Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism: Kant on Marriage, Race, and the Philosophy of the Family
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Sibyl Schwarzenback
As concerns with global interconnectedness have moved cosmopolitanism to the center of political philosophy in the last two decades, interest in Kant's cosmopolitan arguments has surged. Kant's vision of cosmopolitanism and his claims to universalism have been attacked by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, postmodernists, and African philosophers, and have been defended -- just as adamantly -- by contemporary moral and political philosophers who argue that his mature cosmopolitanism involves both a rejection of his racist views and a critique of European colonialism. This project counters those claims through an examination marriage and the family as central elements of the institutional order that shapes Kant's political vision. By asking how, concretely, Kant thought a juridical cosmopolitan world might be achieved and examining his own vision of the transformations necessary to achieve global juridical cosmopolitanism, this project shoes that while Kant criticizes the colonial practices of his day, his cosmopolitan vision involves a justification of the colonial processes that would emerge a century later, and thus fails to meet his own standards of universalism.
The Psychological Import of Syntactic Theory
Author:
David Pereplyotchik
Year of Dissertation:
2012
My primary goal is to assess whether, and in what sense, the rules or principles of grammar are psychologically real. I begin by casting doubt on a received view in generative linguistics, according to which a true theory of the syntax of natural language would, ipso facto, be a theory of a psychological state or mechanism. I argue that a nominalist construal of linguistic theory is a viable alternative to the dominant Chomskyan view that linguistics is a branch of psychology. If this is correct, it follows that there are substantive issues about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in psychological processes, and, if so, what role they play. To address these issues, I examine a range of behavioral and neurocognitive data from psycholinguistics. The data strongly suggest that the human language processing mechanism constructs mental representations of the syntactic properties of incoming linguistic stimuli. I then survey a number of computational models of human language comprehension. While all such models account for an impressive range of data, they make use of the rules or principles of a grammar in one of two very different ways--either by explicitly representing them in a data structure or by embodying them in the form of hardwired procedural dispositions. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that grammars are psychologically real in one of these two ways. But which? To answer this question, I go on to sketch a theoretical framework for thinking about represented and embodied rules, distinguishing embodiment from mere conformity to a rule. I then argue that embodied rules are typically implemented by simpler mechanisms, and that embodiment is, therefore, the more parsimonious hypothesis (ceteris paribus). Furthermore, I argue that we have no principled grounds, at present, for asserting that grammars are represented, rather than embodied, in the human brain. From this, I conclude that a common claim in generative linguistics, i.e., that grammars are represented in the minds of competent language users, must be seen as either as a conflation of the notions of embodiment and representation, or as an attractive but as-yet-ungrounded hypothesis.
Meaning and Morality
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Our ability to use language meaningfully derives in large part from our status as moral agents. The role of value and normativity cannot be separated from meaning and language use.
The Causal Role of State Consciousness
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Mental states often occur consciously. We regularly have conscious perceptions in different modalities, for example. A thought process usually involves several conscious beliefs, perhaps conscious doubts or desires. It is generally assumed that a mental state affects cognition and behavior in virtue of its psychological properties. But is a state's being conscious - what I call the c-property - causally relevant? If so, does the efficacy of that property benefit the creature that is in the conscious state? I argue for an affirmative reply, based on a higher-order theory of consciousness. Such a theory claims that for a mental state to be conscious is for the agent to be aware of being in it, via a suitable mental representation of the first-order state.
Moral Mental States: Four Methods in Metaethics
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Metaethics has traditionally focused on the meaning of moral statements, the referents of moral terms, and the justification of moral claims. This dissertation focuses on the thoughts in virtue of which our moral statements have their meaning and our moral claims have their content. These "moral mental states," as I call them, are best understood as having both intentional and volitional aspects and, corresponding to each aspect, as having satisfaction conditions involving both correctness and success in action. Put simply, our moral mental states are not only responsible for changing the world; they are responsible for changing the world in better ways, rather than worse ones. Using this framework, I examine three current metaethical frameworks (moral realism, constructivism, and expressivism/quasi-realism) and assess their adequacy in accounting for both kinds of these satisfaction conditions. I argue that none of the approaches succeeds in meeting basic constraints imposed by a robust view of moral mental states and propose my own view (interactionism). On my account, we often change our moral stances once the outcomes of the plans they recommend becomes known. Taking this as its basis, interactionism holds that a moral mental state is correct or incorrect based on the content (roughly, approval or disapproval) of the moral mental state one would hold in light of this improved information. Accordingly, the procedures for confirming moral content are similar to those for confirming scientific content: hypotheses and observations play a central role, and we must occasionally defer to other inquirers on issues that exceed our capacity for investigation. I conclude by presenting three empirical hypotheses that claim that we do, as a matter of course, have other-regarding interests and that, in a significant number of cases, our self-regarding and other-regarding interests overlap.
The Language of Philosohy - A Critical Look Into the Language of Early Analytic Philosophy
Author:
Rossen Ventzislavov
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In my dissertation I offer a topical critique of the language of early analytic philosophy. My critique focuses on the factors that shaped the tradition's linguistic inventory. Among these factors, I pay special attention to the direct influence the new analytic arguments and methodologies had on the formation of the specialized language of analysis. In this, I argue that early analytic philosophy is not only distinguished by a tendency of economizing language, as early analytic thinkers readily admitted, but also by the heretofore unstudied effort to ostracize words and expressions that could in any way challenge their new philosophical programs. I attempt to prove that, in result of the latter, early analytic philosophers isolated themselves from alternative ways of doing philosophy and, more importantly, sacrificed some of the understandability of their arguments. My method consists of the analysis of specific arguments by particular philosophers with a view on both the formation of their language choices and the way these choices in turn influence the arguments themselves. My primary examples of the tendencies discussed come from the writings of Moore, Neurath, and Wittgenstein. I also look into the importance of professional conformism for the way the language of early analytic philosophy has been inherited by subsequent generations of analysts. My example here is Searle and, more specifically, his compromised treatment of Derrida's reading of Austin. In conclusion, I explore the issues of language choice, understandability of arguments, modes of inheritance, and philosophical motivation as discussed by Wisdom and Cavell. In the latter two philosophers, I find both eloquent proof for the relevance of the problems that concern my study and, also, fresh suggestions as to how these problems are to be dealt with philosophically.
Metaphysical Dependence and Set Theory
Year of Dissertation:
2013
In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a counterfactual analysis of metaphysical dependence. It is natural to think that one thing x depends on another thing y iff had y not existed, then x wouldn't have existed either. But counterfactual analyses of metaphysical dependence are often rejected in the current literature. They are rejected because straightforward counterfactual analyses fail to accurately capture dependence relations between objects that exist necessarily, like mathematical objects. For example, it is taken as given that sets metaphysically depend on their members, while members do not metaphysically depend on the sets they belong to. The set {0} metaphysically depends on 0, while 0 does not metaphysically depend on {0}. The dependence is asymmetric. But if counterfactuals are given a possible worlds analysis, as is standard, then the counterfactual approach to dependence will yield a symmetric dependence relation between these two sets. Because the counterfactual analysis fails to accurately capture dependence relations between sets and their members, most reject this approach to metaphysical dependence.
On the Phenomenal Character of Conscious Experiences
Year of Dissertation:
2010
It seems intuitive to hold that when one has a conscious experience of seeing red, one's conscious experience has a qualitative property of "red," which is a mental quality. Qualitative properties can only exist in conscious experience and are only accessible introspectively. Therefore, they are subjective, since no one can access the qualitative properties of other peoples' experiences. This is the view held by qualia realists. However, Standard Representationalists hold that there are no mental qualities, since sensory experiences are transparent, and that when one introspects, one's attention ends up on the properties of the external objects. They conclude that the phenomenal character of experiences is determined by their intentional content.
Olfaction: Smelling the Content of Consciousness
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Scientific research on the sense of smell has blossomed over the past two decades, yet a comprehensive philosophical treatment of olfaction is nonexistent. My dissertation remedies this neglect by showing how the anatomical structure, functional circuitry, and sensory states of the olfactory system, call into question the reigning theories of cognition and consciousness. Specifically, olfaction provides new insight about the nature of object perception, the structure of our thoughts, consciousness, and the qualitative character of our experiences.
What Mathematical Explanation is Not
Year of Dissertation:
2009
What Mathematical Explanation is Not argues against the possibility of