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1203Enactivism, action and normativity: a Wittgensteinian analysisAdaptive Behavior 23 (1): 20-33. 2015.In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be …Read more
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846Schaffer (2010) argues that the internal relatedness of all things, no matter how it is conceived, entails priority monism. He claims that a sufficiently pervasive internal relation among objects implies the priority of the whole, understood as a concrete object. This paper shows that at least in the case of an internal relatedness of all things conceived in terms of physical intentionality - one way to understand dispositions - priority monism not only doesn't follow but also is precluded. We c…Read more
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727Naturalism, non-factualism, and normative situated behaviourSouth African Journal of Philosophy 37 (1): 80-98. 2018.This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue aga…Read more
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691Anomalous monism: Oscillating between dogmasSynthese 148 (1): 79-97. 2006.Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, th…Read more
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660The only wrong cell is the dead one: On the enactive approach to normativityIn Heras-Escribano Manuel, Noble Jason & Pinedo García Manuel De (eds.), Pietro Liò et al. (eds.) Advances in Artificial Life (ECAL 2013), . pp. 665-670. 2013.In this paper we challenge the notion of ‘normativity’ used by some enactive approaches to cognition. We define some varieties of enactivism and their assumptions and make explicit the reasoning behind the co-emergence of individuality and normativity. Then we argue that appealing to dispositions for explaining some living processes can be more illuminating than claiming that all such processes are normative. For this purpose, we will present some considerations, inspired by Wittgenstein, regard…Read more
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615Sense and Sensibility Educated: A Note on Experience and (Minimal) EmpiricismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (5): 741-747. 2012.McDowell’s minimal empiricism holds that experience, understood as providing conceptually articulated contents, plays a role in the justification of our beliefs. We question this idea by contrasting the role of perceptual experience in moral and non-moral judgments and conclude that experience per se is irrelevant in the former case and should also be so in the latter one: only with the help of adequate beliefs experience can provide a connection with the world. We conclude with some remarks con…Read more
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612When my own beliefs are not first-personal enoughTheoria 22 (58): 35-41. 2007.Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal—through avowal—the other third-personal—no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions—is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own beliefs; t…Read more
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457Soft facts: Thinking practices and the architecture of realityDaimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 61 7-21. 2014.It is common to criticize the idea of objectivity by claiming that we cannot make sense of any cognitive contact with the world that is not constituted by the very materials of our thinking, and to conclude that the idea must be abandoned and that the world is ‘well lost’. We resist this conclusion and argue for a notion of objectivity that places its source within the domain of thoughts by proposing a conception of facts, akin to McDowell’s, as thinkable while independent of any act of thinking…Read more
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429Whistlin’ past the graveyard: Quietism and philosophical engagementPhilósophos - Revista de Filosofia 10 (2): 141-161. 2005.nos últimos anos, John McDowell tem proposto uma concepção de filosofia em que o objetivo da disciplina não é oferecer teses substanciais, mas antes revelar modos de pensar e premissas ocultas que estão na base da filosofia construtiva. Esta visão terapêutica tem sido chamada ‘quietismo’ e deve muito a algumas idéias favoritas de Wittgenstein ao longo de toda a sua vida. No entanto, a obra de Wittgenstein (e, talvez, também a de McDowell) parece oscilar entre duas compreensões de quietismo: pode…Read more
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197When my Own Beliefs are not First-Personal EnoughTheoria 22 (1): 35-41. 2009.Richard Moran has defended the need for two modes of access to our mental contents, a first-personal and a third-personal one. In this paper we maintain that, in the moral case, an excess of concentration on the a third-personal perspective precludes accounting for our responsibility over our own beliefs and our capacity to normatively respond to the world.
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196Truth matters: normativity in thought and knowledgeTheoria 50 137-154. 2004.If language and thought are to be taken as objective, they must respond to how the world is. I propose to explain this responsiveness in terms of conditions of correction, more precisely, by taking thoughts and linguistic utterances to be assessible as true or false. Furthermore, the paper is committed to a form of quietism according to which the very same thing that can be (truly) thought or expressed is the case: ‘soft facts’ as opposed to hard, free-standing facts, independent of any possible…Read more
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141Are affordances normative?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (4): 565-589. 2016.In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show tha…Read more
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120Truth matters: Normativity in thought and knowledgeTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 19 (2): 137-154. 2010.A proposal to account for the objectivity of thought and language in terms of identity between facts, meanings and contents is offered. Furthermore, their normativity is related to their world involving character. Both proposals are jointly quietist: they avoid philosophical theorizing that explains thought in terms of world or viceversa.
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63Holism and Singularity Towards an Ontology of the UnfittingProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 17 15-22. 2008.Holism about thought content – especially coupled with a measure of semantic externalism – can provide us with an attractive account of how thinking relates to the world. It can help us to tell a neat story that starts out with the inseparable entanglement of truth and intelligibility: in order to understand thought, to confront it to the world and to give verdicts about that confrontation, we need to grasp a considerable amount of truths. A variety of positions that emerge under the influence o…Read more
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59The distinction between personal level explanations and subpersonal ones has been subject to much debate in philosophy. We understand it as one between explanations that focus on an agent’s interaction with its environment, and explanations that focus on the physical or computational enabling conditions of such an interaction. The distinction, understood this way, is necessary for a complete account of any agent, rational or not, biological or artificial. In particular, we review some recent res…Read more
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59When my Own Beliefs are not First-Personal EnoughTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 22 (1): 35-41. 2007.Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal —through avowal— the other third-personal —no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions— is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own belief…Read more
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58Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the WaysHypatia 36 (4): 657-675. 2021.Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that th…Read more
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54Brandom on Thought and Reality: Showing Receptivity the Way out of the BottleneckTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 21-36. 2006.
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53Epistemic virtues and transparencyCroatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (3): 257-266. 2011.Transparency is commonly held to be a property of one’s beliefs: it is enough for me to examine an issue to establish my beliefs about it. Recent challenges to first-person authority over the content of one’s beliefs potentially undermine transparency. We start considering some consequences in terms of variations of Moore’s paradox. Then we study cases where, in the process of acquiring and managing beliefs, one pays excessive attention to how reliable, empirically adequate, coherent, or widely …Read more
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40Epistemic De-PlatformingIn David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro & José Ramón Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression, De Gruyter. pp. 105-134. 2022.
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33Are affordances normative?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (4): 565-589. 2016.In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show tha…Read more
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31Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological DilemmasFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
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31Imaginación democrática y distribución del conocimientoDaimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 86 199-209. 2022.José Luis Moreno argumenta contra lo que considera una variedad de formas de fetichismo político. Lo que tienen en común es depositar una confianza excesiva o monolítica en algún mecanismo democrático en particular. Compartimos su motivación y en esta nota crítica intentamos llevar sus argumentos más lejos preguntándonos si diferentes tipos de conocimiento políticamente relevante pueden distinguirse, si en algunos contextos es necesario dejar las decisiones en manos de expertos y si la propuesta…Read more
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25Truth matters: Normativity in thought and knowledgeTheoria 19 (2): 137-154. 2010.A proposal to account for the objectivity of thought and language in terms of identity between facts, meanings and contents is offered. Furthermore, their normativity is related to their world involving character. Both proposals are jointly quietist: they avoid philosophical theorizing that explains thought in terms of world or viceversa.
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19De la imagen manifiesta a la actitud natural: el lugar de la ciencia en nuestra comprensión del mundoDaimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 25 145-164. 2002.
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6" El conflicto entre continentales y analíticos: dos tradiciones filosóficas", por Luis Sáez RuedaTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 22 (1): 108-112. 2003.
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2Anomalous monism and radical interpretation: a reply to Dwayne MooreTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 99-108. 2012.
Granada, AL, Spain
Areas of Specialization
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Action |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |