Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799
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Item Repositioning Cognitive Kinds(2022) Roige Mas, Aida; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forward a series of theoretical proposals aimed to advance our understanding of cognitive kinds. The first chapter introduces the general debates that provide the philosophical underpinnings for the topics addressed in each of the following chapters. Chapter two compares and distinguishes between modules of the mind and mechanisms-as-causings, arguing that they should not be conflated in cognitive science. Additionally, it provides a novel “toolbox” model of accounts of mechanisms, and discusses what makes any such account adequate. Chapter three addresses the question of whether there is a role within the new mechanistic philosophy of science for representations. It advances a proposal on how to carve working entity types, so that they may include representational explanans. Chapter four offers an account of mental disorders, one that captures the regulative ideal behind psychiatry’s inclusion of certain conditions as psychopathologies. Mental disorders are alterations in the production of some mental outputs (e.g. behaviors, beliefs, emotions, desires), such that their degree of reasons-responsiveness is extremely diminished with respect to what we would folk-psychologically expect it to be.Item A Groundwork for Perspectival Quantum Mechanics(2020) Dascal, Michael; Bub, Jeffrey; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There has recently been a renewed focus on ‘perspectival’ quantum theories. which simultaneously maintain the existence of single measurement outcomes and the universality of unitary evolution. At the same time, these theories have come under attack with results by Frauchiger and Renner, Baumann and Wolf, and others. This dissertation aims to respond to a number of these attacks by providing a groundwork for these types of theories. To lay this groundwork I focus on encapsulated measurements, which involve an isolated observer and a superobserver (who measures the observer). I first distinguish between invasive and non-invasive measurements. Each leads to a possible inconsistency: In non-invasive measurements, the observer is certain of the superobserver’s measurement outcome while the superobserver’s physics predicts multiple possible outcomes. In invasive measurements the superobserver can be certain of his measurement outcome while the observer predicts non-zero probabilities for all possible outcomes. I argue that in the case of non-invasive measurements, the perspectivalist avoids diffculty by denying that the observer’s result has any impact on the physics experienced by the superobserver. Consistency is then maintained between them by looking to the unitary evolution of the superobserver’s measurement. This response leads to a detailed discussion about the metaphysical commitments of the perspectival approach. Here I argue the perspectivalist must accept one surprising result – there is a significant divorce of fundamental ontological states from physical dynamics. Turning to invasive measurements, I argue that the concern here is entirely misplaced. Arguments that raise worries about invasive measurements assume the observer should describe herself to be in a quantum state of having observed her measurement outcome when predicting the superobserver’s measurement results. I argue that this is incorrect. Rather, I explain that it is impossible for any observer to know her quantum state and so she should never describe herself as being in any quantum state at all, let alone use such a description to make predictions about a superobserver’s measurement. To conclude, I explain how the perspectivalist responds to concerns raised about entanglement and the possibility of action at a distance. Combining this with the results above brings into focus how the perspectivalist may develop a consistent, single-world picture of quantum mechanics.Item The Existence of Time and Its Relationship to the Reality of Temporal Passage(2020) Ewing, Kyley; Stairs, Allen; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The starting point of my dissertation is the deeply rooted tension between our everyday pre-theoretic experience of time and our leading metaphysical and physical theories of time. Prime examples of this tension can be found in both discussions surrounding the ontology of the past, present, and future and debates over the fundamental nature of the passage and direction of time. While united by the search for the correct understanding of the relationship between our experience, the metaphysics, and the physics of time, my project is divided into four parts: "Temporal Passage in a Fragmented World" looks at the relation between fragmentalism and the passage of time. As it was introduced by Fine in “Tense and Reality” (2005), fragmentalism is an A-theoretic view that divides the world into incompatible fragments of tensed facts. I begin by explaining how the Fineian fragmentalist can respond to claims that their theory is only able to offer an irredeemably incoherent account of time. I then argue that, even if sense can be made of the general picture of time it presents, Fineian fragmentalism is unable to supply a passable account of the mind-independent passage of time in line with our experience. The conclusion from this will be that Fineian fragmentalism is a subpar tensed A-theoretic account. Lipman (2018) provides a recent modification of Fineian fragmentalism based in a tenseless fragmentalist framework. My suggestion, however, is that Lipman’s attempt to supply a tenseless account of genuine fragmentalist temporal passage is ultimately unmotivated. One underexplored option open to the fragmentalist is to argue that time does not really pass in a fragmented universe. "Norton’s Objective Temporal Passage" considers one unique solution to the puzzle of temporal passage in the block universe. Norton (2010) argues that, although a precise description of its workings is currently beyond our understanding, time really passes. After introducing Norton’s account, I argue that it both implies a counterintuitive relationship between the “now” and passage and that it leads to an unlikely relationship between our experience and reality. I then propose that, even if one is willing to accept these consequences, there is reason to question whether Norton builds a convincing case for the claim that, since we are not able to find any of the identifying characteristics of an illusion in the case of temporal passage, the passage of time is not an illusion. "A Defense of the B-Theoretic, Block Universe" offers a defense of the B-theoretic, block universe theory of time. I begin by motivating the connection between, on the one hand, the B-theory and the block universe and, on the other hand, the A-theory and dynamic views such as presentism. With this connection in place, I argue that the overall weight of experiential, metaphysical, and scientific considerations support the B-theoretic, block universe. My conclusion is that, although there is reason to favor the B-theoretic, block universe over A-theoretic, dynamic views, there are still important and unanswered questions surrounding the B-theoretic, block universe. "Non-Dynamic Temporal Passage" presents an account of the mind-independent and non-dynamic passage of time that is consistent with the block universe theory and central features of our experience of time. In explaining the passage of time, I appeal to the temporal boundaries of the block universe and argue that the passage of time explains both the earlier than relation and the direction of time. Although a minimalist account of temporal passage, it provides substantial answers to the following core questions about temporal passage: What is the basis of the passage of time? What does the passage of time itself amount to? What does the passage of time explain?Item Mindreading for Cooperation: a moderately minimalist approach(2019) Schoenher, Julius; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forth a series of arguments about the extent to which human cooperative interaction is fundamentally shaped by mindreading; i.e. the capability to reason about the psychological causes (e.g. intentions, beliefs, goals) of behavior. The introduction to this dissertation discusses the broad philosophical underpinnings that lay the foundations for more specific philosophical issues under discussion in subsequent chapters. In chapter two, I argue that a thorough interpretation of the relevant empirical evidence suggests that mindreading is fast, effortlessly deployed, and operative sub-personally. For this reason, mindreading is principally well-suited to enable most everyday cooperative interactions. In the appendix, I (in collaboration with Evan Westra ) elaborate on this picture, arguing that the cognitive mechanisms operative in social interactions are, in all relevant respects, similar to those operative in non-interactive situations. While chapter two and the appendix defend the idea that the cognitive faculties responsible for mindreading are fit to enable cooperative interactions, chapters three and four take this perspective for granted and discusses whether human cooperation is crucially dependent on a form of reciprocal attribution of mental states that is often labeled common knowledge. In chapter three of this dissertation I address, and reject, the oft defended idea that truly performing an action together with others requires that all parties commonly know their intended goals. I argue that this view is fundamentally mistaken. Successfully acting together with others often requires not knowing these goals. Chapter four explores reciprocal belief attribution in the context of coordination problems. Humans often coordinate their actions by replicating successful past choices; they reason based on precedent. Philosophers have often claimed that solving coordination problems by relying on precedent presupposes common knowledge that all parties rely on precedent in trying to coordinate their actions. Chapter four points out that this assumption is erroneous: Coordinating behavior on the basis of precedent is broadly incompatible with any higher-order knowledge (or beliefs) about the other agents’ choices.Item RELATIVE AND OBJECTIVE, ON BALANCE: Detailing the Best Systems Analysis of Laws(2017) Bialek, Max; Lyon, Aidan; Romeijn, Jan-Willem; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Variations on Lewis’ Best Systems Analysis (BSA) of laws of nature have tended to emphasize the aspects of the view that allow it to accommodate the peculiarities of scientific practice. That move has allowed such views to do a lot of good work in solving old and new challenges for the BSA, but at the cost of strengthening the argument against the BSA that it is insufficiently objective. I argue that the “insufficiently objective” objection is overcome by a balance of relativity in the laws and limits to that relativity, each properly motivated by appeal to scientific practice. I then explore what relativity in the laws, and limits to it, may be required by scientific practice.Item THE ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF MINDREADING: BELIEFS, PERSPECTIVES, AND CHARACTER(2017) Westra, Evan; Carruthers, Peter M; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forward a series of arguments and theoretical proposals about the architecture and development of the human capacity to reason about the internal, psychological causes of behavior, known as “theory of mind” or “mindreading.” Chapter 1, “Foundations and motivations,” begins by articulating the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary theory-of-mind debates, especially the dispute between empiricists and nativists. I then argue for a nativist approach to theory-of-mind development, and then go on to outline how the subsequent chapters each address specific challenges for this nativist perspective. Chapter 2, “Pragmatic development and the false-belief task,” addresses the central puzzle of the theory-of-mind development literature: why is it that children below the age of five fail standard false-belief tasks, and yet are able to pass implicit versions of the false-belief task at a far younger age? According to my novel, nativist account, while they possess the concept of BELIEF very early in development, children’s early experiences with the pragmatics of belief discourse initially distort the way they interpret standard false-belief tasks; as children gain the relevant experience from their social and linguistic environment, this distortion eventually dissipates. In the Appendix (co-authored with Peter Carruthers), I expand upon this proposal to show how it can also account for another set of phenomena typically cited as evidence against nativism: the Theory-of-Mind Scale. Chapter 3, “Spontaneous mindreading: A problem for the two-systems account,” challenges the “two-systems” account of mindreading, which provides a different explanation for the implicit/explicit false-belief task gap, and has implications for the architecture of mature, adult mindreading. Using evidence from adults’ perspective-taking abilities I argue that this account is theoretically and empirically unsound. Chapter 4, “Character and theory of mind: An integrative approach,” begins by noting that contemporary accounts of mindreading neglect to account for the role of character or personality-trait representations in action-prediction and interpretation. Employing a hierarchical, predictive coding approach, I propose that character-trait representations are rapidly inferred in order to inform and constrain our mental-state attributions. Because this is a “covering concept” dissertation, each of these chapters (including the Appendix) is written so that it is independent of all of the others; they can be read in any order, and do not presuppose one another.Item Representational Content and the Science of Vision(2015) Ritchie, John Brendan Welsh; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The general topic of my thesis is how vision science explains what we see, and how we see it. There are two themes often found in the explanations of vision science that I focus on. The first is the Distal Object Thesis: the internal representations that underlie object vision represent properties of entities in the distal world. The second is the Transformational Thesis: the function of the vision system is to transform information that is latent in the retinal image into a representational format that makes it available for use by further perceptual or cognitive systems. The ultimate aim of my project is to show that these two themes are in tension, and to suggest how the tension may be resolved. The tension between these themes is, I argue, a result of their conflicting implications regarding the role of representational content (what a representation is ``about") in the explanations of vision science. On the one hand, the Distal Object Thesis entails that the internal representations that underlie object vision qualify as a form of mental representation, and reflect a sense in which visual perception is indeed ``objective". Furthermore, I argue at length that a commitment to the Distal Object Thesis (and its consequences) is well-founded: mental representations are indeed an indispensable posit for explanations of aspects of object vision. On the other hand, the Transformational Thesis rests on the presupposition that the content of the internal representations in the visual system are fixed by a causally reliable, information carrying relation. The tension arises because carrying information is insufficient for fixing the content of mental representations. Thus the explanations of object vision that assume the Transformational Thesis, but require a commitment the Distal Object Thesis, are seemingly inadequate. Fortunately, some philosophical theories of intentional content, or the ``aboutness" of mental representations, offer some strategies for reconciling these two themes in the explanations of vision science.Item Deutsch's CTC Model and its Implications for the Foundations of Quantum Theory(2015) Dunlap, Lucas; Bub, Jeffrey; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an exploration of several issues surrounding David Deutsch’s CTC model first introduced in his 1991 paper “Quantum Mechanics Near Closed Timelike Lines”. Deutsch developed his model to account for the effects of quantum theory, which had been left out of classical discussions of time travel paradoxes. Deutsch’s formulation of his model in terms of quantum computational circuits lends itself to being adopted in the quantum information community. The dissertation argues that the adoption of the D-CTC model entails the existence of Nonlocal Signaling, which is in conflict with a fundamental principle of the quantum information approach. In order to motivate this argument, in Chapter 2 I introduce a distinction between Nonlocal Signaling, and Superluminal Information Transfer. In the latter case, a carrier of information physically traverses the space between the distant communicating parties faster than the speed of light. Exploiting quantum entanglement to signal, however, need not have this feature. I term this Nonlocal Signaling. Chapter 3 is where I present the argument that D-CTCs entail Nonlocal Signaling, and examine the controversy surrounding this and related results. I argue that the resistance to these kinds of predictions in the literature is motivated by a commitment to the principles of quantum information theory, which are inappropriately applied here. Chapters 4 and 5 examine details of Deutsch’s model. Chapter 4 argues that it presupposes a significant metaphysical picture that, when explicitly stated, makes a much less comfortable fit between D-CTCs and quantum information theory. Chapter 5 argues that, because of Deutsch’s commitment to this metaphysical picture, he is committed to the existence of physical situations that are in every way indistinguishable from the paradoxes he attempts to rule out by adopting the model in the first place. In Chapter 6, I make some observations about the relationship between the quantum information-theoretic approach to the interpretation of quantum theory, and the approaches focused primarily on arguing for one or another underlying ontology. Deutsch’s model is situated squarely in the latter camp. It serves as a useful example in pulling apart the implications of the two approaches. In conclusion, I argue that the quantum information-theoretic interpretation of quantum theory, in denying the fundamentality of any particular ontology, in favor of kinematical principles, is in tension with the metaphysical commitments of the Deutsch model. Deutsch’s interpretational stance is among the metaphysically-motivated positions. I argue that this element of the Deutsch model is essential to the solutions it offers to the paradoxes of time travel, and therefore the D-CTC model cannot be adopted without implicitly endorsing Deutsch’s metaphysical commitments. This feature makes the D-CTC model an uncomfortable fit with QIT.Item From Social Choice to System Choice: A Problem for Lewis’s Best System Analysis(2015) Woo, Sungwon; Lyon, Aidan; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most important results in social choice theory is Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem (1951/1963), according to which there cannot exist any rational procedure of aggregating individual preferences into a social preference. In this dissertation, I argue that the analogue of Arrow’s theorem threatens David Lewis’s Best System Account (BSA) of laws of nature, as the BSA invokes the procedure of aggregating different system-choice criteria into a resultant choice of the best system. First, I examine the formal conditions of Arrow’s impossibility theorem and its theory-choice variant. In the domain of theory choice, statistical model selection methods make different theory-choice standards commensurable. This inter-standard comparability may open up an escape route from the Arrovian impossibility for theory choice. Conducting a rigorous examination of those statistical methods, in particular, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), I show that these methods assume the existence of true status of nature, and that their inter-standard comparability serves as an epistemic constraint. I then argue that there is a formal analogy between social choice and system choice for the BSA and the Arrovian impossibility threatens the BSA. After rejecting various possible attempts to escape from the Arrovian impossibility for the BSA, I propose the variants of the BSA implemented with AIC and BIC as an attempt to make a case for inter-criterial comparability in system choice. I argue that, however, the proposed variants will inevitably fail to pick the best system. The failure is explained by the results in my investigation of the statistical methods. Finally, I suggest different ways in which the BSA might be able to escape from the Arrovian impossibility: a non-harmful dictatorship, a threshold-prior criterion, and the statistical method called Minimum Description Length Principle. I close the dissertation by suggesting that the BSA might have to give up the notion of ‘balancing’ in its analysis of laws of nature in order to avoid the Arrovian result in a way that is consistent with the Humean perspective on laws of nature.Item Innateness in the Sciences: Separating Nature, Nurture, and Nativism(2015) Engelbert, Mark; Rey, Georges; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scientists across the life sciences routinely appeal to notions of "innate" or "genetic" traits to explain developmental phenomena, and the idea of "innate" differences among people has figured prominently in some explanations of observed social inequality. This dissertation is an analysis of these concepts, which proceeds in two parts. Part I explores various philosophical issues related to the use of innateness as an explanatory concept, while Part II examines controversial claims that genetic differences among racial groups account for observed social inequality. I argue throughout that much disagreement about innateness arises from innocuous differences in explanatory goals and interests among different scientific research programs. Nevertheless, some proponents of genetic racial differences rely on understandings of "genetic" traits that conflict with the moral commitments of a just society. Part I begins with arguments for a contextual and pragmatic approach to scientific explanation: in order for an explanation to be a good one, it must cite causes that are relevant to our interests in the explanatory context. I then apply this framework to biology and psychology, showing how different contexts call for different interpretations of innateness. I conclude Part I by responding to arguments that aim to establish a single meaning for "innate"/"genetic" across all explanatory contexts. Part II examines the use of "innate" and "genetic" concepts in developmental biology and population genetics, and applies the lessons of this examination to debates about alleged racial differences in genes for intelligence. I show that "hereditarians," who argue for innate racial differences, employ an explanatory framework that abstracts away from substantial complexity in developmental interactions between genes and environments. While this framework is adequate for certain purposes, it is poorly suited to designing interventions capable of eliminating racial IQ differences and attendant social inequality. I propose an alternative, mechanistic framework that promotes understanding of developmental complexity and design of effective interventions. I argue that a full commitment to racial equality demands that we adopt this latter framework, and to the extent that hereditarians resist doing so, their work exhibits some racist tendencies.