•  1
    Rationality: Constraints and Contexts (edited book)
    with Hung T. W.
    Elsevier. forthcoming.
  •  4
    Quiet Qualia, Unsensed Sensa
    NTU Philosophical Review 21 307-339. 1998.
    In C. I. Lewis's epistemology, qualia are taken to be directly intuited and inherently recognizable. He distinguishes sharply between qualia and that which C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell refer to as “sensa" or “sense-data." Where Broad and Russell appear to allow for the possibility of unsensed, incompletely sensed, or inaccurately sensed sensa, Lewis regards qualia as given--to be is to be sensed and certain. Lewis finds the Broad-Russell view to be incredible and says of sensa so construed t…Read more
  •  45
    Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, 1st Edition (edited book)
    with T. W. Hung
    Academic Press. 2016.
    For half a century the idea of rational thought has been challenged by discoveries that call into question some of its foundations. How we actually think seems to be at odds with descriptive and prescriptive models that once held sway in the development of modern science and scholarship. One response to these challenges has been a loss of nerve. Another—the one on display in Rationality: Contexts and Constraints—is an active attempt to revise those models, so as to enhance their compatibility…Read more
  •  1411
    Subjectivity theories of consciousness take self-reference, somehow construed, as essential to having conscious experience. These theories differ with respect to how many levels they posit and to whether self-reference is conscious or not. But all treat self-referencing as a process that transpires at the personal level, rather than at the subpersonal level, the level of mechanism. Working with conceptual resources afforded by pre-existing theories of consciousness that take self-reference t…Read more
  •  884
    Is depressive rumination rational?
    In Timothy Joseph Lane & Tzu-Wei Hung (eds.), Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, Elsevier Academic Press. pp. 121-145. 2016.
    Most mental disorders affect only a small segment of the population. On the reasonable assumption that minds or brains are prone to occasional malfunction, these disorders do not seem to pose distinctive explanatory problems. Depression, however, because it is so prevalent and costly, poses a conundrum that some try to explain by characterizing it as an adaptation—a trait that exists because it performed fitness-enhancing functions in ancestral populations. Heretofore, proposed evolutionary e…Read more
  •  975
    Rationality and its contexts
    In Timothy Joseph Lane & Tzu-Wei Hung (eds.), Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, Elsevier Academic Press. pp. 3-13. 2016.
    A cursory glance at the list of Nobel Laureates for Economics is sufficient to confirm Stanovich’s description of the project to evaluate human rationality as seminal. Herbert Simon, Reinhard Selten, John Nash, Daniel Kahneman, and others, were awarded their prizes less for their work in economics, per se, than for their work on rationality, as such. Although philosophical works have for millennia attempted to describe, explicate and evaluate individual and collective aspects of rationality, n…Read more