Papers by Thomas D Bontly
Individualism and the Nature of Syntactic States
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Dec 1, 1998
It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are type-individuated b... more It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are type-individuated by their semantic or intentional properties. First, I argue that this assumption is implausible for theories like David Marr's [1982] that seek to provide computational or syntactic explanations of psychological processes. Second, I examine the implications of this conclusion for the debate over psychological individualism. While most philosophers suppose that syntactic states supervene on the intrinsic physical states of information-processing systems, I contend they may not. Syntatic descriptions must be adequately constrained, and the most plausible such constraints appeal to a system's teleological function or design and hence to its history. As a result, physical twins may not realize the same syntactic states.
Exclusion, Overdetermination, and the Nature of Causation
Journal of Philosophical Research, 2005
A typical thesis of contemporary materialism holds that mental properties and events supervene on... more A typical thesis of contemporary materialism holds that mental properties and events supervene on, without being reducible to, physical properties and events. Many philosophers have grown skeptical about the causal efficacy of irreducibly supervenient properties, however, and one of the main reasons is an assumption about causation which Jaegwon Kim calls the causal exclusion principle. I argue here that this principle runs afoul of cases of genuine causal overdetermina-tion. Many would argue that causal overdetermination is impossible anyway, but a careful analysis of these arguments shows them to be misguided. Finally, I examine the reasons given in support of the causal exclusion principle, and I conclude that it is plausible if, and probably only if, a certain view of the nature of causation turns out to he correct. Since that view of causation is unacceptable to nonreductivists on other grounds, however, it turns out that exclusion-based arguments essentially beg the question.
Should Intentionality be Naturalized?
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 30, 2001
The Nature and Structure of Content * By JEFFREY C. KING
Analysis, Apr 1, 2009
Synthese, Jul 1, 2006
Philosophical accounts of causation have traditionally been framed as attempts to analyze the con... more Philosophical accounts of causation have traditionally been framed as attempts to analyze the concept of a cause. In recent years, however, a number of philosophers have proposed instead that causation be empirically reduced to some relation uncovered by the natural sciences: e.g., a relation of energy transfer. This paper argues that the project of empirical analysis lacks a clearly defined methodology, leaving it uncertain how such views are to be evaluated. It proposes several possible accounts of empirical analysis and argues that the most promising approach would treat it as a contingent identity discovered by identifying the relation (or relations) that most nearly approximate the inferential role of causal concepts in a psychological theory of causal judgment.
The Things We Mean
Review of Metaphysics, 2005
Do we owe it to future generations, as a requirement of justice, to take action to mitigate anthr... more Do we owe it to future generations, as a requirement of justice, to take action to mitigate anthropogenic climate change? This paper examines the implications of Derek Parfit’s notorious non-identity problem for that question. An argument from Jorg Tremmel that the non-identity effect of climate policy is “insignificant” is examined and found wanting, and a contrastive, difference-making approach for comparing different choices’ non-identity effects is developed. Using the approach, it is argued that the non-identity effect of a given policy response to climate change depends on the contrasting policy. Compared to a baseline scenario without further mitigation, the non-identity effect of choosing to limit climate change to 1.5°C would be highly significant.
Individualism and the Nature of Syntactic States
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1998
It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are typeindividuated by... more It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are typeindividuated by their semantic or intentional properties. First, I argue that this assumption is implausible for theories like David Marr's [1982] that seek to provide computational or syntactic explanations of psychological processes. Second, I examine the implications of this conclusion for the debate over psychological individualism. While most philosophers suppose that syntactic states supervene on the intrinsic physical states of informationprocessing systems, I contend they may not. Syntactic descriptions must be adequately constrained, and the most plausible such constraints appeal to a system's teleological function or design and hence to its history. As a result, physical twins may not realize the same syntactic states.
Philosophical Studies, 2015
Can an act harm someone-a future someone, someone who does not exist yet but will-if that person ... more Can an act harm someone-a future someone, someone who does not exist yet but will-if that person would never exist but for that very action? This is one question raised by the non-identity problem. Many would argue that the answer is No: an action harms someone only insofar as it is worse for her, and an action cannot be worse for someone if she would not exist without it. The first part of this paper contends that the plausibility of the 'no harm' argument stems from an equivocation. The second half argues for an account of harm that is both causal and contrastive. Finally, the paper contends that the contrastive account disarms the no harm argument and furthermore neutralizes a related argument (the benefit argument) that has been problematic for some previously proposed solutions to the nonidentity problem.
Mind and Language, 2005
Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified O... more Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified Occam's Razor: 'Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. Superficially, Grice's principle seems a routine application of the principle of parsimony ('Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'). But parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Griceans faces numerous objections. This paper argues that Modified Occam's Razor makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the processes involved in language acquisition, and it describes recent empirical findings that bear these assumptions out. The resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice's principle, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of linguistic phenomena.
In his recent book, Jaegwon Kim argues that psychophysical supervenience without psychophysical r... more In his recent book, Jaegwon Kim argues that psychophysical supervenience without psychophysical reduction renders mental causation 'unintelligible'. He also claims that, contrary to popular opinion, his argument against supervenient mental causation cannot be generalized so as to threaten the causal efficacy of other 'higher-level' properties: e.g., the properties of special sciences like biology. In this paper, I argue that none of the considerations Kim advances are sufficient to keep the supervenience argument from generalizing to all higherlevel properties, and that Kim's position in fact entails that only the properties of fundamental physical particles are causally efficacious. In his recent book Mind in a Physical World, Jaegwon Kim argues for two controversial and (if true) important claims. The first is that psychophysical supervenience without psychophysical reduction would render mental causation 'unintelligible'-that mental properties, if supervenient, would have their causal efficacy usurped by the very properties on which they supervene. (That is the conclusion of the so-called supervenience argument.) The second claim is that, contrary to popular opinion, the argument for the first claim cannot be generalized so as to threaten the causal efficacy of other 'higher-level' properties: e.g., the properties of special sciences like biology. In this paper, I take issue with the second of these claims. Specifically, I will argue that none of the considerations Kim advances are sufficient to keep the supervenience argument from generalizing to all higher-level properties, and that Kim's position in fact entails that only the properties of fundamental physical particles are causally efficacious. Before I argue this point, however, some background is in order.
Annals of the American Thoracic Society, 2014
Self-management in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, centering on an action plan for the exa... more Self-management in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, centering on an action plan for the exacerbation and enhanced communication between the patient and health care providers, makes good clinical sense. However, five relatively large trials of selfmanagement in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have had inconsistent results: only two demonstrated reductions in health care utilization and one had to be discontinued prematurely because of increased mortality. Do these discordant findings require a paradigm shift in our concept of self-management? Probably not-but an analysis of the negative studies can give us valuable insights. There are data to support the idea that patients in the trial that showed increased mortality did not self-manage appropriately. Only 4.5% of these patients called in before starting treatment for their exacerbation, the time to initiation of antibiotics or steroids was unsatisfactorily long, and the intervention arm used minimally more prednisone and antibiotics than the control arm. The reasons for a higher mortality will likely never be known, but it is possible that these high-risk patients may have needed earlier assessment by a trained professional, or that self-management led to overconfidence and treatment delays. We clearly need more effective ways to implement self-management and better define which groups of patients stand to benefit (or be harmed) by this intervention. This will require an investment in well-thought-out clinical trials.
Philosophical Studies, 2005
This paper enters the continuing fray over the semantic significance of Donnellan's referential/a... more This paper enters the continuing fray over the semantic significance of Donnellan's referential/attributive distinction. Some hold that the distinction is at bottom a pragmatic one: i.e., that the difference between the referential use and the attributive use arises at the level of speaker's meaning rather the level of sentence-or utterance-meaning. This view has recently been challenged by Marga Reimer and Michael Devitt, both of whom argue that the fact that descriptions are regularly, that is standardly, used to refer defeats the pragmatic approach. The present paper examines a variety of issues bearing on the regularity in question: whether the regularity would arise in a Russellian language, whether the regularity is similar to the standard use of complex demonstratives, and whether the pragmatic approach founders on the problem of dead metaphors. I argue that the pragmatic approach can readily explain all of these facets of the referential use of descriptions.
Philosophia, 2005
Causation poses a thorny nest of problems in the philosophy of mind, not the least of which is th... more Causation poses a thorny nest of problems in the philosophy of mind, not the least of which is the problem of causal exclusion. The problem confronts anyone who accepts three initially plausible theses: The Causal Completeness of Physics (CCP): every physical event is causally determined (or at least has its chances causally determined) by prior physical events. The Irreducibility of the Mental (IM): mental properties and events
Should Intentionality be Naturalized?
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2001
One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a pu... more One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items (objects, properties, facts) in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, informational relations, teleological or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have ...
Uploads
Papers by Thomas D Bontly