Abstract One powerful and influential approach to mental representation analyses in terms of biological functions, functions histories natural selection. This “teleosemantic” package, however, faces a familiar challenge. Surely depends only on the present-day structures cognitive systems, not their historical provenance. “Swampman” drives point home. Suppose bolt lightning creates an intrinsic ...

BACKGROUND Use of herbal extracts and essences as natural antibacterial compounds has become increasingly popular for the control of oral infectious diseases. Therefore, finding natural antimicrobial products with the lowest side effects seems necessary. The present study sought to assess the effect of Punica granatum L. water extract on five oral bacteria and bacterial biofilm formation on ort...

Thirteen samples of authentic absinthe dating from the preban era (i.e., prior to 1915) were analyzed for parameters that were hypothesized as contributing to the toxicity of the spirit, including naturally occurring herbal essences (thujone, pinocamphone, fenchone), methanol, higher alcohols, copper, and antimony. The total thujone content of preban absinthe was found to range between 0.5 and ...

If people have essentialist beliefs about natural kinds, it follows that when an entity’s identity is uncertain, we should defer to experts knowledgeable about its hidden inner nature. In two experiments we presented students and lay adults with scenarios involving ambiguous-looking natural kinds, artifacts, and hybrid animal-artifacts and examined whether they would choose to defer to an exper...

1. The Problems As all of you know, Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979) have made a convincing case that neither meanings nor beliefs are in the head. Most philosophers, I think, have accepted their argument. Putnam explained to us that a subject's internal notions often do not fix their reference by themselves, but are helped by its natural and social environment; and Burge explained to us that hav...

Abstract A recent, seemingly appealing version of the powerful qualities view defines properties’ qualitativity via an essentialist claim and their powerfulness a grounding claim. Roughly, this approach holds that properties are because they have qualitative essences, while instances or essences ground causal-modal facts. I argue theory should be replaced with one in terms both ‘meta-grounding’...

Being able to give reasons for what the world is and how it works is one of the defining characteristics of modernity. Mathematical reason and empirical observation brought science and engineering to unprecedented success. However, modernity has reached a post-state where an instrumental view of technology needs revision with reasonable arguments and evidence, i.e., without falling back to supe...

The present studies investigated children's and adults' intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about 2 different ways of determining an unknown object's category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence) or taking a sample from one specific region (lo...