Category: books

Can the science of well-being be value free?

Anna Alexandrova: A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being / Ethics / Philosophy of Science

  Here’s an attitude I sometimes encounter among scientists: “It is not my job as a scientist to figure out what true well-being is and to choose my constructs accordingly. My job is to study empirical relations between people’s subjective experiences and various factors, such as personality traits, behavior, socioeconomic …

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What to expect when you are theorising well-being?

Anna Alexandrova: A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being / Ethics / Philosophy of Science

Different people expect different things from theories of well-being. Some expect that they systematise in a maximally general way intuitions about goods that constitute well-being, others that they states most important causes of well-being, still others that they help them to lead a good life. I for one ask that …

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Is there a single concept of well-being?

Anna Alexandrova: A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being / Ethics / Psychology

My interest in what is now called the science of well-being dates back to my graduate school days at UC San Diego. Sometime in the mid-aughts I came across a debate between psychologists who advanced ‘hedonic profile’ measures of happiness and those who favoured life satisfaction questionnaires. The former argued …

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2. Psychological and Computational Models of Sentence Processing

AI / computation AI / David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax / metaphysics of mind / Models, AI, Robotics / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science

Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let’s now address those questions. When people talk about “the psychological reality of syntax”, there are (at least) two importantly different types …

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1. The Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology of Linguistics

analytical philosophy / David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax / Epistemology / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science

There are, broadly speaking, three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory—cognitivism (e.g., Chomsky 1995, 2000), platonism (e.g., Katz 1981, 2000), and nominalism (e.g., Devitt 2006, 2008). Platonism is the view that the subject matter of linguistics is an uncountable set of abstracta—entities that are located outside …

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Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and Its Place in the Mind (Intro)

David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax

In his groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Noam Chomsky first made explicit what is now arguably the dominant view concerning the aims and objects of linguistic inquiry. Rather than studying the sounds and inscriptions that we produce and comprehend, or the social conventions that govern linguistic usage, Chomsky …

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