The Brains Blog

The Reliability of Case Judgments

If the “theory-theory“ of concepts sketched in the previous post is correct, then we begin the philosophical analysis of a category such as knowledge equipped with nothing more than some rudimentary beliefs about the place of knowledge in the explanatory order. These beliefs may paint a rather partial or even …

Philosophical Concepts as Natural Kind Concepts

Michael Strevens March 26, 2019 March 24, 2019 analytical philosophy / Cognition / Concepts / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

I want to argue that philosophical analysis, a.k.a. the method of cases, is a worthy pursuit: that it reliably gives us substantial knowledge. The linchpin of my strategy is an appeal to cognitive psychology to show that philosophical concepts—the concept of knowledge, the concept of justice, the concept of causality, …

The Philosopher in the Armchair

Michael Strevens March 25, 2019 June 4, 2020 analytical philosophy / Concepts / Experimental Philosophy / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

A philosopher goes into the armchair and brings back knowledge. What world have they been exploring? What is this knowledge of, and how did they find it? These are questions that philosophy, the most methodologically self-conscious of all the disciplines, can’t help but ask itself over and over again. They …

Now Featured

John Schwenkler March 24, 2019 April 3, 2019 books

We are grateful to Michael Strevens for blogging this week on Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.

Mind the body (5) A taxonomy of theories of ownership

Frederique de Vignemont March 1, 2019 February 25, 2019 bodily experience / Frederique de Vignemont: Mind the Body

In my previous posts, I described my view and replied to some objections one could make against it. Hopefully, readers will by now have a clearer idea of what conception of ownership I defend. Is it inflationary or deflationary? I am actually not sure since like many I have never …

Mind the body (4) What kind of first-personal content?

Frederique de Vignemont February 28, 2019 February 25, 2019 bodily experience / Frederique de Vignemont: Mind the Body / Phenomenology / Philosophy of Mind / Self-consciousness

In the previous post, I argued that the feeling of ownership must be conceived of as an affective feeling. But one may wonder whether this affective feeling is not just a side-effect of the feeling of ownership, and not the feeling itself. Evolutionary significance indeed is only a consequence of ownership …

Mind the body (3) What is the experience of bodily ownership?

Frederique de Vignemont February 27, 2019 February 25, 2019 bodily experience / Frederique de Vignemont: Mind the Body / Phenomenology / Philosophy of Mind / Self-consciousness

The claim so far is that it feels different when one is aware that a hand is one’s own and when one is not. Now one needs to explore this phenomenological difference and determine its nature. There are three ways to go from here: Bodily experiences represent only low-level sensory …