This paper collects the responses by J.L. Bermúdez to articles discussing his work by Matheus Valente, Víctor Verdejo, Derek H. Brown, Shaun Gallagher, Carlota Serrahima, Daphne Bernués and Marta Jorba, Daniel Dohrn, Sarah A. Fisher and Marko Jurjako.
This paper contributes to, and underpins, the project of an integrative account of psychological and bodily self-consciousness. Following a trend in the literature that uses the notion of “ownership” to discuss self-consciousness, and adapting José Luis Bermúdez’s terminology, I refer to psychological self-consciousness as “ψ-ownership” and to bodily self-consciousness as “φ-ownership.” The paper has two main aims. First, it presents a methodological framework for the study of ψ- and φ-ownership based on the framework that Bermúdez has put forward for this purpose. My framework involves three desiderata that apply mutatis mutandis to both the ψ and the φ domains. By laying out this framework, I clarify the relationship between ownership and the epistemic phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (both in the ψ and the φ domains), and I highlight the appeal of the notion of a phenomenology of ψ- and φ-ownership. Hence, this methodological discussion helps disclose deep similarities between the very explananda of the inquiries into ψ- and φ-ownership. Second, the paper critically examines one aspect of Bermúdez’s approach to self-consciousness, namely his explanation of bodily immunity to error in view of his defense of the phenomenology of bodily ownership. In order to articulate this criticism, I leverage the conclusions of the first half of the paper about ownership and immunity. I suggest that, despite Bermúdez’s explicit advocacy for the integrative project, his strategy at this specific point prevents him from seeing this project to completion.
Based on a survey testing people’s intuitions about questions, Lani Watson has recently claimed that the act of seeking information captures the nature of genuine questions and what distinguishes them from rhetorical ones. In this paper, I will argue that Watson’s account fails to provide an accurate theory of questions. By revisiting the survey cases and results, and using Searle’s conception of the illocutionary point of directives, I will first argue that the cases support and confirm a simple and straightforward aim-constitutivist theory of the speech act of asking: One asks a real question by uttering an interrogative sentence only if one’s utterance is an attempt that aims to get the addressee to answer the question it expresses. Otherwise, one is asking a fake or rhetorical question. Moreover, based on Friedman’s perspective on inquiring attitudes as states in which one has a question open in one’s thought, I will argue that the survey cases can be taken to expand and deepen the sincerity conditions for questions that Searle had initially proposed: One sincerely asks a question if one wants the addressee to answer the uttered question to settle an inquiring state of mind, or to make a target audience enter into it. Finally, in the cases in which the survey participants recognise the presence of a question despite the absence of any apparent speech act of asking, I will argue that they recognise an inquiring state of mind rather than simply an information-seeking act: They recognise that one is in a mental state in which one is asking oneself a particular question.
El hallazgo de que los estudios financiados por la industria farmacéutica suelen reportar con mayor frecuencia resultados favorables al promotor ha llevado a proponer la existencia de un sesgo de financiación que podría sobreestimar los efectos de los medicamentos. Sin embargo, no se ha identificado un mecanismo claro ni hay evidencia sólida de que la financiación de la industria introduzca en los resultados un error sistemático favorable a sus intereses. Este artículo revisa críticamente el concepto de sesgo de financiación, argumentando que la influencia de la industria no debe considerarse un sesgo específico. Para ello, a partir de la definición de sesgo adoptado por la metodología Cochrane – el patrón oro en evaluación de intervenciones en salud- analiza qué características debería cumplir la influencia de la industria para poder mantener que produce sesgo en la investigación clínica y, a través de una caso empírico, pone de manifiesto cómo no puede asumirse acríticamente que los resultados de los estudios que financia y en los que tiene obvios intereses comerciales obtienen resultados diferentes a los financiados por otras fuentes. Por ello, mantiene como conclusión la necesidad de abandonar la idea de sesgo de financiación, evitando la estigmatización de la investigación privada por su origen, como si de un pecado original se tratara.
Stephen Weinberg's prediction of the cosmological constant (A) represented an influential application of the Anthropic Principle in cosmology. His approach relied on key assumptions including: a multiverse framework, a proportionality between the number of observers and the formation of galaxies, uniform priors for the vacuum energy density within the anthropic range, and the assumption of typicality. While Weinberg's model successfully constrained A within observationally reasonable limits, its methodological foundations may raise some concerns. This paper examines three central components of Weinberg's reasoning: the choice of probability measure, the conditionalization scheme linking observer abundance to galaxy formation, and the assumption of typicality. Particular attention is given to the role of self-locating uncertainty in translating observer counts into predictive weight. While Weinberg's framework is internally coherent once its assumptions are granted, I argue that its predictive force depends on substantive commitments concerning prior distributions and the resolution of indexical uncertainty. Recognizing the conditional structure of these assumptions clarifies the epistemic status of anthropic predictions and highlights the need for greater methodological precision in future cosmological applications of observer-based probability.
Disputes over complex social and political issues frequently reveal themselves in the use of contrasting frames. A policy on restricting gun ownership may be characterised by one side as "improving public safety" and by the other side as "curtailing individual rights"; one group may frame the construction of new homes on the greenbelt as "increasing the housing supply" while their opponents characterise it as "damaging the environment"; and so on. In recent work, J. L. Berm & uacute;dez argues that these kinds of alternative frames put agents in touch with distinct-and potentially conflicting-reasons for judgement and action. He diagnoses many cases of discursive deadlock as clashes of frames and he prescribes to agents a course of epistemic due diligence, whereby they adopt multiple alternative frames. In this paper, I argue that the analysis, while valuable, is importantly incomplete. Frames not only elucidate reasons but signal identities and affiliations-and that calls instead for structural changes to discursive environments.
The concept of a "zero-point," the bodily origin of the first-person perspective or the egocentric spatial frame of reference through which we encounter the world, is pervasive in phenomenological accounts of perception. Iwill argue that the zero-point is a complete abstraction that misleads the analysis of perception and action. In contrast, body-schematic processes involved in perception and action are multi-dimensional, complex and complicated by temporal and intermodal factors. I consider several different characterizations of the zero-point: as an objective physiological point, as a geometrical point, or, phenomenologically, as part of one's experience. I examine evidence from vision studies, and more generally from studies of sensory-motor processes, action, and intersubjective interaction. I reference the work of Jos & eacute; Berm & uacute;dez in this area and briefly outline an alternative notion that better captures what the zero-point was meant to capture. Berm & uacute;dez's analysis helps us to see that there is no point to the concept of zero-point.
The observation that studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry tend to report results more frequently favorable to the sponsor has led to the suggestion of a funding bias that could overestimate the effects of medications. However, no clear mechanism has been identified, and there is a lack of compelling evidence that industry funding introduces a systematic error in the results that favors its interests. This article provides a critical review of the concept of funding bias, arguing that industry influence should not be regarded as a distinct form of bias. Drawing on the definition of bias established by the Cochrane methodology-widely considered the gold standard in the evaluation of health interventions-the analysis explores the characteristics that industry influence would need to meet in order to be considered a source of bias in clinical research. Using an empirical case study, it is demonstrated that one cannot uncritically assume that studies funded by the industry and aligned with its commercial interests produce different results than those funded by other sources. Consequently, the article asserts the need to abandon the notion of funding bias and to avoid stigmatizing private research based solely on its origin, as if it were a form of original sin.
According to common wisdom, the connective tonk defined by Prior trivializes any theory that contains it. However, it should not be forgotten that whether an argument holds or not depends to a large extent on the underlying notion of logical consequence. Logical consequence is usually assumed to be Tarskian, that is, reflexive, transitive and monotonic. However, Belnap had already conjectured that tonk might not be so problematic in a non-transitive logic, which Cook finally proved in 2005. In this paper we improve on Cook's result in two ways: our hypothesis is simpler (namely, we use fewer interpretations than he did and we do not rely on a disjunctive consequence relation) and it is not ad hoc (namely, our working consequence relation is not designed merely to avoid triviality under tonk).
This paper begins with some brief intellectual autobiography, recalling my first engagement with philosophy of biology. The substantive part of the paper then focuses on the plurality of possible classifications central to the theses of scientific disunity and metaphysical disorder developed in my early career. After discussing this in terms of biological classification, and introducing the reasons for thinking of classifications as typically value-laden, I discuss two sets of human classifications bearing on normatively vital questions, those around sex and gender and those involved in the distinctions between human races.
In this paper I discuss the process ontology that has been the central focus of my research for almost 20 years. I explain what this is, and illustrate how it applies to biology through the example of the organism. I also aim to show how naturally process ontology fits with the disordered world I described in the preceding article. Finally, I show how process philosophy illuminates a number of topics relating to the human condition, including personal identity and freedom of the will, and provides a deeper understanding of the issue around human classification, notably by sex and gender and by race.
Since the 1960s, the distinction between data and phenomena has fueled debates in the philosophy of science, with scholars arguing that data must be modeled in order to serve as evidence for phenomena. We claim that the modeling of data to obtain evidence for phenomena involves four levels: data, sample structure, population structure and phenomena. Our analysis suggests that the notion of pattern is essential to fully grasp the inferential capacity of data models, where representation occurs through nested surrogative reasoning –typically in the form of an isomorphism that holds at different layers. We also explain how our taxonomy of pattern-based inferential steps could shed light on various aspects of nested data modeling, such as the risk of theoretical bias. To illustrate our proposal, we examine the Eddington experiment –which tested general relativity by observing the deflection of starlight near the Sun–, and show how patterns at different levels of the data modeling provide the basis for nested surrogative reasoning in this case. Transforming the data points identified on photographic plates into a representation of light deflection requires a multi-layered search for patterns, where each pattern takes us one step further in data modeling and one step closer to the target phenomenon.
En este artículo examino si la teoría de conocimiento extendido (TCE) puede dar una explicación completamente satisfactoria de la agencia epistémica combinando el externismo activo y el fiabilismo de virtudes. TCE sería una teoría completamente satisfactoria si explica cómo los agentes son responsables epistémicamente porque tienen y manifiestan una disposición cognitiva a responder apropiadamente ante razones derrotantes de su estatus epistémico. Mi tesis negativa es que TCE no logra este cometido porque sus principios explicativos de primer orden conducen al escepticismo. En consecuencia, la teoría debería abandonarse. Mi tesis positiva, sin embargo, es que TCE puede dar una explicación completamente satisfactoria de la agencia si adopta el relativismo epistémico como principio de segundo orden. Aunque esta maniobra implica revisar la metaepistemología detrás de TCE, permite conservar la combinación de externismo activo y fiabilismo de virtudes constitutiva de esta teoría epistemológica.
En este trabajo voy a defender que el condicional intuicionista es tan buen modelo del condicional indicativo como cualquier otro condicional que se ha propuesto en la literatura. Para esto voy a presentar tres argumentos: (1) voy a argumentar que el Modus Ponens es una regla necesaria para comprender el condicional indicativo, (2) voy a defender que la regla de Introducción del condicional es la mejor regla de introducción que puede darse para un condicional, y (3) voy a mostrar que estas dos reglas no caracterizan solamente al condicional material sino que hay una cantidad infinita de condicionales que las validan. Y aún más, el condicional intuicionista en particular validará una serie de desiderata deseadas en la literatura sobre condicionales indicativos además de tener probabilidades que validan una versión de la Tesis de Stanlanker y una semántica que enriquece el condicional indicativo con una dimensión epistémica.
Según la sabiduría popular, la conectiva tonk definida por Prior trivializa cualquier teoría que la incluya. Sin embargo, no hay que olvidar que, si un argumento es lógicamente válido o no, depende en buena medida de la noción de consecuencia lógica subyacente. Casi siempre se asume que la consecuencia lógica es tarskiana, esto es, que es reflexiva, transitiva y monotónica. Sin embargo, Belnap había conjeturado que tonk podría no ser tan problemática en una lógica no transitiva, cosa que finalmente probó Cook en 2005. En este artículo mejoramos el resultado de Cook en dos aspectos: nuestra hipótesis es más simple (a saber, usamos menos interpretaciones que él y no usamos una relación de consecuencia lógica disyuntiva en el definiendum) y no es ad hoc (a saber, nuestra relación de consecuencia lógica no está definida exclusivamente para evitar la trivialidad).
This article brings into dialogue the debate on the governance of the global commons and the emergent postcolonial discourse on 'archipelagic thinking' on the basis of an interpretation of Carl Schmitt's idea of the Grossraum in international law. It analyses two axioms in Schmitt's discourse on international law: the first is that the character of law as nomos varies depending on the elements of planetary habitability, such as earth, sea, air and energy/fire, in which it operates. The second concerns the relation that Schmitt establishes between maritime imperialism, settler colonialism and the practice of islanding. The article proposes to understand archipelagic thinking as a deconstructive intervention in the imperial geopolitical dualism between land and sea, shows the 'archipelagic' dimensions of the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, and offers a defence of the Common Heritage of Mankind principle.
This special issue aims to illustrate how the emerging approach of archipelagic thinking can contribute to political theory and international relations theory, and it attempts to grapple with the geopolitical and ontological complexities of the South China Sea and Western Pacific. Archipelagic thinking is an emerging interdisciplinary approach in island studies, political anthropology and political ecology. The interest of archipelagic thinking for political theorising rests on the following considerations: (1) it builds on the legacy of global anti-colonial and postcolonial movements that gained traction from the 1960s onwards and led to the development of decolonial and postcolonial critiques, subaltern studies and political ecology (Braverman and Johnson 2020); (2) it challenges dominant configurations of sovereignty over the state, population and territory, and reimagines political subjectivity and the possibilities of relationality (Espejo 2020; Youatt 2020). Third, it overlaps with, and is theoretically informed by, the advent of ‘geophilosophy’ (Povinelli 2016), posthumanism (Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016) and the political ecology based on science and technology studies, or STS (Latour 2017; Liboiron 2021).
Though it is most often imagined as an island continent, Australia is an archipelago set within a complex of archipelagoes. It is a relationship that must be seen as a dynamic historical process implying that the archipelagic chains of connection between Australia and the Indo-Australian Archipelago are processual, performative and complexly intertwined. Archipelagic thinking shifts the 'geography of reason' from one that is essentialist and co-produced with a Eurocentric, geolocational, property-based understanding of territorialisation and governance, to one that is heterotopic, multi-scalar, multi-ontological, dynamic and emergent. Its multi-spatiality not only embraces Indigenous perspectives and the geopolitical processes through which Island Southeast Asia came to be occupied, it also creates a knowledge space for the development of postcolonial justice. Archipelagic thinking is inherently cosmopolitical, given its emphasis on multiplicity and real difference. Establishing a regenerative cultural and environmental commons is the best way forward.
This article examines China's artificial island-building in the South China Sea as a form of 'un-islandic' violence that undermines ecological and relational principles central to archipelagic thinking. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's theory of nomos and land appropriation, it analyses how Chinese political theorists and state planners have embraced Schmittian concepts to justify territorial expansion and sovereign authority. It argues that the transformation of coral reefs into militarised landforms, framed as 'green engineering', exemplifies a technocratic logic of green colonialism rather than environmental stewardship. Contrasting this with the relational ontology advanced by islandic thinking - particularly in the works of David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh - the article shows how China's island-making disrupts multi-species ecologies and dispossesses existing social relations, thereby enacting a form of spatial violence rooted in statist modernity, calling for a shift away from land-centric paradigms towards a more ecologically attuned politics of space.
