Naturalizing Information

Naturalism and transcendentalism in the naturalization of phenomenology

In this article, an account is given of the relation between naturalism and transcendentalism in the current project of naturalizing phenomenology. This project usually takes the transcendental point of view to be in conflict with the naturalizing attitude and the contemporary sciences of cognition thus seem to require cutting Husserlian phenomenology from its anti-naturalist roots, i.e., natur...

Naturalizing as an error-type in Biology

Biologists make mistakes – but they can also find them and remedy them. I survey a series of cases where idealizations and assumptions about normality have shaped common erroneous biological concepts: male and female; developmental abnormalities; competition in evolution; and laws of nature. Such scientific interpretations of nature can have profound social consequences. Identifying such recurr...

Naturalizing Metaphysics with the Help of Cognitive Science

Naturalizing the Acting Self: Subjective vs. Anonymous Agency

This paper considers critically the enterprise of naturalizing the subjective experience of acting intentionally. I specifically expose the limits of the model that conceives of agency as composed of two stages. The first stage consists in experiencing an anonymous intention without being conscious of it as anybody’s in particular. The second stage disambiguates this anonymous experience thanks...

Naturalizing Self-Consciousness

The crucial problem of self-consciousness is how to account for knowing self-reference without launching into a regress or without presupposing self-consciousness rather than accounting for it (circle). In the literature we find two bottom-up proposals for solving the traditional problem: the postulation of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness and the postulation of a pre-reflexive form of...