can be causes. Finally, I look at the implications of an interventionist analysis for the idea that an inquiry into psychological causes must be an inquiry into causal mechanisms. I begin by setting out the main ideas of the interventionist approach.

But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible

Ever since the publication of 'Truth' in 1959 Sir Michael Dummett has been acknowledged as one of the most profoundly creative and influential of contemporary philosophers. His contributions to the philosophy of thought and language, logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics have set the terms of some of most fruitful discussions in philosophy. His work on Frege stands unparalleled, both as landmark in the history of philosophy and as a deep reflection on the defining commitments of the analytic school. This volume of specially composed essays on Dummett's philosophy presents a new perspective on his achievements, and provides a focus for further research fully informed by the Dummett's most recent publications. Collectively the essays in philosophy of mathematics provide the most sustained discussion to date of the role of Dummett's diagnosis of the root of the logico-mathematical paradoxes in his case for an intuitionist revision of classical mathematics. The themes of other essays include a fundamental challenge to Dummett's Fregean understanding of predication, and a criticism of his case for logical revision outside of mathematics.

Our use of ‘I’, or something like it, is implicated in our self-regarding emotions, in the concern to survive, and so seems basic to ordinary human life. But why does that pattern of use require a referring term? Don't Lichtenberg's formulations show how we could have our ordinary pattern of use here without the first person? I argue that what explains our compulsion to regard the first person as a referring term is our ordinary causal thinking, which requires us to find a persisting object as the mechanism that underpins the causal structure we naturally ascribe to the self. I thus argue against Peacocke's picture (2012), on which it's the cogito that explains one's knowledge of one's own existence

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 35-39 [Access article in PDF] The Ownership of Thoughts John Campbell Keywords: schizophrenia, thought insertion, immunity to error through misidentification. SYDNEY SHOEMAKER FORMULATED a basic point about first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states when he declared that they are, in general, immune to error through misidentification (Shoemaker 1984). Assuming Shoemaker's point to be correct, the puzzle it raises is this: how are we to explain this datum? Why should it be that first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states are immune to error through misidentification? One type of explanation is in terms of the meaning of the first person: that "I" just stands for whoever is the owner of these (demonstrated) psychological states (including any states being self-ascribed). I argued against this account of the first person in a number of places, and in favor of an alternative explanation of Shoemaker's datum. On the alternative explanation, the reason for the immunity is provided by an account of the ownership of psychological states, on which what makes a psychological state mine is the possibility of self-ascription of it by me (Campbell 1986, 1999a). Suppose we call this the Introspectionist explanation of the immunity to error through misidentification of present-tense self-ascriptions of psychological states. I do think, though, that the simple Introspectionist account is too simple an account of Shoemaker's datum (Campbell 1999a, 1999b). The reason is that there is a certain complexity in our notion of the ownership of a token thought. We cannot give a full account of our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought simply in terms of the person who is capable of introspective knowledge of the thought. The reason is that there is another dimension to our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought. We also think of the possessor of a thought as being the person who generated that very thought; we think of the owner of the thought as being the person who brought that particular token thought into existence, the person who formed it. Of course, that token thought may be a copying of someone else's idea; that other person may have influenced my formation of that particular thought. But the point remains that I play a special role in the production of my thoughts.Suppose we have a document bearing a signature and we ask, "Whose signature is that?" In this case we are asking about the authorship of the signature; we are asking who made those particular marks on that bit of paper. Of course, someone else can copy my signature, trying to make it look as if what they write was written by me. But for a particular piece of writing to be an authentic signature of mine, the thing has to be generated by me personally. I think it is helpful to bear in mind this aspect of the notion of the ownership of a signature, when we consider a certain complexity in the notion of the ownership of a thought—I mean, an occurrent, episodic [End Page 35] thought. There are, I am saying, two strands in the ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought, which we do not ordinarily have any reason to separate. First, there is the notion of the person who generated that particular thought, which we might think of on the model of the person who inscribed a particular signature. Of course, in generating a particular token thought, you may be subject to all sorts of influences. Perhaps your thought is derivative, largely shaped by others. Perhaps your thoughts are sometimes simply echoes of the things other people have said. Nonetheless, when we consider how your individual token thoughts are being brought about, you play a proximal role in their formation that no one else does. To give an analogy, suppose that I am taking notes at your dictation. Then there is a sense in which the contents of my notes are entirely determined by you. But there is also a sense in which the token sentences are being generated by...

We can make a distinction between the conceptual role of the first person and the reference of the first person. By ‘conceptual role’ I mean the use that is made of the term: the kinds of procedures that we use in verifying judgements using the term and the kinds of actions we perform on the basis of judgements involving the term. In “Self-Notions,” Perry talks about conceptual role using the phrase, ‘epistemic/pragmatic relations’. He says there are “normally self-informative” ways of getting information and “normally self-dependent” ways of acting. These ways of getting information about the self, and ways of acting dependent on the self, constitute what I am calling the conceptual role of the first person. Perry indeed says, “I believe that what is special about self-notions is that they are the normal repository of normally self-informative ways of perceiving, and the normal motivator of normally self-dependent ways of acting.”

We can make a distinction between the conceptual role of the first person and the reference of the first person. By ‘conceptual role’ I mean the use that is made of the term: the kinds of procedures that we use in verifying judgements using the term and the kinds of actions we perform on the basis of judgements involving the term. In “Self-Notions,” Perry talks about conceptual role using the phrase, ‘epistemic/pragmatic relations’. He says there are “normally self-informative” ways of getting information and “normally self-dependent” ways of acting. These ways of getting information about the self, and ways of acting dependent on the self, constitute what I am calling the conceptual role of the first person. Perry indeed says, “I believe that what is special about self-notions is that they are the normal repository of normally self-informative ways of perceiving, and the normal motivator of normally self-dependent ways of acting.”

Ordinarily, if you say something like “I see a comet,” you might make a mistake about whether it is a comet that you see, but you could not be right about whether it is a comet but wrong about who is seeing it. There cannot be an “error of identification” in this case. In making a judgement like, “I see a comet,” there are not two steps, finding out who is seeing the thing and finding out what it is that is being seen, so that you could go wrong at either step. The only place to go wrong is in your description of what is being seen. We usually take it that the same point applies to present-tense ascriptions to oneself of psychological states in general. You can get it wrong about which psychological state you are in, but you cannot get it right about the psychological state but wrong about whose psychological state it is. In contrast, in a room full of people, I might hear a noise and conclude, “Bill sneezed,” and in this case I could be wrong either about who it was that sneezed or about whether it was a sneeze, rather than say a death-rattle.

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, or finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions

It is sometimes said that ordinary linguistic exchange, in ordinary conversation, is a matter of securing and sustaining joint attention. The minimal condition for the success of the conversation is that the participants should be attending to the same things. So the psychologist Michael Tomasello writes, ‘I take it as axiomatic that when humans use language to communicate referentially they are attempting to manipulate the attention of another person or persons.’ I think that this is an extremely fertile approach to philosophical problems about meaning and reference, and in this paper I want to apply it to the case of the first person. So I want to look at the case in which you tell me something about yourself, using the first person, and we achieve joint attention to the same object. But I begin with some remarks about how this approach applies to proper names and to perceptual demonstratives.