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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Mind
When Is It Mental?, Stuart Glennan
When Is It Mental?, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Most philosophical debate over mental causation has been concerned with reconciling commonsense intuitions that there are causal interactions between the mental and the physical with philosophical theories of the nature of the mental that seem to suggest otherwise. My concern is with a different and more practical problem. We often confront some cognitive, affective, or bodily phenomenon, and wonder about its source – its etiology or its underlying causal basis. For instance, you might wonder whether your queasiness due to something you ate, or whether it is just nervousness, or whether your aunt’s memory loss is a neurological problem or …
Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan
Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from the perspective of a mechanical theory of causation (Glennan 1996, 1997, 2010, forthcoming), and to explain what, from this perspective, causal generalizations mean, and what role they play within the mechanical theory.
Mechanisms (Oxford), Stuart Glennan
Mechanisms (Oxford), Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Mechanism is undoubtedly a causal concept, in the sense that ordinary definitions and philosophical analyses explicate the concept in terms of other causal concepts such as production and interaction. Given this fact, many philosophers have supposed that analyses of the concept of mechanism, while they might appeal to philosophical theories about the nature of causation, could do little to inform such theories. On the other hand, methods of causal inference and explanation appeal to mechanisms. Discovering a mechanism is the gold standard for establishing and explaining causal connections. This fact suggests that it might be possible to provide an analysis …
Contextual Unanimity And The Units Of Selection Problem, Stuart M. Glennan
Contextual Unanimity And The Units Of Selection Problem, Stuart M. Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Sober and Lewontin’s critique of genic selectionism is based upon the principle that a unit of selection should make a context‐independent contribution to fitness. Critics have effectively shown that this principle is flawed. In this paper I show that the context independence principle is an instance of a more general principle for characterizing causes,called the contextual unanimity principle. I argue that this latter principle, while widely accepted, is erroneous. What is needed is to replace the approach to causality characterized by the contextual unanimity criterion with an approach based on the concept of causal mechanism. After sketching such an approach, …
Probable Causes And The Distinction Between Subjective And Objective Chance, Stuart M. Glennan
Probable Causes And The Distinction Between Subjective And Objective Chance, Stuart M. Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
In this paper I present both a critical appraisal of Humphreys' probabilistic theory of causality and a sketch of an alternative view of the relationship between the notions of probability and of cause. Though I do not doubt that determinism is false, I claim that the examples used to motivate Humphreys' theory typically refer to subjective rather than objective chance. Additionally, I argue on a number of grounds that Humphreys' suggestion that linear regression models be used as a canonical form for the description of causal relations is untenable. I conclude by exploring the variety of ways in which probabilistic …
Capacities, Universality And Singularity, Stuart M. Glennan
Capacities, Universality And Singularity, Stuart M. Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
In this paper I criticize Cartwright's analysis of capacities and offer an alternative analysis. I argue that Cartwright's attempt to connect capacities to her condition CC fails because individuals can exercise capacities only in certain contexts. My own analysis emphasizes three features of capacities: 1) Capacities belong to individuals; 2) Capacities are typically not metaphysically fundamental properties of individuals, but can be explained by referring to structural properties of individuals; and 3) Laws are best understood as ascriptions of capacities.
Computationalism And The Problem Of Other Minds, Stuart M. Glennan
Computationalism And The Problem Of Other Minds, Stuart M. Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
In this paper I discuss Searle's claim that the computational properties of a system could never cause a system to be conscious. In the first section of the paper I argue that Searle is correct that, even if a system both behaves in a way that is characteristic of conscious agents (like ourselves) and has a computational structure similar to those agents, one cannot be certain that that system is conscious. On the other hand, I suggest that Searle's intuition that it is “empirically absurd” that such a system could be conscious is unfounded. In the second section I show …