Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

Considerable interest has been recently devoted to analyzing picture perception and its differences from vis-à-vis perception. However, an exhaustive theory of picture perception requires explaining the difference between these two perceptual states and the one we are in when facing pictorial illusions like trompe l’oeils, which foster the impression of being in front of a real object available for interaction. One standard story is that these illusions prevent the viewer from perceiving the surface, which is instead possible with usual pictures, this causing the pictorial space to be perceived as…

This paper explores the structural parallels between Gettier’s challenge to the justified true belief account of knowledge and Chisholm’s problem of wayward causal chains in action theory. Despite their distinct domains, both issues highlight the necessity of an adequate connection between explanation, justification, and outcome. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that the distinction between theoretical and practical rationality is less rigid than traditionally assumed. The paper further contends that, while a solution to the issue of wayward causal chains can at least be hypothesized, previous analyses have primarily…

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of Wittgenstein’s use of the notions of habit and custom. References to habit and custom abound in Wittgenstein’s writings already from the 1930s, but no particular focus has been placed on his actual use of these notions. The aim of the paper is to provide a preliminary conceptual tool useful for developing a fruitful engagement between Wittgenstein’s “post-tractarian” philosophy and contributions to the philosophy of habit. To do this, I will first trace relevant occurrences in Wittgenstein’s writings. Secondly, I will map the use…

Wittgenstein famously asked: What is left when we subtract the fact that my arm rises from the fact that I raise it? Any adequate theory of action must clarify the difference between actions of this kind and mere bodily movements. Plausible answers since the 1950s have been broadly causal. The readiest answer—that causation by an intention is the missing element—is oversimple. Intentionality, however, may be crucial even if intentions alone cannot provide an answer. Elizabeth Anscombe apparently favored reasons for acting; but reasons in the abstract, say as true propositions,…

In some of its many forms, happiness is no emotion. But there is also an emotion of happiness which, like other emotions, has correctness conditions. The correctness conditions of happiness differ in several respects, formal and non-formal, from those of emotions such as admiration, fear and indignation. The account given here of the correctness conditions of happiness suggests an account of happiness as a species of satisfaction and an account of the relation between happiness and affective rationality or reason.

The cognitive revolution, which from the early ’60s shaped the domains of linguistics, anthropology, psychology and related disciplines, manifested its effect in the field of pragmatics with the seminal work of Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). Among many other issues, Sperber and Wilson brought to the attention of the pragmatics community the question of the place of pragmatic abilities in the overall architecture of the mind. At that time, Fodor had already suggested that human cognitive architecture is partly modular (Fodor 1983) by introducing the functional and architectural distinction between modular…

Enactivists often claim that since perception is one with action, it does not involve representations, hence perception is direct. Here we argue that empirical evidence on neural activity in the ventral premotor cortex confirms the enactivist intuitions about the unity of action and perception. But this very unity requires the detection of the action possibilities offered by the objects in the environment, which in turn involves certain representational processes at the neural level. Hence, the enactivist claim that perception is direct is wrong, or at least ambiguous and potentially misleading:…

This paper argues that naïve realism has an epistemic advantage over other rival views. The argument consists of two steps. First, I argue that the phenomenology of veridical visual experience plays an indispensable role in explaining how we can refer to the experience as a justificatory reason for a demonstrative judgment. Second, I argue that only naïve realism can coherently allow a veridical visual experience to be used as a factive reason.

The classic thought experiments for Content Externalism have been motivated by consideration of intentional states with a mind-to-world direction of fit. In this paper, I argue that when these experiments are run on intentional states with a world-to-mind direction of fit, the thought experiments actually support Content Internalism. Because of this, I argue that the classic thought experiments alone cannot properly motivate Content Externalism. I do not show that Content Externalism is false in this paper, just that it cannot be motivated by the classic thought experiments alone. I discuss…