Suspicion toward spirit-related practices, beliefs, and experiences is misplaced and may block a therapeutic avenue for anomalous experiences like hearing voices or sensing the presence of the dead. The argument rests on the claim that such experiences are not inherently pathological but can become so depending on how they are interpreted and reacted to. The paper provides a philosophical foundation for this claim by defending a 'contextualist' view of pathology against 'inherentist' alternatives that hold some or all anomalous experiences are inherently pathological.
Meaning emerges from interactions between individuals and their environments, as shown by signaling games. The concept of consciousness, like all concepts, forms from such games and acquires a sense, from which its reference to the world can be inferred. A representationalist account of consciousness contrasts with an enactivist account. A conscious state can be assumed and fixed by intensional reference. Although consciousness may be excluded from neurobiological explanation, it remains semantically relevant, reflecting a semantic gap between the mental and the physical.
This paper examines the concept of dialectics within the theory of linguistic bodies, an enactivist framework. The author initially presents dialectics as having three aspects: ontological, methodological, and a dialectical model. Drawing on enactivist linguistic notions of concreteness and abstraction, the author then proposes reconceiving dialectics as a two-fold concept—methodological and epistemological. This reconceptualization aims to avoid a paradox that arises from acknowledging three ontological enactivist claims alongside certain assumptions of the methodological approach. The paper thus offers a theoretical argument about how to understand dialectics in this context.
A zombie world is one where all microphysical facts match our world but no one is conscious; a zombie is an individual without conscious experience despite identical microphysics; an inverted has qualitatively different experiences. The first premise of Chalmers' conceivability argument against materialism holds that such scenarios are ideally conceivable. This paper rejects that premise, arguing that current physics provides no clear concept of the physical to contrast with the non-physical, so zombie worlds, zombies, and inverts are only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable—the Obscurity of the Physical Objection.