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This chapter gives a brief overview of the (European) beginnings of positivist psychology, i.e. of the ways of thinking and research that promise an objective view into human experience by recording the brain’s physiological processes that accompany mental processes.

In recent work, Sosa proposes a comprehensive account of epistemic value based on an axiology for attempts. According to this axiology, an attempt is better if it succeeds, better still if it is apt (i.e., succeeds through competence), and best if it is fully apt, (i.e., guided to aptness by apt beliefs that it would be apt). Beliefs are understood as attempts aiming at the truth. Thus, a belief is better if true, better still if apt, and best if fully apt. I raise a Kantian obstacle for Sosa’s account, arguing that the quality or worth of an attempt is independent of whether it succeeds. In particular, an attempt can be fully worthy despite being a failure. I then consider whether Sosa’s competence-theoretic framework provides the resources for an axiology of attempts that does not place so much weight on success. I discuss the most promising candidate, an axiology grounded in the competence of attempts, or what Sosa calls adroitness. An adroit attempt may fail. I raise doubts about whether an adroitness-based axiology can provide a plausible explanation of the worthiness of subjects’ beliefs in epistemically unfortunate situations, such as the beliefs of the brain in a vat. I conclude by speculating that the notion of a belief’s fit with what the subject has to go on, a notion missing from Sosa’s competence-theoretic framework, is crucial to explaining epistemic worth.

Thought experiments involving The Matrix, brains-in-vats, or Cartesian demons have traditionally thought to describe skeptical possibilities. Chalmers has denied this, claiming that the simulations involved are real enough to at least sometimes defeat the skeptic. Through an examination of the meaning of kind terms in natural language I argue that, though the Chalmers view may be otherwise attractive, it is not an antidote to skepticism.

This paper addresses several objections that have been leveled against a behavioral approach to psychological categories. It reconstructs and critically assesses (a) the so-called causal objection; (b) alleged counterexamples whereby one can exhibit the typical behaviors associated with a psychological phenomenon without exhibiting the latter, including Lewis’ “perfect actor” case and Kirk’s “zombie”; (c) alleged counterexamples whereby organisms can exemplify psychological phenomena without exhibiting any behavior associated with them, including Armstrong’s imagined brain in a vat, Putnam’s “super-super-spartans” scenario, and related cases; and (d) the holistic objection. Mistaken assumptions in each of these objections are pinpointed. The paper starts with a brief characterization of behaviorism about psychological categories and a summary of the particular version thereof supported here, which draws upon Ryle and Skinner, among others.

John McDowell argued that the virtuous person (VP) knows no temptation: her perception of a situation silences all competing motivations - be it fear in the face of danger or a strong desire. The VP cannot recognize any reason to act non-virtuously as a reason, and is never inclined to act non-virtuously. This view rests on the requirement that the VP rationally respond, and not merely react, to the environment - it rests on the requirement that the relation between the VP and the world (ethical requirements) must rule out the possibility that the VP is a brain in a vat. I will argue that the opposite is true: virtue requires a sensitivity to temptation. The VP, as such, must be able to recognize reasons for performing non-virtuous actions as reasons, and be inclined to perform them. She must find nothing human alien. This is so because the VP must possess the ability to understand non- virtuous agents, and understanding necessarily involves vulnerability to temptation. Otherwise, it will be argued, the VP views the actions of others as determined from outside the space of reasons. But the VP, like any other person, must have the ability to view the actions of others as rational responses to the environment, not only as reactions to it. Put differently, the VP's view of others must rule out the possibility that they are brains in a vat - the possibility that their actions are merely caused, rather than justified, by the facts. Finally, it will be suggested that an amended conception of the VP can meet both requirements: view others as rationally responsive to the world, without relinquishing its relation to the facts.

Recent literature in epistemology has focused on the following argument for skepticism (SA): I know that I have two hands only if I know that I am not a handless brain in a vat. But I don't know I am not a handless brain in a vat. Therefore, I don't know that I have two hands. Part I of this article reviews two responses to skepticism that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: sensitivity theories and attributor contextualism. Part II considers the more recent ‘neo-Moorean’ response to skepticism and its development in ‘safety’ theories of knowledge. Part III argues that the skeptical argument set out in SA is not of central importance. Specifically, SA is parasitic on skeptical reasoning that is more powerful and more fundamental than that displayed by SA itself. Finally, Part IV reviews a Pyrrhonian argument for skepticism that is not well captured by SA, and considers a promising strategy for responding to it.

In his recent book, Epistemic Luck, Duncan Pritchard writes: 'all parties to the dispute agree that the evidence we have in favour of our everyday beliefs does not prefer those beliefs over their sceptical alternatives.' And again: 'Everyone agrees that we lack internalist justification for believing even everyday propositions' (2005: 206, 211). The basis for this agree ment is the compatibility of all our sensory evidence with sceptical alter natives such as the hypothesis that we are all brains in vats. Compatibility appears to equate with lack of favour. Pritchard does allow an externalist kind of knowledge that we are not brains in vats. This kind of knowledge requires only true belief that meets a safety condition: belief that remains true in most or nearly all nearby possible worlds. Assuming that the world in which we are brains in vats is distant, our belief that we are not such remains true in nearby possible worlds (Pritchard 2005: 75). But Pritchard holds that we lack the more satisfying and satisfactory internalist knowl edge of the denial of radical sceptical hypotheses, and he claims that all epistemologists agree. They agree that we lack accessible evidential sup port for our belief that we are not brains in vats. Lacking evidence, we cannot claim such knowledge or argue for it (2005: 77). In short, we lack justification for this belief (2005: 104, 112, 117, 119). Does agreement among all in the present tight circle of epistemologists really indicate that we have no evidential reason to prefer belief in our physical world to the brain-in-the-vat hypothesis? Consider the following. Imagine the context of a murder trial, in which everyone agrees that the standards for knowledge of guilt are set very high. The prosecution's evidence consists of five witnesses, none with a personal interest in the outcome, who testify that they saw at close range the butler stab his employer with a kitchen knife repeatedly after a heated argument about his salary and duties, the bloody knife having been found shortly after ward among the butler's belongings with his fingerprints on it. The defence attorney points out that all this evidence is perfectly compatible with the employer's wife having hired a close look-alike to the butler, perhaps an unknown twin, to impersonate him, commit the murder, find a kitchen knife with his fingerprints on it, smear it with the victim's blood, and plant it in the butler's room so as to implicate him in the crime. He argues that since the jurors cannot rule out this possibility, since they cannot cite any

In 1981, Hilary Putnam published a paper entitled “Brains in a Vat.” In it, he reflected on a “science fiction possibility discussed by philosophers,” which he describes as follows: a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person's brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; but really all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. The computer is so clever that if the person tries to raise his hand, the feedback from the computer will cause him to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the hand being raised. Moreover, by varying the program, the evil scientist can cause the victim to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate) any situation or environment the evil scientist wishes. He can also obliterate the memory of the brain operation, so that the victim will seem to himself to have always been in this environment. It can even seem to the victim that he is sitting and reading these very words about the amusing but quite absurd supposition that there is an evil scientist who removes people's brains from their bodies and places them in a vat of nutrients which keep the brains alive. The nerve endings are supposed to be connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that … (Putnam 1981b: 5–6) This scenario, which will henceforth be called the brain-in-a-vat (or BIV) scenario, has generated a tremendous amount of philosophical commentary in the more than three decades since its publication. Putnam's reflections on the BIV scenario have a familiar historical precedent, of course, in Descartes's reflections on the Evil Demon scenario.

In early essays and in more recent work, Fred Dretske argues against the closure of perception, perceptual knowledge, and knowledge itself. In this essay I review his case and suggest that, in a useful sense, perception is closed, and that, while perceptual knowledge is not closed under entailment, perceptually based knowledge is closed, and so is knowledge itself. On my approach, which emphasizes the safe indication account of knowledge, we can both perceive, and know, that sceptical scenarios (such as being a brain in a vat) do not hold.

We come ready to investigate, to search for coherence and meaning. Embedded in the process of satisfying our basic wants and needs are a lot of problem-solving skills — something I like to call “cephalic capabilities.” I use the word cephalic, an older word not much used in the neurosciences, because of its link to the brain in the context of the body. Our brains are not “a brain in a vat” — that is, a brain detached from action and divorced from the contours of adaptation; rather, a brain is part of a body in space and time that is the rare limiting factor for behavior and experience. This chapter deals with some of the foraging skills our cephalic capabilities allow.

In 1998, Eric Kandel wrote in his intriguing paper titled “A new intellectual framework for psychiatry” (Kandel, 1998) that “the unique domain which psychiatry occupies within academic medicine, the analysis of the interaction between social and biological determinants of behavior, can best be studied by also having a full understanding of the biological components of behavior.” Fifteen years later, much like surfers who continue a frustrated and longing pursuit for the next “big one” (Cowan et al., 2000; Kandel, 2006), we are, according to Henrik Walter, in the midst of the third wave of biological psychiatry (Walter, 2013). Because a wave is, in a physical sense, a disturbance that propagates through space and time while transferring energy, there are at least three reoccurring “thermodynamic sinks” that I would like to also emphasize with Walter to ultimately better understand the complexity of the human brain in action (Bassett, 2011). First is the rediscovery of the coequal contributions of emotions and affects toward normal brain functioning (Damasio, 2003; Tsuchiya and Adolphs, 2007). After Michael Gazzaniga and George Miller “invented” “cognitive neuroscience” in the late 1980s (Zorumski and Rubin, 2011), the predominance of a cognition-centered view of “higher” (and perhaps as one facet: more noble?) brain functions was able to again delay necessary and not so new “insults” to our species and misdirect (in its top-down-view of brain functioning) the conceptualization and treatment of mental disorders (Cromwell and Panksepp, 2011; Almada et al., 2013). Neurobiology helps us recalibrate the human wishful thinking we had come to appreciate regarding the “higher” and “lower” of the “conditio humana” imprinted in our (neuro)physiology. As the world divides into facts, there is in fact no such hierarchy imprinted in our brains. Rather, the brain seems to favor “dynamic coalitions of networks of brain areas with a high degree of connectivity,” and these networks - or the connectome - should not be conceptualized as being specifically affective or cognitive (Pessoa, 2008). Second is the rediscovery of the body in biological psychiatry. Walter mentions the “4Es” (embodiment, embeddedness, enactivism, extended cognition) and the challenge of so-called “situatedness” (Walter, 2013). However, the very first step toward valuing the operant inter-wovenness of mind and body might be a simpler one. Interestingly of ectodermal origin, neural tissue emerged enabling motor control in an evolutionary beneficial way. The brain originates in relation to a body that again, in relation to the outer world, actively moves – and, not least, gained the ability to interact with other bodies. Sensory information about the “situation,” the re-flective information involved in reflexes, is primarily able to close the loop and help coordinate movement. If Antonio R. Damasio is right, there is a need for emotions before we can feel anything, and these emotions are intimately connected with “more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli” (Damsio, 2005). These so-called “somatic markers” (Damasio, 1996) apparently make us capable of making predominantly beneficial decisions for self-preservation and the (we have to admit: biologically sexual) preservation of our species. It is designative that the brain is the “unmoved mover.” However, changes are also reflected in the brain itself if the “motor-sensory” connections to the body are disturbed, e.g., in paraplegia (Wiens, 2005; Lenggenhager et al., 2012). The fantasy of an ever-dreaming, monolithic (but nonetheless self-conscious) “brain in a vat” that could reasonably think (or meaningfully simulate) about “what is it like to be a bat” (Nagel, 1974) currently suffers from not only solipsistic but also neurobiological-Darwinistic (so to say “inborn”) pitfalls. In this manifold context, it is interesting that today's “modern or third wave” of psychiatry is more willing to pay increased attention to enigmatic somatic symptom disorders (other than at first glance mere “brain disorders” such as schizophrenia, depression, addiction, and dementia) and attempts to incorporate the body and its imprinted neural representation into a genuine, more holistic understanding of the field. One could interpret it as a new esteem of anciently quirky psychosomatics in biological psychiatry that overcomes its centro-centric monodimensionality. Third is the rediscovery of the importance of “being in relation” for reasonable neural functioning, especially in terms of social relationships for the human brain. From birth until death, human mammals need the “significant other(s),” and it is perhaps the most integrating framework covering cognitive and affective neurosciences that will give rise to emerging social neurosciences (Eisenberger and Cole, 2012; Singer, 2012). Newly emerging imaging techniques, such as hyperscanning (Babiloni and Astolfi, 2012), i.e., the simultaneous recording of brain activity of different subjects that allows “the study of inter-brain correlations between the cerebral activity of a group of interacting subjects as a unique system” (Babiloni and Astolfi, 2012), will help us understand the brain and perhaps pave the way to a central second-person neuroscience (Schilbach et al., 2013). Against this background, and only as one important example, empathy and the question of its quality and quantity in men have gained more and more attention in modern neuroscience (Gonzalez-Liencres et al., 2013). Psychotherapy and its proven impact on mental health (Etkin et al., 2005), before any technical question, fundamentally relies on the quality of the relation between two human beings (like patient and therapist) (Ardito and Rabellino, 2011). One could, again, interpret this rediscovery as the new esteem of anciently subordinate psychotherapy in biological psychiatry. Finally, after three waves, a fourth wave seems inevitable. I would venture to predict that this “new wave” will belong to the computational neurosciences (Wen et al., 2011; Poldrack et al., 2012) and arise from the background of information integration theory (Tononi, 2005). The Human Brain Project (Markram, 2012) which was awarded one of the European Union's Flagship grants in 2013, worth more than €1 billion ($1.35 billion) over the next ten years, aims for the first time to tie or link up all knowledge of and to simulate the complete human brain from the molecule to the cortex on supercomputers to better understand how it functions (or even malfunctions), is ultimately the first step into a new era of real cooperativeness among neuroscientists and brains (Markram, 2013). Unfortunately, largely without “third wave” psychiatry. Just as affect and cognition, body and soul, the body-bound brain and the brain of my conspecific, and psychiatry and psychosomatics grow together, entities that belong together grow together. We have the opportunity to see the emergence of a new, non-reductionist science of fractal brains, as we examine mental orders and disorders differently, in a “brainy way,” with more cooperation and integration than ever before. In one word, in accordance with Henry Markram (Kandel et al., 2013): exciting!

In this chapter, David Golumbia argues that computationalist ideology – the view that everything in reality is ultimately made up of computation – can be seen with particular clarity in what he calls “the uploading story.” According to this story, we human beings are on the verge of losing our human embodiment and our contact with everyday reality, and moving into a world where our minds merge with computers and we inhabit virtual realities much like those seen in videogames. A prominent exemplar of this story is found in the work of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who claims that we are heading toward a profound transformation he and others call “The Singularity.” Golumbia argues that the premise of Kurzweil's “Singularity” reads very much like the fantastic versions of “uploading” that have been widespread in computational thought for decades. To expose the conceptual flaws in the uploading story and its incarnation in Kurzweil's “Singularity,” Golumbia examines a selection of recent television series and films that use this story as their narrative foundation. Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, and Gamer constitute a kind of demonstrative interrogation of the uploading fantasy, Golumbia argues, revealing its central contradiction – namely, that it relies not on actual technological advances but on distortions beyond any recognizable limits of our conceptions of the human, the mind, and the body. Keywords: Singularity; Ray Kurzweil; digital culture; uploading; minds and computers; Dollhouse; Battlestar Galactica; Gamer (film); cultural studies; digital media; brain in a vat; Jacques Derrida; Hilary Putnam

Suppose that a team of neurosurgeons and bioengineers were able to remove your brain from your body, suspend it in a life-sustaining vat of liquid nutrients, and connect its neurons and nerve terminals by wires to a supercomputer that would stimulate it with electrical impulses exactly like those it normally receives when embodied. According to this brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, your envatted brain and your embodied brain would have subjectively indistinguishable mental lives. For all you know—so one argument goes—you could be such a brain in a vat right now. 1

A mental presentation... does not have any necessary connection with what it stands for... Magical theories of reference, in a word, are wrong. (Dell'Utri 1990, p. 83) In order to refer we have to partake in causal chains connecting our words with their reference, provided that our referential intentions are socially shared and the reference itself is knowable. (Dell'Utri 1990, p. 84) Brains in a vat (BIV) are connected to a computer which causes the brains to have sense-impressions-"images"--qualitatively indistinguishable from those had by normal embodied brains. According to Dell'Utri, Putnam, using the above premisses

I will include embodied cognition as part of the concept of situated cognition. One often encounters these terms used together – embodied cognition and situated cognition – and it is clear that situated cognition cannot be disembodied, although some authors emphasize one over the other or provide principled distinctions between them. Philosophical thought experiments notwithstanding, however, the often-encountered brain in the vat, is, to say the least, in a very odd and artificial situation. Given what seems to be an essential connection between embodiment and situation, I will take the more inclusive and holistic route and view them accordingly.

The truth condition for ‘This is one mind’ is roughly that this consists in a single realisation of the mind blue-print. The ideal way of establishing its truth would be to investigate the structure of what confronts us and determine whether it realises the mind blue-print. Unfortunately, we are not sufficiently knowledgeable. If we did not know that brains animated the people we see around us, there would be no temptation to suppose that a brain in a vat was a mind. The statement has to be verified indirectly.

ed from Nozick's account of knowledge and skepticism. According to SCA, the problem with my belief that I'm not a BIV-and I do have such a belief, as do most of us-is that I would have this belief (that I'm not a BIV) even if it were false (even if I were one). It is this that makes it hard to claim to know that I'm not a BIV. For, according to SCA, we have a very strong general, though not exceptionless, inclination to think that we don't know that P when we think that our belief that P is a belief we would hold even if P were false. Let's say that S's belief that P is insensitive if S would believe that P if P were false. SCA's generalization can then be restated as follows: We tend to judge that S doesn't know that P when we think S's belief that P is insensitive. As is well worth noting, this general inclination explains the operation of nonphilosophical skeptical hypotheses that are far less radical than the BIV hypothesis or even the painted mule hypothesis. Just so, it serves to explain why, even though I feel inclined to say that I know the Bulls won their game last night because I read the result in a single newspaper, I still feel strongly pulled toward admitting the (mildly) skeptical claim that I don't know that the paper isn't mistaken about which team won: I realize that my belief that the paper isn't mistaken is a belief I would hold even if it were false (even if the paper were mistaken). Indeed, after encountering a couple of instances of AI with different skeptical hypotheses plugged into the 'H' slot (for example, the BIV, the painted mules, and the mistaken paper hypotheses), one develops a sense of what makes for an effective skeptical hypothesis and, thus, an ability to construct convincing instances of Al oneself. To make AI's second premise convincing, it is usually sufficient (though not necessary) that H be incompatible with 0. But what about the first premise? To make it convincing, we instinctively look for a hypothesis that elicits in the listener both the belief that the hypothesis doesn't obtain and an acknowledgement that this belief is one she would hold even if the hypothesis did obtain. Upon hearing the hypothesis, typically one can't help but projecting oneself into it. How would things seem to me if that situation obtained? Well, pretty much (or sometimes exactly) as they actually seem to me. And, so, what would I believe if such a "strange" situation obtained? Pretty much (or exactly) what I ac

In "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism," Douglas C. Long presents a transcendental argument against epistemological skepticism.' The argument has a distinctively Kantian flavor (though Long does not highlight this connection), in that it proceeds from the premise that I have self-knowledge and ends with the conclusion that I have perceptual knowledge of an objective, material subject of mental states. If the skeptic wishes to accept the transcendental argument's premise (as he seems to do), then he must reject his claim that I lack knowledge of all propositions concerning my physical nature, history and environment. The falsity of this skeptical claim is a condition for the possibility of self-knowledge, according to Long's transcendental argument. In this paper, I would like to see whether the argument is really workable. Long's target is the contemporary Cartesian skeptic whose challenge runs as follows. It is metaphysically possible that I am a brain in a vat who is massively mistaken about my own properties and those of the physical world, in virtue of the fact that my experiences are entirely computer-induced and unveridical. But no evidence or reasons are available which allow me to know that this possibility is not actual. Thus, I do not know any of the propositions about the physical world which are false according to the skeptical possibility. Long maintains that there is an epistemological difficulty in holding that I lack all ordinary perceptual knowledge (and thus lack perceptual knowledge of my body) while possessing the knowledge that I am the subject of various mental states (including experiences which may or may not be veridical and thoughts which may or may not bear true contents). Long's argument to establish the difficulty centers around the skeptic's Cartesian method for arriving at the knowledge that I am the subject of mental states in the absence of perceptual knowledge about the external world. The method involves an infer