M Folescu
My current and planned research is in the philosophy of language and mind, including aesthetics. Methodologically, my research program brings the study of historical philosophy together with a critical assessment of contemporary linguistics and empirical psychology to explain some of the philosophical puzzles concerning human cognition.
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For more, see the papers below.
"Mary Shepherd’s Epistemology." (forthcoming: draft available upon request).
In the course of the refutation of Humean skepticism, Mary Shepherd's two main works, Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824) and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation (1827), put forward an original philosophical system that explains how we have knowledge of an external world, of the self and other minds, and of a benevolent deity. In this paper, I will focus on the details of Shepherd’s system that establish that we have knowledge of the existence of an external, mind-independent world. Moreover, I will explain that our knowledge of the nature of this world is limited in certain ways, but it is still quite robust.
"Reid and Shepherd on Beauty and the Subjectivity of Taste." (With Tieying Zhou) (forthcoming: draft available upon request).
In this paper, we first discuss Reid’s views regarding beauty and the internal taste, explaining how we are supposed to make rational judgments of taste, when presented with artifacts. Beauty is considered by him to be a real excellence of an object, of which our internal sense informs us, when in its presence. Several circumstances may corrupt our taste, and their influence prohibits us from making a fully rational judgment. If things were to work properly, we would probably all make the same judgments, when presented with the same artifacts. We argue that this is problematic since it requires an ideal level of education and familiarity with art to actually appreciate both ancient European art and contemporary Chinese art correctly. To solve this problem, we turn our attention to explicating Shepherd’s understanding of beauty along the lines of the traditional regular secondary qualities, like color. We argue that for Shepherd, the key to understanding our relationship with the external world is a certain kind of inter-subjective objectivity. Like Reid, Shepherd also believes that many things can influence our interaction with the external world; however, she sees this as an advantage, rather than a bug of the system. What emerges is a picture on which we have actual, not ideal, correct judgments of taste that allow for all sorts of artifacts to be appreciated as beautiful.
"Thomas Reid on Powers and Abilities." (published version) (penultimate version)
Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally.
"Mary Shepherd on the Role of Proofs in Our Knowledge of First Principles." (published version)
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This paper examines the role of reason in Shepherd's account of acquiring knowledge of the external world. I argue that reason plays an important, but not foundational role. Certain principles enable us to make the required inferences for acquiring knowledge of the external world. These principles are basic, foundational and, more importantly, self-evident and thus justified in other ways than by demonstration. Justificatory demonstrations of these principles are neither required, nor possible. Given the tradition Shepherd is working in, I call these principles first principles. Shepherd should have said that we know the first principles of any science, in general, and that everything which begins to exist must have a cause (the causal maxim henceforth), in particular, via intuition, not via reason. Reasoning about such principles can help their self-evidence shine through in certain cases; their justification, and our being justified in believing them, does not come from this reasoning, however.
"Perception As A Multi-Stage Process: A Reidian Account." (published version)
The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid's brand of anti-skepticism: he believed that our knowledge of the external world is justified. The ground zero of this knowledge is the information we acquire about our environment via perception. Reid argues that perception grounds our knowledge of the external world, even though perception is merely reliable, and not infallible. There are two main features that make perception a weapon of choice in Reid's battle against skepticism: (i) perception (proper) is epistemically immediate; relatedly, (ii) the knowledge acquired via perception(proper)is not the result of learning, experience, or reasoning. Given these normative parameters, this paper argues that, for Reid, the mechanism of perception proper (aka original perception) is a multi-stage process, with sequential and independent stages of acquiring and processing information, which must occur, for a subject to perceive a body with its qualities.
"Relinquishing Control: What Romanian De Se Attitude Reports Teach Us About Immunity To Error Through Misidentification." (published version)
Higginbotham (2003) argued that certain linguistic items of English necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates. For languages where PRO does not play the syntactical role it does in English, one could investigate whether there are obligatory control elements akin to PRO, which force a de se interpretation of the relevant reports, and thus indicate that those reports are immune to error through misidentification (IEM henceforth). Folescu & Higginbotham (2012) argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn't allow for PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood of certain verbs. However, that paper did not account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display IEM in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Moreover, in Romanian, there are reports that do not look as if they're expressing de se attitudes (since they do not have the usual de se triggers) that are, nonetheless, expressing thoughts that have IEM. Their IEM, moreover, is not even lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given these data from Romanian, I argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be explained starting either from the syntactical or lexical structure of a language.
"Using Benevolent Affections To Learn Our Duty." (published version)
The puzzle is this: I argue that for Reid, moral sense needs benevolent affections — i.e. some of our animal, non-cognitive principles of action — to apply rules of duty, since the moral sense alone doesn't always tell us whether the rules apply. But duty can conflict with benevolent affections. In this paper, I argue that Reid takes moral psychology seriously and that he believes that our natural benevolent affections can be used as indicators of duty. Although creative, his account has a major problem, because he does not resolve certain conflicts that arise between what action a duty prescribes and what action a natural affection, associated to that duty, inclines us to do.
"Remembering Events: A Reidean Account of (Episodic) Memory." (published version)
Memory is essential to our functioning as fully developed, social individuals. Without memory to help us retain new information, our lives would be devoid of continuity, so that questions about our identity as persons and our place in the world would be impossible to answer. According to psychologists, there are several types of memory, and one type in particular, the so-called episodic memory, is essential for keeping track of our relationships with things in our environment. One project here is to determine exactly what type of things we are related to via episodic memory. Intuitively, physical objects, broadly construed, and their properties should be on the list. In addition, events seem like good candidates. But it is difficult to understand how we can have direct access to past events, given their essentially ephemeral character. Thomas Reid offers an explanation of how memory of events is possible. This paper presents, criticizes, and amends his view that memory not only preserves our knowledge of the external world, but also contributes to such knowledge, by being essential for the perception of events.
"Thomas Reid's View of Memorial Conception." (published version)
Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons, and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid's notion of perceptual conception (i.e. of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ?
"Thinking About Different Nonexistents Of The Same Kind." (published version)
How is it that, as fiction readers, we are nonplussed by J. K Rowling's prescription to imagine Ronan, Bane, and Magorian, three different centaurs of the Forbidden Forrest at Hogwarts? It is usually held in the philosophical literature on fictional discourse that singular imaginings of fictional objects are impossible, given the blatant nonexistent of such objects. In this paper, I have a dual purpose: (i) on the one hand, to show that, without being committed to Meinongeanism, we can explain the phenomenon of singular imaginings of different nonexistents of the same (fictional) kind; (ii) while, at the same time, to attribute this position to Thomas Reid, thus correcting some misunderstandings of his view on imagination.
"Perceiving Bodies Immediately: Thomas Reid's Insight." (published version)
In An Inquiry into the Human Mind and in Essays on Intellectual Powers, Thomas Reid discusses what kinds of things perceivers are related to in perception. Are these things qualities of bodies, the bodies themselves, or both? This question places him in a long tradition of philosophers concerned with understanding how human perception works in connecting us with the external world. It is still an open question in the philosophy of perception whether the human perceptual system is providing us with representations as of bodies, or only as of their properties. My project in this article is to explain how, on Reid's view, we can have perceptual representations as of bodies. This, in turn, enables him to argue that we have a robust understanding of the world around us, an understanding that would be missing if our perceptual system only supplied us with representations as of free-floating properties of bodies.
"Perceptual and Imaginative Conception: The Distinction Reid Missed." (penultimate draft)
This paper is concerned with Thomas Reid's explanation of conception, understood as playing a key role in perception and as being essentially employed by imagination. I argue that there is a deep-rooted tension in Reid's understanding of conception, and that he conflates two different things when he describes the power of conception as being unitary.
"Two Takes on the De Se." (With James Higginbotham). (penultimate draft)
In this article we consider, relying in part upon comparative semantic evidence from English and Romanian, two contrasting dimensions of the sense in which our thoughts, including the contents of imagination and memory, and extending to objects of fear, enjoyment, and other emotions directed toward worldly happenings, may be distinctively first-personal, or "de se," to use the terminology introduced in Lewis (1979), and exhibit the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (hereafter: IEM) in the sense of Shoemaker (1968) and elsewhere.
