Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to (...) be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate. (shrink)

Are non-indexical action rationalizations necessarily incomplete because of a missing indexical component? Bermúdez argues that they are. Two things make the argument unpersuasive. First, it assumes that all action rationalizations involve attitudes that are about the agent. Second, it assumes that the attitudes expressible using ‘I’ are themselves indexical. Each is an assumption that believers in complete but non-indexical action rationalizations can and do reject. Surprisingly though, a more effective argument can be obtained by switching focus from indexical attitudes about (...) agents to indexical attitudes about times. The debate about the de se and the de nunc has much less in common than is standardly assumed. It is the de nunc not the de se which provides the knock-down case for essential indexicality. (shrink)

Matthew Babb offers a strikingly elegant argument for, and explanation of, the essential indexicality of intentional argument. His two key thoughts are that intentional action always involves intentions, and intentions are essentially indexical. In particular, every intention is indexically about the agent whose intention it is, i.e. de se. In this paper, I set out two models on which at least some intentions are not de se—they are impersonal—and I show that these models are compatible with the data Babb points (...) to. I also set out some more data that an account of essential indexical cases ought to be responsive to. Its span suggests that the claim that all intentions are de se, even if true, cannot be what explains what is going on in essential indexical cases involving intention. (shrink)

Why are de se mental states essential? What exactly is their de se-ness needed to do? I argue that it is needed to fend off accidentalness. If certain beliefs – for example, nociceptive, proprioceptive or introspective beliefs – were not de se, then any truth they achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as knowing. If certain intentions – intentions that are in play whenever we intentionally do anything – were not de se, then any satisfaction they (...) achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as intentionally acting. How states hook on to their referent is relevant in a systematic but underexplored way to whether they non-accidentally achieve their aim – truth in the case of beliefs, satisfaction in the case of intentions. In the relevant cases, the way of hooking on to a referent needed to avoid being accidental is the way a de se state hooks on to its referent. (shrink)

The ways of thinking of things associated with a few indexical expressions—e.g. ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘that’—have a special role in the causation of action. They have a role not had by, for example, the guise associated with the ‘Superman’, or the guise associated with any other proper name. So, at least, an orthodox view about action—often associated with the phrase ‘essential indexical’—has it. Recently, this view has come under scrutiny. An increasing number of philosophers think it is a myth. In this (...) paper, I do two things. First, I argue that the orthodox view really is an insight, not a myth. Second, I offer an explanation of why it is that the insight holds. (shrink)

This article explores and defends the claim that addictive desires—for alcohol in particular—are partly explained by the motive of self-escape. We consider how this claim sits with the neurophysiological explanation of the strength of addictive desires in terms of the effect addictive substances have on the dopamine system. We argue that nothing in the neuroscientific framework rules out pluralism about the causes of addictive desire.

If tokens of 'I' have a sense as well as a reference the question immediately arises of what account to give of their sense. One influential kind of account, of which Gareth Evans provides the best developed instance, attempts to elucidate the sense of 'I' partly in terms of the distinctive functional role possessed by thoughts containing this sense ('I'-thoughts). Accounts of this kind seem to entail that my 'I'-thoughts cannot be entertained by anyone other than me, a consequence generally (...) thought unacceptable. I defend it. I also justify a functional role account of the sense of 'I'. The result should be to make plausible an account of the sense of 'I' in terms of the functional role of 'I'-thoughts. (shrink)

Jonathan Gingerich uses examples from literature and song to introduce a kind of freedom he calls “spontaneous freedom.” He argues that spontaneous freedom is central to our ordinary talk of freedom but overlooked by the philosophical literature on free will, which focuses on a kind of freedom that is constitutively moral. I argue that spontaneous freedom is the standard kind of freedom, the constitutively moral kind. What is distinctive about Gingerich’s examples is not that they involve a new kind of (...) freedom but that they involve an agent feeling their freedom. This supports a different take about their significance. (shrink)

One influential approach to the question of why addiction excuses focuses on the question of what addiction is and, more particularly, on what addiction turns out to be in the light of scientific inquiry, e.g. neurophysiological inquiry into the dopamine system. I note the tension between this approach and the apparent data-point that lay folk, who have not performed the relevant inquiry, can know that addiction excuses. Given this data-point, the moral psychology of addiction should work with the materials to (...) be found in the shallows of the addicted mind. (shrink)

This article argues that a sustained, consistent, and ambitious argument underlies Annette Michelson’s writings on art and film across the 1970s and 1980s. Working in relation to modernist discourses of the 1960s, Michelson links an account of time and temporal organization in cinema to a developmental model of film spectatorship. Read in this way, Michelson’s writing represents an alternate and overlooked strand of film theory and criticism, one that provides a new account of cinematic avant-gardes—and an alternative to what I (...) call the infantile tendencies of film theory that is grounded in the terms of cognitive maturity. (shrink)

The Simple Explanation just consists in the observation that a judgment will be immune to error through misidentification (IEM) when it is not based on an identification. The Simple Explanation does not itself rule out any candidate theory of de se thought. This chapter discusses IEM relative to the first person more than any other kind of error through misidentification. For convenience, the author uses fp-immunity as an abbreviation (and fp-immune as an abbreviation for the corresponding adjective). James Higginbotham and (...) François Recanati mostly speak of 'thoughts' as exhibiting or failing to exhibit IEM. It is clear that both beliefs and judgments can exhibit IEM. The most plausible explanation of fp-immunity, the Simple Explanation, imposes no tight constraints on an account of the de se. Constraints on such an account need to be gathered from somewhere else. (shrink)

This paper compares two stories about why addiction can mitigate blame. One, the _strong urges story_, says that the key point is that addictive urges are very strong. The other, _the inability story_, says that the key point is that people with addiction are unable to refrain from pursuing the things they are addicted to. Part of what is at issue is whether and in what way the two stories are in competition. I defend the _strong urges story_, and argue (...) that it has an _explanatory advantage_ over the _inability story_. The two stories agree on what the basis of mitigation in addiction is, but the _strong urges story_ goes deeper than the _inability story_. I also offer a suggestion about why, despite this, the _strong urges_ story can seem inadequate, and the _inability story_ can seem like the solution. (shrink)

Nina Simone sang: "I’m just a soul whose intentions are good." Paulina Sliwa (2019) defends a subtle, worked out picture on which Simone’s excuse turns out to be the basic form of an excuse. But good intention is a straitjacket that most excuses resist. There are cases where someone has an excuse, and the intention they have is just neutral. There are cases where someone has an excuse, and the intention they have is actually bad. In both sorts of case, (...) the agent’s excuse must consist in something other than a good intention. I argue that it consists in their caring as they ought. The basic form of an excuse is "She cared; her heart was in the right place.". (shrink)

I defend the view that episodic memory judgments do not depend on any kind of identification of oneself as the person whose past is being remembered, and are therefore logically (rather than merely de facto) immune from error through misidentification relative to “I”. There are two challenges to this view that have been pressed in the literature. One appeals to the idea of background presuppositions of identity and says that “I am the person from whom my memory impression derives” is (...) a background presupposition of any memory judgment. The other appeals to wh-misidentification and says there are possible cases in which memory goes astray that should be counted as cases of error through wh-misidentification. Although the details are different, the core thought behind both challenges is the same: Shoemaker’s thought that there could be a memory-like relation that one stands in to another’s past. I think this thought is a mistake. (shrink)

_The Lure of the Image_ shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max (...) Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, _The Lure of the Image_ exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style. (shrink)

In 656, the Gnomon of Zhou (Zhoubi 周髀) was canonized as one of the Ten Mathematical Classics (Suanjing shishu 算經十書) that would serve as the basis of contemporary curricula, testing and, later, the study of the history of mathematics in ancient China. Itself purporting to have been transmitted from the beginning of human civilization to the Duke of Zhou 周公 (r. 1042–1036 bce), most modern scholars follow Qian Baocong (1968) in positing that the text was redacted from earlier materials circa (...) 100 bce. In this paper, I will present linguistic evidence that supports Christopher Cullen (1996) and early Qian Baocong’s (1924, 1932) position that the received Gnomon of Zhou came together much later, in the first or second century ce, at around the same time or later than the Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures (Jiuzhang suanshu 九章算術). In addition, I will present evidence connecting its early reception and transmission history to the Far North/Northwest that might explain features of this strange text and its strange position in discussions of cosmology in the Middle Period Chinese capitals further south. (shrink)

Experience is the most primitive kind of intentional contact with reality. Metaphysical inquiry is one of the heights of human thought. It would not be surprising if experience was often silent on metaphysics, failing to offer support to one metaphysical disputant over the other, forcing them to fall back on nonexperiential considerations. I argue that the dispute between A- and B-theorists about time is a dispute about which experience is silent. B-theorists have typically conceded that the manifest image of time (...) conflicts with how time turns out to be, on their own view of time. They have offered an array of accounts of why that conflict should not worry us. I argue here that these accounts are unconvincing. I also argue that they are unnecessary. Nothing about how time is experienced conflicts with B-theory. An independently plausible method for discovering what properties experience represents—the method of phenomenal contrast—implies that experience does not favor A-theory over B-theory. (shrink)

One influential approach to the question of why addiction excuses focuses on the question of what addiction is and, more particularly, on what addiction turns out to be in the light of scientific inquiry, e.g. neurophysiological inquiry into the dopamine system. I note the tension between this approach and the apparent data‐point that lay folk, who have not performed the relevant inquiry, can know that addiction excuses. Given this data‐point, the moral psychology of addiction should work with the materials to (...) be found in the shallows of the addicted mind. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first concerns the question of whether there is any essential involvement of perspectival thought in intentional agency. I defend the view that the answer is ‘no’ for one kind of perspectival thought, and ‘yes’ for a different kind. Agency does not depend on de se thought, but it does depend on de nunc thought. The second aim of the paper is to defend a claim about the significance of this de se–de nunc contrast as (...) a case study. I argue that the contrast is best explained by a picture on which different kinds of perspectival thought are seen as islands. On this picture, an account of the conceptual role of one kind of perspectival thought won’t settle much about any other kind of perspectival thought. The picture is proposed as a replacement for the standard picture, on which perspectival thought is seen as a natural cognitive kind. (shrink)

The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 1, Ancient Science. Edited by Alexander Jones and Liba Taub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 642. $160.

This article takes stock of the seeming wealth of visual and material sources concerning stars and numbers that has come down to us from early imperial China (221 BCE–755 CE) and their minimal impact on how we write the history of astronomy and mathematics in this period. My goal is to offer ideas about how we might better engage with these sources and work across ancient and modern disciplines. I begin by outlining the conceptual categories into which our historical subjects (...) divided these sciences, followed by an overview of those visual and material sources we know from textual sources to have once existed versus those that are currently extant. The historiographic disconnect, I argue, is due in part to an inherent disconnect in the sources that have survived and, in some degree, to terminological and categorical confusion between those working in the history of science, divination, and art. Pointing to what are, in my opinion, good examples of how we might move forward and beyond the limits imposed by our sources and disciplinary boundaries, I then end on a list of questions I think fruitful to explore. What, for example, do we mean by “accuracy” when speaking of how constellations are represented in technical literature and tomb murals? (shrink)

One of the basic assumptions about André Bazin's theory of cinema has been that his idea of realism stands in direct opposition to modernism. In this article, I further develop a revised account of Bazin's realism that I have offered elsewhere, which rethinks the basic assumptions of ontology and realism in his work. This brings Bazin into a surprising affinity with tenets of high modernism. From this position, a re-examination of his engagement with the films of Orson Welles not only (...) shows Bazin to be wrestling with those issues in his criticism but also provides a way to rethink a number of positions in film theory that have historically been associated with a stringently reflexive modernism. (shrink)

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against the three assumptions (...) helps point in the direction of a better account. (shrink)

The Human Agenda is the first Special Edition of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art (CJLPA), an interdisciplinary journal founded at the University of Cambridge. Focused on the unique intersections of law, politics and art in the context of human rights, contributors to the Special Edition include David Baragwanath, Luis Moreno Ocampo, Nadia Murad, Nancy Hollander, Andrew Clapham, Vladimir Osechkin, Mansour al-Omari, and many others. A full table of contents is available through the publication's own page.

I defend a ‘naïve’ idea about intentionality: a judgment is about an object if, and only if, that object figures in its truth-conditions. Some authors have suggested that a child’s judgment that it is 4pm, for example, is about the time of day, while it merely concerns the time zone she inhabits. But I argue that any such about/concerns distinction must be linked to a variety of phenomena in order to be explanatory of any: after all, the hypothesis of a (...) dormative power is of no theoretical use; it does not explain the production of sleep, but only labels its occurrence. One might think that some objects figuring in the truth-conditions of a judgment are contributed by its content, and others by the act itself: but this would not explain why only some of the commitments we incur in judging are immune to error—assuming the idea of such ‘innocent commitments’ to be intelligible; nor is it plausible to suggest that ‘parochial’ elements of truth-conditions which the subject cannot vary in her judgments are contributed by the act—only a gerrymandered taxonomy of the mental could yield this result. Better to stick with the naïve view and recognize that judgment types are individuated by their truth-conditions. (shrink)

This book contains an edited selection of the papers presented at the Second International Conference on the History of Ancient Mathematics and Astronomy (ICHAMA), organized by Tang Quan and Qu Anjing and held in Xi’an, 2–8 December 2018, commemorating the foundation. This collection, consisting of papers that have been refined and edited into scientific articles, provides an overview of how the history of science can be international, stepping beyond area studies, without being Euro-centric. Containing chapters written by East Asia scholars (...) who do not publish widely in English, the volume opens an important window into their projects and the state of scholarship in their respective countries in relation to the history of mathematics and astronomy. As the contributions span a spectrum of senior and junior scholars, they are of great interest to an academic audience of researchers and post-graduate students in the history of science and the history of mathematics and astronomy in particular. (shrink)