Brian Keeley

Pitzer College

Where does entertaining (or promoting) conspiracy theories stand with respect to rational inquiry? According to one view, conspiracy theorists are open-minded skeptics, being careful not to accept uncritically common wisdom, exploring alternative explanations of events no matter how unlikely they might seem at first glance. Seen this way, they are...

Naturalism concerning the mental is the belief that the tools and concepts of natural science are necessary to achieve an understanding of the mind. After briefly setting the stage of naturalism and the mind, I pose the question of naturalism about the mind in its historical context, comparing the development of naturalist approaches to philosophy...

In Western common sense, one speaks of there being five human senses, a claim apparently challenged by the biological and psychological sciences. Part of this challenge comes in the form of claiming the existence of additional senses (proprioception, pain, a human pheromone sense). Part of the challenge comes from positing multiple senses where com...

This article looks at the role of neurobiology in explaining the distinction among the senses. It presents the Aristotelian account of the senses and presents the view that that psychological facts alone are sufficient to account for the different senses, or at least that organ criterion is far less important than some have argued. It discusses Joh...

Traditional secular conspiracy theories and explanations of worldly events in terms of supernatural agency share interesting epistemic features. This paper explores what can be called "supernatural conspiracy theories," by considering such supernatural explanations through the lens of recent work on the epistemology of secular conspiracy theories....

Traditional secular conspiracy theories and explanations of worldly events in terms of supernatural agency share interesting epistemic features. This paper explores what can be called “supernatural conspiracy theories”, by considering such supernatural explanations through the lens of recent work on the epistemology of secular conspiracy theories....

INTRODUCTION There are two ways to do the unexpected. The banal way – let’s call it the expectedly unexpected – is simply to chart the waters of what is and is not done, and then set out to do something different. For a philosopher, this can be done by embracing a method of non sequitor or by perhaps inverting some strongly held assumption of the f...

For over three decades, Paul Churchland has been a provocative and controversial philosopher of mind and of science. He is most famous as an advocate of 'eliminative materialism', whereby he suggests that our commonsense understanding of our own minds is radically defective and that the science of brain demonstrates this (just as an understanding o...

Paul Churchland has been viewed as a provocative, controversial philosopher of mind and science for over three decades. This collection offers an introduction to his work as well as a critique of some of his most famous philosophical positions, and includes contributions by established as well as promising young philosophers. It is intended to comp...

The charge that anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals is a fallacy is itself largely misguided and mythic. Anthropomorphism in the study of animal behavior is placed in its original, theological context. Having set the historical stage, I then discuss its relationship to a number of other, related issues: the role of anecdotal evidence, the taxonomy...

word count= 164) The event of Lee Basham's essay "Malevolent Global Conspiracy" is used to reflect further on the epistemic status of attempts to explain social phenomena by means of conspiracies. After presenting an update on the status of conspiracy theories surrounding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, I synopsize the philosophical problem of cons...

The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and ot...

How ought we differentiate the senses? For example, what distinguishes vision from audition from olfaction, and how many senses are there, exactly? I argue that these questions come in two versions. First, there is the traditional problem of individuating the senses in humans, which goes back to Aristotle's solution that we have five senses. Second...

Word count (this entire document): 3,475 The event of Lee Basham’s essay “Malevolent Global Conspiracy ” is used to reflect further on the epistemic status of attempts to explain social phenomena by means of conspiracies. After presenting an update on the status of conspiracy theories surrounding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, I synopsize the phil...

Neuroethology is a branch of biology that studies the neural basis of naturally occurring animal behavior. This science, particularly a recent program called computational neuroethology, has a similar structure to the interdisciplinary endeavor of cognitive science. I argue that it would be fruitful to conceive of cognitive science as the computati...

This paper explores the relationship between psychology and neurobiology in the context of cognitive science. Are the sciences that constitute cognitive science independent and theoretically autonomous, or is there a necessary interaction between them? I explore Fodor's Multiple Realization Thesis (MRT) which starts with the fact of multiple realiz...

It is often heard in Artificial Life (A-Life) circles that contemporary biology studies life-as-we-know-it (an Earth based, carbon chain phenomenon), whereas A-Life takes as its domain of study life-as-it-could-be. But lacking a clear definition of "life " the question arises: how would we recognize life-as-it-could-be, if we managed to create it?...

Are attributions of content and function determinate, or is there no fact of the matter to be fixed? Daniel Dennett has argued in favor of indeterminacy and concludes that, in practice, content and function cannot be fixed. The discovery of an electrical modality in vertebrates offers one concrete instance where attributions of function and content...

As the end of the Millennium approaches, conspiracy theories are increasing in number and popularity. In this short essay, I offer an analysis of conspiracy theories inspired by Hume's discussion of miracles. My first conclusion is that whereas Hume can argue that miracles are, by definition, explanations we are not warranted in believing, there is...

This paper is a complement to the recent wealth of literature suggesting a strong philosophical relationship between artificial life (A-Life) and artificial intelligence (AI). I seek to point out where this analogy seems to break down, or where it would lead us to draw incorrect conclusions about the philosophical situation of A-Life. First, I sket...

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there...

This paper is a complement to the recent wealth of literature suggesting a strong philosophical relationship between artificial life (A-Life) and artificial intelligence (AI). I seek to point out where this analogy seems to break down, or where it would lead us to draw incorrect conclusions about the philosophical situation of A-Life. First, I sket...

This paper is a complement to the recent wealth of literature suggesting a strong philosophical relationship between artificial life (A-Life) and artificial intelligence (AI). I seek to point out where this analogy seems to break down, or where it would lead us to draw incorrect conclusions about the philosophical situation of A-Life. First, I sket...