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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.

Appliquant aux arguments sceptiques la strategie qui consiste a conceder a son adversaire des premisses possibles puis a lui montrer qu'elles n'aboutissent pas a la these contraire, l'A. examine l'hypothese du malin genie developpee par Descartes, l'hypothese du brain-in-a-vat etudiee par J.-L. Austin et l'hypothese de Dieu soutenue par Berkeley

The scales across which physical properties exist are vast and subtle in their effects on particular systems placed locally on such scales. For example, human experiential access is restricted only to partial segments of the mass density, size, and temperature scales of the universe. I argue that philosophers must learn to appreciate better the effects of physical scales. Specifically, thought experiments in philosophy should be more sensitive to physical scale effects, because the conclusion of a thought experiment may be undermined by unintentionally ignored scale effects, and the changes required to obtain the foreground state of affairs in a thought experiment might require unacknowledged scale-spanning changes to the contextual background. I discuss four philosophical thought experiments: Putnam's Twin Earth and Brain in a Vat, Searle's Chinese Room, and Chalmers's Zombies Without Qualia. I close by briefly defending the greater interest and importance of physical possibility over logical possibility.

Sources and Acknowledgments Introduction Thought Experiments: Science Fiction as a Window into Philosophical Puzzles (Susan Schneider). Part I: Could I be in a "Matrix" or Computer Simulation? Related Works: The Matrix Permutation City The 13th Floor Vanilla Sky Total Recall Animatrix 1. Brain in a Vat (John Pollock). 2. Are You In a Computer Simulation (Nick Bostrom). 3. Excerpt from The Republic Plato 4. Excerpt from The Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes). 5. The Matrix as Metaphysics (David J. Chalmers). Part II: What Am I? Free Will and the Nature of Persons Related Works: Software Star Trek, The Next Generation: Second Chances Mindscan The Matrix Minority Report 6. Where Am I (Daniel C. Dennett). 7. Personal Identity (Eric Olson). 8. Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons (Derek Parfit). 9. Who Am I? What Am I (Ray Kurzweil). 10. Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report (Michael Huemer). 11. Excerpt from "The Book of Life: A Thought Experiment" (Alvin I. Goldman). Part III: Mind: Natural, Artificial, Hybrid, and "Super" Related Works: 2001 Blade Runner AI Frankenstein Terminator I, Robot 12. Robot Dreams (Isaac Asimov). 13. A Brain Speaks (Andy Clark). 14. The Mind as the Software of the Brain (Ned Block). 15. Cyborgs Unplugged (Andy Clark). 16. Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds (Daniel C. Dennett). 17. Superintelligence and Singularity (Ray Kurzweil). Part IV: Ethical and Political Issues Related Works: Brave New World Gattaca Terminator White Plague 18. The Man on the Moon (George J. Annas). 19. Mindscan: Transcending and Enhancing the Human (Brain Susan Schneider). 20. The Doomsday Argument (John Leslie). 21. Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" and Machine Metaethics (Susan Leigh Anderson). 22. Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence (Nick Bostrom). Part V: Space and Time Related Works: Twelve Monkeys Slaughterhouse Five The Time Machine Back to the Future Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions 23. A Sound of Thunder (Ray Bradbury). 24. Time (Theodore Sider). 25. The Paradoxes of Time Travel (David Lewis). 26. The Quantum Physics of Time Travel (David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood). 27. Miracles and Wonders: Science Fiction as Epistemology (Richard Hanley). Index

The Matrix presents a version of an old philosophical fable: the brain in a vat. A disembodied brain is floating in a vat, inside a scientist’s laboratory. The scientist has arranged that the brain will be stimulated with the same sort of inputs that a normal embodied brain receives. To do this, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back into the simulation. The internal state of the brain is just like that of a normal brain, despite the fact that it lacks a body. From the brain’s point of view, things seem very much as they seem to you and me. The brain is massively deluded, it seems. It has all sorts of false beliefs about the world. It believes that it has a body, but it has no body. It believes that it is walking outside in the sunlight, but in fact it is inside a dark lab. It believes it is one place, when in fact it may be somewhere quite different. Perhaps it thinks it is in Tucson, when it is actually in Australia, or even in outer space. Neo’s situation at the beginning of The Matrix is something like this. He thinks that he lives in a city; he thinks that he has hair; he thinks it is 1999; and he thinks that it is sunny outside. In reality, he is floating in a pod in space; he has no hair; the year is around 2199; and

Putnam’s semantic argument against the BIV hypothesis and Sosa’s argument against dream skepticism based on the imagination model of dreaming share some important structural features. In both cases the skeptical option is supposed to be excluded because preconditions of its intelligibility are not fulfilled (affirmation and belief in the dream scenario, thought and reference in the BIV scenario). Putnam’s reasoning is usually interpreted differently, as a classic case of deception, but this feature is not essential. I propose to interpret BIV’s utterances as cases of reference failure best captured by truth-value gaps. Both anti-skeptical strategies are then vulnerable to the same type of objections (how do we know what state we are in or how do we know what kind of language do we speak).

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.

Skeptical hypotheses and the skeptical argument The Cartesian skeptic puts forward various logically possible skeptical hypotheses for our consideration, such as that you are now merely dreaming that you are reading an entry on Hilary Putnam. The more radical Evil Genius hypothesis is this: you inhabit a world consisting of just you and a God-like Evil Genius bent on deceiving you. In the Evil Genius world, nothing physical exists, and all of your experiences are directly caused by the Evil Genius. So your experiences, which represent there to be an external world of physical objects (including your body), give rise to systematically mistaken beliefs about your world (such as that you are now sitting at a computer). Some philosophers would deny that the Evil Genius hypothesis is genuinely logically possible. Materialists who hold that the mind is a complex physical system deny that it is possible for there to be an Evil Genius world, since, on their view, your mind could not possibly exist in a matterless world. Accordingly, a modern skeptic will have us consider an updated skeptical hypothesis that is consistent with materialism. Consider the hypothesis that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (The movie The Matrix depicts embodied brains which are so stimulated, while their bodies float in vats.) If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, on the basis of your computer-induced experiences, that you are looking at a tree, then you are sadly mistaken. After having sketched this brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, the skeptic issues a challenge: can you rule out the possibility described in the hypothesis? Do you know that the hypothesis is false? The skeptic now argues as follows.

The scenario of the brain in a vat, first aired thirty-five years ago in Hilary Putnam's classic paper, has been deeply influential in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This collection of new essays examines the scenario and its philosophical ramifications and applications, as well as the challenges which it has faced. The essays review historical applications of the brain-in-a-vat scenario and consider its impact on contemporary debates. They explore a diverse range of philosophical issues, from intentionality, external-world scepticism, and the nature of truth, to the extended mind hypothesis, reference magnetism, and new versions of realism. The volume will be a rich and valuable resource for advanced students in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, as well as anyone interested in the relations between language, thought and the world.

Acknowledgments Contributors Introduction: Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? - Jay L. Garfield, Jan Westerhoff 1) Pratityasamutpada and Dharmadhatu in Early Mahayana Buddhism - Chaisit Suwanvarangkul 2) Language and existence in Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Preliminary reflections - Mattia Salvini 3) Reification and Nihilism: The Three Nature Theory and Its Implications - Sonam Thakchoe 4) The Case for Discontinuity - Mark Siderits 5) "Undigested Pride": Bhaviveka on the Dispute Between Madhyamaka and Yogacara - David Eckel 6) Xuanzang and Kuiji on Madhyamaka - Dan Lusthaus 7) Nagarjuna's Yogaaa - Jan Westerhoff 8) Nagarjuna the Yogacarin? Vasubandhu the Madhyamika? On the Middle-way between Realism and Anti-Realism - Eviatar Shulman 9) Without Karma and Nirvana, Buddhism is Nihilism: The Yogacara Contribution to the Doctrine of Emptiness - Jonathan C. Gold 10) Two Topics Concerning Consciousness in Santaraksita's Yogacara-Madhyamaka Syncretism - James Blumenthal 11) I am a Brain in a Vat (Or Perhaps a Pile of Sticks By the Side of the Road) - Jay L. Garfield Index

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.

In this paper, I raise some questions about Pritchard’s (2005) internalist argument for scepticism. I argue that his internalism begs the question in support of scepticism. Correlatively I advance what I take to be a better internalist argument for scepticism, one that leaves open the possibility of empirically adjudicating sceptical hypotheses. I close by discussing what it means to be an internalist.

I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: roughly put, we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, we don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths. However, people unfamiliar with philosophy and cognitive science do know all those things. The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here's a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t epistemically neutralize it, you have to be able to neutralize it to know P; so you don’t know P. But the skeptical hypotheses I plug into it are “real, live” scientific-philosophical hypotheses often thought to be actually true, unlike any of the outrageous traditional skeptical hypotheses (e.g., ‘You’re a brain in a vat’). So I call the resulting skepticism Live Skepticism. Notably, the Live Skeptic's argument goes through even if we adopt the clever anti-skeptical fixes thought up in recent years such as reliabilism, relevant alternatives theory, contextualism, and the rejection of epistemic closure. Furthermore, the scope of Live Skepticism is bizarre: although we don’t know the simple facts noted above, many of us do know that there are black holes and other amazing facts.

Summary A familiar sort of argument for skepticism about the external world appeals to the evidential similarity between what is presumed to be the normal case and the case where one is a brain in a vat (or BIV). An argument from Putnam (1981, ch. 1) has been taken by many to provide an a priori refutation of this sort of skeptical argument. The question I propose to address in this paper is whether Putnam's argument affords us an a priori refutation of skeptical arguments that appeal to the claim that one does not know that one is not a BIV. I will develop a negative answer to this question along two related fronts. Along the first front I defend against new criticisms the common position that the externalism on which Putnam's argument is based entails skepticism about the meanings of sentences in our language and the contents of our thoughts. I do not take this to be a refutation of externalism or externalist arguments; rather, I see this as a motivation to locate the difficulty with arguments for externalism. But if externalism is abandoned, of course, the anti-skeptical argument it has widely been taken to support must be abandoned along with it. I will argue, however, that this is not a significant loss, because along a second front I will argue that externalism cannot be given a priori justification; it is therefore ill-suited to ground an a priori refutation of BIV skepticism anyway.

Nozick (1981) famously advocated a tracking theory of knowledge according to which S knows that p only if S would not believe p if p were false and S would believe p if p were true. These two modal conditions on knowledge, sensitivity and adherence respectively, seem initially to provide a neat solution to the Gettier problem and the problem about scepticism. For instance, the reason you fail to know there�s a barn in fake barn county despite having a justified true belief is that you would still believe there�s a barn if instead you were looking at one of the many barn facades. And while both conditions are met when it comes to your belief that you have hands, your belief that you are not a handless brain in a vat (BIV) is insensitive, and so you cannot know that you are not a BIV. So, your lack of knowledge of the negation of sceptical hypotheses seems to inflict no damage on your putative knowledge of everyday propositions. So far, so good. The problem with the requirement that sensitivity be a necessary condition on knowledge is twofold. First off, given your knowledge that having hands entails not being a BIV, Nozick�s anti-sceptical strategy implies that knowledge is not invariably closed under known entailment. Secondly, there are intuitive cases of insensitive knowledge. Some of these, including Nozick�s own grandmother case, can be handled by insisting that S sensitively believes p just in case S would not believe p using the same method that S uses in the actual world if p were false. But, as Zalabardo notes, method-relativization of sensitivity fails to deal with all such cases, including Sosa�s (1999) rubbish chute. You drop a rubbish bag down the chute in a high-rise condo. Intuitively, moments later you know that �

In this paper we offer an exegesis of Hilary Putnam’s classic argument against the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis offered in his Reason, truth and history (1981). In it, Putnam argues that we cannot be brains in a vat because the semantics of the situation make it incoherent for anyone to wonder whether they are a brain in a vat. Putnam’s argument is that in order for ‘I am a brain in a vat’ to be true, the person uttering it would have to be able to refer successfully to those things: the vat, and the envatted brain. Putnam thinks that reference can’t be secured without relevant kinds of causal relations, which, if envatted, the brain would lack, and so, it fails to be able to meaningfully utter ‘I am a brain in a vat’. We consider the implications of Putnam’s arguments for Cartesian scepticism and suggest that there may yet be some ways out of Putnam’s arguments for the traditional sceptic. In conclusion, we discuss the role of Putnam’s arguments against the brain in a vat hypothesis in his larger defense of his own internal realism against metaphysical realism.

This essay argues that the image of the brain in a vat metaphorically encapsulates articulations of the relationship between the corporeal and the technological dimensions found in cyberpunk fiction and cinema. Cyberpunk is concurrently concerned with actual and imaginary metamorphoses of biological organisms into machines, and of mechanical apparatuses into living entities. Its recurring representation of human beings hooked up to digital matrices vividly recalls the envatted brain activated by electric stimuli, which Hilary Putnam has theorized in the context of contemporary epistemology. At the same time, cyberpunk imaginatively raises the same epistemological questions instigated by Putnam. These concern the cognitive processes associated with the collusion of human and mechanical creatures, and related metaphysical and ethical issues spawned by such processes. As a philosophical trope, the brain in a vat would appear to pivot on the notion of a disembodied subject consisting of sheer mentation. However, literary and cinematic interpretations of the image in cyberpunk persistently foreground the obdurate materiality of the flesh—often in its most grisly and grotesque incarnations.

Brain in a vat scenarios in analytic philosophy feature both brains and technological apparatus. The relation between specimens and technology is an interesting aspect of these scenarios, and in order to explore this relation, I contrast here two kinds of scientific collecting practices: the collection of post-mortem brains versus the compilation of digital brain atlases. This contrast highlights a novel configuration of the relation between brains (in digital media) and new information technologies. This new configuration is traced back to the late 1980s, which saw the rise of a new kind of collection of brains, with a markedly different scope and nature: the neuroscience database. Brains are now easily captured in vivo, so that while post-mortem brains were precious and few, scanners provide an embarrassment of riches in the form of terabytes of data. The rise of the virtual brain as a new digital object for research is reliant on the development of new imaging technologies, but also on the growth of computerised tools, informatics, and electronic networks in this field. These developments contribute to an informational turn in scientific research. This article considers what is involved in the shift in type of object, from the scarce, wet, biological brain to a plentiful, digital, virtual one. It discusses the significance of this new object in terms of collections, institutions, and research practices.

As formulated by Duncan Pritchard and John McDowell, epistemological disjunctivism is the claim that perceptual experience can provide the subject with epistemic justification that is reflectively accessible and externally grounded at the same time. Pritchard calls this thesis ‘the holy grail of epistemology’, since it reconciles two traditionally rival theories of justification, namely epistemic internalism and epistemic externalism. The main objection against epistemological disjunctivism thus understood is that it does not do justice to the well-known internalist intuitions expressed in The New Evil Demon and Brain-in- a-Vat scenarios. I defend epistemological disjunctivism from this objection by indicating that those who apply to such scenarios commit themselves to implausible views in the philosophy of mind. I conclude that epistemological disjunctivism accurately expresses the epistemological attitude of a non-reductive materialist regarding the body-mind problem.

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.

Moore's ‘Proof of an External World’ has evoked a variety of responses from philosophers, including bafflement, indignation and sympathetic reconstruction. I argue that Moore should be understood as following Reid on a variety of points, both epistemological and methodological. Moreover, Moore and Reid are exactly right on all of these points. Hence what I present is a defence of Moore's ‘Proof’, as well as an interpretation. Finally, I argue that the Reid-Moore position is useful for resolving an issue that has recently received attention in epistemology, namely, how is it that one knows that one is not a brain in a vat?

(2002). A Moorean Response to Brain-in-a-Vat Scepticism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 148-163.

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!

Hilary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, he originally introduced his brain in a vat scenario to help illustrate a point about the ‘mind/world relationship.’ In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's discussion has already inspired a substantial body of criticism, but it will be argued here that these criticisms fail to capture the central problem with his argument. Indeed, it will be shown that, rather than simply following from his semantic externalism, Putnam's conclusions about the self-refuting character of the brain in a vat hypothesis are actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world.

I defend a coherence theory of knowledge.2 It is a reply to the sceptic and at the same time an admission that we cannot prove the claims of the sceptic to be in error. We have much to learn from the sceptic, including what knowledge is. I shall articulate, however briefly, a coherence theory of knowledge. I shall then explain what sort of concession to the sceptic it permits. The theory is based on the assumption that we are fallible, that is, that we can err, no matter how well justified we might be in what we accept. Coherence yields a theory of justification, not of truth, but an adequate match between coherence and truth is all that is required to yield knowledge. Let us see how. Knowledge is based on what we accept as true and on the truth of what we accept. But the acceptance of something true does not suffice for knowledge, for we may be unjustified in what we accept and yet accept something true. We may, in fact, proceed by the most irrational methods and fallacious reasoning and still be lucky enough to accept something true. My own view of acceptance is that it differs from belief in constituting a positive evaluation of belief at a metamental level of evaluation. Thus, acceptance, unlike mere belief, constitutes the best efforts of a person to obtain truth and avoid error. But our best efforts can go awry. What, then, must we add to convert our acceptance of something true to knowledge of it? The answer is justification, but justification is the place where the sceptic dwells. We must enter, nonetheless. The sceptic raises objections to what we accept, whether it concerns tables, persons, galaxies or neutrinos. And the sceptic can be expected to raise doubts, hyperbolic doubts from Descartes or more mundane doubts from everyday life. The sceptic might appeal to a powerful demon, if demonology attracts her, or a malicious scientist manipulating our brain in a vat, if science fiction attracts her. Or she might appeal to our dreams, the illusions of sense, or even our familiar lapses of memory. How should I reply? What can I appeal to in order to argue that I know the sceptic is wrong in her hyperbolic and mundane doubts?

(Putnam, and following him Crispin Wright, has 'I am a BIV' where 'Snow is white' occurs in the formulation in the text. What difference does this make? There are three points to be made. (1) Replacement of 'Snow is white' by 'I am a BIV' would make no difference to the soundness of the argument. (2) It would, however, guarantee the argument's availability for first-personal rehearsal by any philosophically knowledgeable reader of this paper, independently of the contingencies of his linguistic resources whether, that is, he be an Alaskan Eskimo or Saharan Arab. (Saharan Arabs are hereby permitted to replace 'Snow is white' throughout the text by 'Palm trees are green'.) (3) Replacement of 'Snow is white' by 'I am a brain in a vat' would enable the conclusion of the argument to be expressed as the claim that the sceptic's position is self-refuting (as, indeed, Putnam does express it), or, as Crispin Wright puts it, absaud. But, as Wright in effect notes towards the end of his paper, so long as the argument refutes the sceptic, that is enough, self-refutation is merely the icing on the cake.) (A)-(C) is an argument for the conclusion that I am not a BIV. The sceptic's claim is that I cannot know that I am not (since I cannot know this without empirical investigation hereafter 'a.p.' and cannot know it with empirical investigation). To get an argument whose conclusion is in explicit contradiction with the sceptic's claim we can restate Putnam's argument as follows

According to ‘internalism’, what mental states people are in depends wholly on what obtains inside their heads. This paper challenges that view without relying on arguments about the identity-conditions of concepts that make up the content of mental states. Instead, it questions the internalist’s underlying assumption that, in Searle’s words, “the brain is all we have for the purpose of representing the world to ourselves”, which neglects the fact that human beings have used their brains to devise methods for extending and enhancing the brain’s own functions, in particular for storing information externally. Although Popper draws attention to this fact, he fails to grasp its psychological implications, concluding instead that there can be knowledge “without a knowing subject”, and so repeating the internalist’s mistake. With equal justice one can conclude, absurdly, that there are ownerless plans, resolutions and shopping-lists. The paper goes on to meet possible internalist counter-arguments.

1. Metaphysical Realists have traditionally relied upon the skeptic to give substance to the idea that truth is, in the words of Hilary Putnam, 'radically non-episternic,’ forever outstripping, in principle at least, the reach of justification. What better model of truth so conceived, after all, than the skeptic's contention that even our firmest convictions might be mistaken in that we might be the victims of demonic deception or the machinations of an evil scientist? But the availability of this favorite model of Realist truth, encapsulated in the claim that we might be ‘brains in avat,’has been called into question by Putnam in the opening chapter ofReason, Truth, and History.Putnam contends that, if we grant the Realist notion of truth, as referentially mediated correspondence to THE WORLD, then, given certain plausible constraints on reference, we can know that we arenotbrains in a vat (or, more accurately, ‘brains in avat'of a particular kind, as we shall see).

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

Robert Nozick’s conception of knowledge has triggered a lot of criticism over the last three decades. According to one kind of objection, Nozick’s conditions of knowledge are either not necessary or not suffi cient or neither necessary nor suffi cient for knowledge. It is not clear how serious this kind of objection is: Nozick did not intend his proposal to constitute a fi nal reductive defi nition of knowledge in terms of individually necessary and jointly suffi cient conditions; whether Nozick’s account can deal with such objections depends on the interpretation of certain aspects of the account as well as on the further development of the account. For all or almost all objections of this kind (see, e.g., Kripke 2011), there have been interesting and perhaps even promising defenses of Nozick’s theory (see, e.g., Adams and Clarke 2005 ). Another kind (see, e.g., Kripke 2011), of objection, however, is more serious. No matter what the exact details of the theory and no matter how one further develops it, it will always be incompatible with a very plausible and important epistemic principle, namely the principle that knowledge is closed under known entailment (the “principle of closure ”). Nozick himself openly stated that his account of knowledge is incompatible with closure (see Nozick 1981 , 206–11 1 ) – and stuck with the theory, dropping closure. Most philosophers went the other way and stuck with closure, giving up on any theory like Nozick’s which is incompatible with closure. If anything is “the killer objection” to Nozick’s account, then it is based on his denial of closure. 2

This chapter gives a brief overview of The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology, which presents state-of-the-art thinking about a very simple and intuitively compelling idea in epistemology. The book sparks renewed interest in sensitivity, perhaps restoring it to the throne of principles in externalist epistemology. Given the resilience of sensitivity, those who wish to reject sensitivity theories will try to uncover criticisms in addition to the several counterexamples that have been proposed and to the allegation that sensitivity forces us to deny closure. In this book, three prominent epistemologists, Jonathan L. Kvanvig, Jonathan Vogel, and Peter Klein, offer novel criticisms of sensitivity theories or steer extant criticisms in new and different directions. The book comprises essays defending the relative merits of safety over sensitivity. The book also includes a critical commentary by Anthony Brueckner on Sherrilyn Roush's (2005) Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science.

This paper argues that if knowledge is defined in terms of probabilistic tracking then the benefits of epistemic closure follow without the addition of a closure clause. (This updates my definition of knowledge in Tracking Truth 2005.) An important condition on this result is found in "Closure Failure and Scientific Inquiry" (2017).

My central aims in this paper are to sketch my view of the starting point and methodology behind anti-individualism, and to use this sketch to clarify the relationship between our ordinary practices of attributing thoughts to a person, on the one hand, and self-knowledge-the familiar fact that in a wide range of ordinary cases a person "knows the contents" of his thoughts without special "empirical" investigation, on the other. My immediate purpose is to expose two misunderstandings of this relationship. The most fundamental and widespread misunderstanding is to think that we can make sense of attributing thoughts to a person even if he can't "know the contents" of his thoughts without special "empirical" investigation. A related misunderstanding is to think that a person can "know the contents" of his thoughts even if he suspends all his "empirical" beliefs. To expose these misunderstandings I'll explore the relationship between anti-individualism and some puzzling skeptical "possibilities" that apparently undermine self-knowledge. In discussing these issues there is a danger of getting swamped by unusually heavy seas of language. I take for granted, for instance, that to say we have self-knowledge is to say we "know the contents" of our own thoughts without special "empirical" investigation. But these words are commonly associated with ideas that prevent us from understanding the relationship be

In this paper I offer a solution to scepticism about the world which neither embraces idealism, nor ends in a stalemate, nor begs the question against the sceptic. In the first part of the paper I explicate the sceptical argument and try to show why it has real force. In the next part of the paper I propose a version of the relevant possibilities approach to scepticism. The central claim of the proposed solution is that a sceptical possibility undermines knowledge only if the possibility is true in some close possible world. But since there is no reason to believe that I am deceived by an evil demon or that I am a brain in a vat in some close possible world, there is no reason to accept an essential premise of the sceptical argument, i.e. that the sceptical scenarios are relevant possibilities. Finally, I argue that the solution proposed does not embrace idealism, end in a stalemate, or beg the question.

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