John Searle has long argued that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. In his view the capacity of speech acts to represent and relate to reality derives from more biologically basic forms of intentionality, such as perception and action, which initially evolved to relate organisms directly to their environments. Searle’s naturalistic model of language, in order to b...

This article argues that the history of geography should be written from an externalist perspective; that is, its history should be directly related to the larger historical context in which it is embedded. My example is American human geography during the early Cold War period. The argument is that as a result of America’s experience during the Second World War, the USA mobilised its academy t...

By “practical reasoning” I shall understand reasoning about what to do. Doing something includes as the most elementary case (1) the immediate initiation of a change in the agent itself (typically a movement of some part or parts of its body). More complex cases are (2) the immediate initiation of a series of bodily movements and (3) adoption of an intention to initiate a sequence of bodily mov...

In the present talk I intend to discuss the validity of a model (or better, a class of models) of learning and deuterolearning processes in cognitive systems, constructed combining set-theoretical and proof-theoretical concepts. This class of models is based on ideas coming from different disciplines: 1) Gregory Bateson’s systemic-relational theory of learning and change; 2) G ̈odel’s incomplete...

It has been claimed that psychologist Joshua Greene's recent neuroscientific research into the physiological underpinnings of our moral intuitions has normative implications. In particular, it has been claimed that this research discredits our deontological intuitions about trolley-like cases, without discrediting our consequentialist intuitions about such cases. I disagree. As I see it, attemp...

There has been a great deal of discussion in the recent literature regarding the supposed phenomenon of “epistemic luck.” This is the putative situation in which an agent gains knowledge even though that knowledge has come about in a way that has, in some sense to be specified, involved luck in some significant measure. Unfortunately, very little of the literature that deals with epistemic luck...

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a wor...

A common assumption in metaphysics and the philosophy of language is that the general structure of language displays the general metaphysical structure of the things we talk about. But expressions can easily be imperfect representations of what they are about. After clarifying this general point, I make a case study of a recent attempt to semantically analyze the nature of knowledge-how. This a...

In this paper, we present a view of conscious perception that supposes a processual unity between the activity in the agent and the perceived event in the external world. It is a kind of radical externalism (both vehicle and content) that suggests that the boundary of the agent’s conscious mind are much larger than those of its body. We suggest a process-based approach as an explanation of ordi...

theoretical level. 34 # software cultural criticism A working principle has been established in the previous section: that any terms of reference are not definitive but only function as ideas in progress for further development. Criticism of the terms under discussion is an expected part of any critical work. The parenthesised subtitle of Matthew Fuller’s essay ‘Behind the Blip’ suggests as muc...