Entity Realism About Mental Representations

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations.

A Practically Useful Metaphysics of Technology

In the past couple of decades, there has been a tendency to identify the study of artefacts as one of the central subject matters of philosophy of technology. This subject identification relies on a metaphysical distinction between artefacts and non-artefacts, and is supported by the premise that artefacts are philosophically significant in ways that non-artefacts are not. Here it is argued that if we want philosophy of technology to be practically useful, the artefact/non-artefact distinction is a misleading place to start, as this distinction is developed through a metaphysical approach which is of little use for practical decisions and evaluations. Instead, we need to adopt a different metaphysical approach which is practically useful. This alternative approach is called activity realism, as opposed to entity realism in light of which artefacts are defined. Activity realism provides a metaphysical foundation for a practically useful philosophy of technology.

LA RELATIVITÀ E LA REALTÀ DEL MOMENTO PRESENTE

In this paper I examine the problem of scientific realism from the viewpoint of the question of reality of time, and of the present moment in particular. For this purpose, I examine four different views about the reality of time, corresponding in the debate on scientific realism to theory realism, entity realism, structural realism and what we could call “weak realism” (intersubjectice agreement). I conclude that the relational character of “being present” need not entail the reducibility of mental states to physical states, but rather the necessity of considering together the objective succession of physical events perceived by our brain and the awareness of this succession made possible by our brain.

Experiment

The authors provide an overview of philosophical discussions about the roles of experiment in science. First, they cover two approaches that took shape under the heading of “new experimentalism” in the 1980s and 1990s. One approach was primarily concerned with questions about entity realism, robustness, and epistemological strategies. The other has focused on exploratory experiments and the dynamic processes of experimental research as such, highlighting its iterative nature and drawing out the ways in which such research is grounded in experimental systems, concepts and operational definitions. Second, the authors look at more recent philosophical work on the epistemology of causal inference, in particular highlighting discussions in the philosophy of the behavioral and social sciences, concerning the extrapolation from laboratory contexts to the world.