Neither Presentism nor Eternalism

Presentism, eternalism, and phenomenal change

Normally, when we notice a change taking place, our conscious experience has a corresponding quality of phenomenal change. Here it is argued that one’s experience can have this quality at or during a time when there is no change in which phenomenal properties one instantiates. This undermines a number of otherwise forceful arguments against leading metaphysical theories of change, but also requ...

Neither fragments nor ellipsis *

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they s...

Neither separate nor equivalent

Evidence suggests that binding, or encoding a feature with respect to other features in time and space, can convey cognitive advantages. However, evidence across many kinds of stimuli and paradigms presents a mixed picture, alternatively showing cognitive costs or cognitive advantages associated with maintaining bound representations. We examined memory for colored letters drawn from similar an...

Neither healthy nor sick

The article examines the tensions involved in the development of treatment for mental disorders during the period 1950-1980 in the United States. It relates those tensions to the diffusion of a social ideal strongly influenced by the subjectivist fervor characteristic of post-war America but also internally contradictory. Psychiatric diagnosis came to be seen as a way of disqualifying the indiv...

Neither Desert nor Disease