Tag Archives: Cartwright

Why Emergence Doesn’t Emerge and Secondary Qualities Are Not Secondary

This is the full, uncut version of the paper I sent to the Harvard-MIT graduate philosophy conference.  It is entitled, “Why Emergence Doesn’t Emerge and Secondary Qualities Are Not Secondary.”  I may pursue this project further, depending on feedback.  There are a number of shortcomings, among them being that I am not as well versed in Aristotle, and it has come to my attention (through al-Kindi, of all people!) that Aristotle’s epistemology contains the an idea of subtraction from perception to arrive at mental content.  Contingent upon looking further into this, I may add a significant section on Aristotle, or just had his philosophy, insofar as it is applicable, to the Meillassoux-Objectivism discussion.

Also posted on my blog are two papers, “Cognition as Negation” and “The Onto-Epistemic Stance,” which line up with the purpose of this paper.  If I take this collective project any further, I may look into writing a full-length monographic work for publication.

Again, this is the raw form of the paper, well over 5,000 words, and exceeding the 4,000-word limit imposed by the conference.  Nonetheless, feel free to comment.

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Filed under Cognitive Science, Epistemology, Natural Philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Pure Philosophy

Cognition as Negation

The cognitive version of the onto-epistemic stance paper can be acquired by clicking on: Cognition as Negation.  Unfortunately, due to length restrictions, I had to summarize the original onto-epistemic paper, which has grown to forty pages, and try to slip in how I think it can be extended to cognition.  The headache of trying to organize the previous paper was trebly difficult, because I could not speak at length in this paper to describe in detail what was intended in: The Onto-epistemic Stance.  I included a couple of modified portions of the earlier text in this newer paper, which is being sent to the joint conference on cognition held by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.  As a result of the inordinate constraint placed on the text length of this paper, I did not have the space to do a ground-up presentation of how the onto-epistemic stance seems to be present already in cognitive science.  In fact, I am wondering whether the totality of the venture might not merit full monographic treatment.  With as little exposure as I have had to the sciences of mind, further research on, for instance, phonemes will assuredly thicken up the text, leading me to believe that a full-length endeavor might be necessary.

At any rate, please send me an e-mail or leave me a comment if you have any ideas on how to make the paper better, ideas that need to be explained further/clarified, or anything of that sort.

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Filed under Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Pure Philosophy

Flat Ontology and the Onto-epistemic Stance

I have been working on an idea for a seminar, entitled “Unity of Science,” which involves collapsing epistemology and ontology into one branch of philosophy.  The paper is called, “Abstraction as Dissection of a Flat “Ontology”: The Illusiveness of Levels” (click this sentence to view paper).  One of the motivations for doing this is that I think pragmatism and theory-ladenness call for it; and the two notions, themselves, seem to be naturally married by van Fraassen’s pragmatics of explanation —not to mention having been sort of suggested by Peirce.  I say “sort of” because theory-ladenness hadn’t been thought of, back then. Continue reading

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Filed under Epistemology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science