In C. I. Lewis's epistemology, qualia are taken to be directly intuited and inherently recognizable. He distinguishes sharply between qualia and that which C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell refer to as “sensa" or “sense-data." Where Broad and Russell appear to allow for the possibility of unsensed, incompletely sensed, or inaccurately sensed sensa, Lewis regards qualia as given--to be is to be sensed and certain. Lewis finds the Broad-Russell view to be incredible and says of sensa so construed that they are “neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring."I argue that the Broad-Russell view is at least as plausible as Lewis's and, indeed, that to adequately describe and explain mental phenomena, it may be necessary to distinguish the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (sensa or qualia) from the accessing function of consciousness. In arguing the pIausibilityof this distinction, I draw upon work from both cognitive science and phenomenology. I also argue that, in principIe, experimental evidence could be adduced to decide the issue between the Broad-Russell and the Lewis views. In a concluding section I suggest implications of the view developed here for Lewis's epistemology.

In this essay I develop evelop a critique of different modes understanding what is a moment of meaningful form in art (the figural). I attempt to show that approaches which maintain a separation between form and content, or the subjective and the objective cannot truly do justice to the presentational nature of meaning in art. In particular, I refer to Mikel Dufrenne's conception of expression in his Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience as being paradoxically misleading when it comes to understand the figural in its phenomentality. I ultimately argue for the need to bear in mind that the relationship between presentation and representation, or experience and objectivity ought to be approached in terms of complementary difference.

How do our minds grasp the world? The nlajor task in explaining the relation between mind and the world is to indicate how facts, experiences, and judgments stand in justificatory relation. This paper examines three ways of explaining the cognitive relation between mind and world: inferentialism, conceptualism, and social pragmatism. These three theories differ from the traditional foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism in that they no longer attempt any analysis of the epistemic notions such as knowledge and evidence abstractly; rather, they explore, in a Wittgensteinean way, these notions in relation to linguistic practices. In this paper, I will first examine the debate between inferentialism and conceptualism, a debate involving Sellars, Davidson, McDowell, and Brandom. I will show that both inferentialism and conceptualism have difficulties in giving a complete account of empirical justification and that their difficulties can be remedied only by resorting to some social pragmatisnl notions such as the social development of conceptual capacities and the social recognition of cognitive performance.

Gareth Evans produced a powerfulline of argument against Quine's well-known Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. In one part of his attack, Evans argued that, under certain conditions, structural simplicity may become truth-conducive for semantic theories. Being structurally more complex than the standard semantic theory, perverse semantic theories a la Quine are an easy prey for Evans' considerations. The bulk of the paper will be devoted to addressing Evans' criticism. By reviewing the classical/connectionist debate in cognitive science between a hypothetical sympathizer of “cognitive orthodoxy" and the friend ofconnectionism, I shall contend that the Quinean has nothing to fear from a classical reading of Evans' considerations.

An inquiry into the “pure we-relationship" in Schutz is attempted. In his early major work The Phenomenology of the Social World Schutz regards the “pure we-relationship" as the ultimate foundation of the social world. Because of the confusion with “concrete we-relationship," its meaning remains misunderstood among many interpreters. While this concept is rooted in “Thou-orientation" and is regarded as formal concept without any content, Schutz is criticized for having taken up an idealistic and egocentric position in his social theory. I find it is deficient to defend Schutz by reference to the lifeworld theory that he develops in late thought. Instead , I suggest that we might save him from such criticism by introducing the “mutual tuning-in relationship."

Crispin Wright (1992) has reshaped debates about Realism by offering a new landscape of what's at stake in the discussions between realists and their opponents. Instead of arguing whether a given discourse can be truth apt， discussion should focus, Wright contends, on what kind of truth predicate a discourse can enjoy. Namely, whether truth for a discourse can be 'robust' or merely ‘minimal' Wright's approach has important implications for Quine's well-known Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. The bulk of this paper will be devoted to showing that an argument involving minimalism about truth which Wright (1997) offersagainst the Inscrutability Thesis fails by reductio. By the end of the paper, we'll see how Wright's proposed frame of' discussion for Realism bears on themetaphysical status of Semantic Theories.

Recently, certain philosophers have argued that an explanatory relation is a causal relation that is fundamentally about the invariance of a relation betweenvariables of interest under intervention-i.e., about a manipulable invariant relation. This manipulative theory tends to reduce a causal relation to a manipulable invariant relation. By explicating a case from contemporary econometrics, this paper argues that a manipulable invariant relation can be obtained only when the causal chain or causal structure of the targeted relation is free from disturbing influences. In other words, a manipulable invariant relation can be regarded only as a special kind of causal relation, and so the notion of invariance can never replace the idea of causation. This paper also shows that the distinction between causation and invariance has methodological import concerning the philosophical discussion of economic theorizing and of economic theory development.1. Introduction2. Manipulation, Invariance, Superexogeneity, and Causal Structure2.1 The Manipulability Theory of Causation2.2 The Idea ofWeak Exogeneity2.3 The Idea of Invariance and Its Relation to the Idea of Superexogeneity2.4 Can We Equate a Causal Relation with an Invariant Relation?3. The Methodological Import of the Distinction between Causation and Invariance4. A Causal Structuralist Account of Economic Theorizing and Economic Theory Development5. Conclusion

For the past several decades, philosophers of science such as Hacking and Giere, instead of focusing attention on scientific theories and seeing them as just linguistic entities, have been thinking about philosophy of science from the standpoint of experimental manipulation and model-construction. Both Hacking’sexperimentalism and Giere’s modelism have played a great part in giving birth to an action-oriented and technology-shaped philosophy of science. In this paper, it is argued that philosophy of science can benefit from the technological approach and correlatively, the methodology of general technology might profit from taking into consideration the refinements and novel developments of philosophy of science. It is argued, besides, not only that different methodological approaches have to be integrated into a rather general theory of scheme-interpretation, but also that action-“grasping”-knowledge is shaped by interpretations and by perspectives.

How is a scientific theory, especial a classical physical theory, tested? This problem has a long history. In this paper I’ll propose a theory of testing based on but differentiated from Giere’s studies on the structure of scientific theories (Giere 1988, 1994, 1999). I will show, from both theoretical and historical perspectives, that a scientific theory can always be understood as one contains a classified model population, including both higher-level models and realizable models, and that scientists always test a theory through its realizable models. To transmit the consequences of testing realizable models to a higher-level model is a very complicated mechanism. Therefore, it is unlikely that a whole theory could ever be completely confirmed or falsified, even if some of its realizable models havebeen conclusively confirmed or falsified. Finally, I’ll illustrate such a theory of testing can give an adequate account of the testing history of a scientific theory, for example, the Newtonian theory. This theory of testing is a rational reconstruction, in Lakatosian sense, of the process of scientific testing.

This paper consists of two parts. First, (i) I shall consider two defences of Quine´s polemical Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference put forward by Hookway (1988), and Calvo Garzón (2000a; 2000b), respectively. Then, (ii) I shall consider an extension of Quine´s succinct behavioural criteria of Radical Translationsuggested by Hintikka´s Game-Theoretical Semantics (1973; 1976). I shall argue that Hintikka´s semantics suggest behavioural criteria which we can use to constrain perverse semantic theories. In particular, I shall try to show that whilst Hintikka´s behavioural data tells against Hookway´s proposal, it reveals, nonetheless, a reason as to why my proposed perverse semantic theory enjoys the same priviledged status that a standard semantic theory is supposed toenjoy.

Some compatibilists believe that the principle of alternative possibilities has been shown to be false by Frankfurt-style arguments, and this gives way to the compatibility of causal determination with moral responsibility. Those incompatibilists who defend the principle of alternative possibilities, on the other hand, insist on the truth of the principle and on the incompatibility of causal determination with moral responsibility. In this article, I argue that Frankfurt-stylecounterexamples are unsuccessful in indicating the falsity of the principle of alternative possibilities, and yet this failure is inconclusive to prove the correctness of incompatibilism. In fact, the principle of alternative possibilities is, I show, compatible with causal determination and thus with compatibilism on a specificunderstanding of determinism and compatibilism.

Consider two of the central debates in the contemporary philosophy of mind: the debate between representationalism and anti-representationalism about phenomenal character, and the debate between conceptualism and nonconceptualism about the content of experience. The former, the qualia debate, centers on whether the phenomenal character of conscious experience is exhausted by its representational content. The latter is about whether conceptual capacities are constitutive of the representational content of perceptual experience such that the only kind of content that perceptual experience possesses is conceptual content. Most philosophers consider these two debates as unrelated, or at least should be treated separately. In this paper, I argue that there is an obvious and important sense in which the two issues are related. More specifically, if one accepts conceptualism, it would impose a significant constraint on what position one is allowed to take in the qualia debate. First, I suggest that once it is made clear that conceptualism can be considered as a particular version of representationalism, the conceptualist would have to take a certain stance on whether there are nonintentional qualia. The reason why the conceptualist needs to worry about the qualia issue is that if in addition to intentional content perceptual experiences also contain nonintentional qualia as constituents, then perceptual experiences cannot be fully conceptual. Second, I argue that although in McDowellian conceptualism the content of perceptual experience is construed in terms of Fregean sense rather than internal mental representation, it still faces challenges from the Inverted Earth argument against representationalism. My goal is not to show that conceptualism fails, but to show that it is a serious issue that the defenders of conceptualism have to take into consideration.

This paper explores Kant's account of force, a topic that was of central philosophical concern in his day, but which he does not explicitly address in any of his Critiques. Just as with the nature of space and time and the nature of the human will, the nature of force was under dispute by the philosophers and natural scientists to whose legacy Kant was responding. Yet, Kant does not make force an explicit topic of his Critiques, and thus provides no explicit transcendental account of force. Nevertheless, I will argue that one can indeed find in Kant a transcendental account of force, one that is a synthesis of empiricist and rationalist accounts, but in an unexpected place; the third Critique, in the discussion of the principle of purposiveness

The search for a proper language for God-talk is a perennial task in theology as well as in philosophy. From times of antiquity, the use of analogy was employed in different realms of knowledge. Yet it was not until the medieval era, primarily through the effort of Thomas Aquinas, that analogy was used extensively in religious discourse. However, Thomistic analogy was not accepted by all. The contention between univocal and analogical use of words was never settled. The contemporary scene adds further fuel to the debate. Logical positivism claims that God-talk is totally meaningless, as truth claims can never be established in such a domain. And some critics say that religion belongs to the world of the ‘un-sayable’ and silence is the only response. The situation demands an urgent response from the side of the religious thinkers, and Ian Ramsey, previous Nolloth professor of Philosopy of Christian Religion at Oxford University, has taken up the task to face this challenge. Ramsey’s job is twofold. First, he is of course concerned with defending religious discourse against such philosophical critiques. At the same time, he is eager to show how theological apologetics could actually benefit from the tenets of Logical Empiricism. His method of ‘models’ and‘disclosures’ is used to demonstrate the empirical relevance of religious language. Such approach also reveals that religious discourses do containsomething more than the narrowness of meaning and truth set down by the logical empiricists. The purpose of this paper is to place Aquinas’ analogyside by side with Ramsey’s models approach and see how they compare and contrast each other. Specifically, we will see how these approaches haveroughly the same dynamics of going from what is seen to what is unseen in talking about God. We will also see how the two projects differ owing to a fundamental difference in their ontology.