Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel
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Mind and World: Beyond the Externalism/Internalism Debate
Research Proposal Mind and World: Beyond the Externalism/Internalism Debate Sanjit Chakraborty Research Scholar Department of Philosophy Jadavpur University Background For the last few years the concept of the natural kind terms has haunted me. My main concern has been regarding the location of the meaning of these terms. Are meanings of the natural kind terms in the head or in the world? This question has been the most pressing in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language. I have realized that we cannot separate mind from the world. I had in the beginning only a layman‟s conception regarding mind, meaning and the world. When I entered the field of philosophy inspired by Hilary Putnam, I found that semantic externalism is a vexing issue involving a vast area. The location of content is at the core of the metaphysical debate regarding internalism and externalism in the sense that internalists believe that mental proprieties are intrinsic only if they preserve across world identity of internal replicas. Externalism is opposed to this thinking. For externalists, mental properties are in many cases dependent on physical or social environment. The linguistic strategy also maintains a difference between internalism and externalism regarding the mental content. Descriptivism focuses on general terms that consist in descriptive content and leads to mode of presentation of reference through sense. Besides, the causal theory of reference refutes descriptivism to ensure that there is a causal chain of reference between words and 1 objects that help us to identify agent‟s thought through an identification of its relation with external environment. -
Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: an Introduction
Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction Alan Richardson English, Boston College Francis F. Steen Communication Studies, UCLA Literary studies and the cognitive sciences, pursuing common interests in language, mental acts, and linguistic artifacts, have developed markedly different approaches to similar phenomena of reading, imaginative involve- ment, and textual patterning. Until quite recently, the distance between them has drawn more attention than their possible convergence (Franchi and Güzeldere ). A number of literary theorists and critics, however, have steadily been producing work that finds its inspiration, its method- ology, and its guiding paradigms through a dialogue with one or more fields within cognitive science: artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, post- Chomskian linguistics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and evolution- ary biology. Reuven Tsur () has been developing his ‘‘cognitive poet- ics’’ since the s; the prominent psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland (: ) demonstrated the advantages of attending to the ‘‘more powerful psychology’’ emerging from cognitive neuroscience in ; Mark Turner (: viii) advanced his far-reaching project of a ‘‘cognitive rhetoric’’ in ; and Ellen Spolsky (: ) trenchantly brought a theory of ‘‘cogni- tive instability’’ to bear on literary interpretation in . These and like- minded critics respond to the limitations (or, in Spolsky’s case, missed op- portunities) of poststructuralist conceptions of meaning and interpretation by questioning the reigning models in the field, whether in the interest of Poetics Today : (Spring ). Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/23/1/1/458295/01.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 2 Poetics Today 23:1 displacing, reworking, supplementing, or fundamentally regrounding them (Hart ). -
Kedwards CV Inprogress.Pages
Philosophy Department 541 Hall of Languages Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244-1170 [email protected] Kevan Edwards 31 5-416-2700 (cell) ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2008 - Assistant Professor, Syracuse University 2006-2008 Assistant Professor, University of Kansas EDUCATION 2000-2006 Ph.D. in Philosophy, Rutgers University, October 2006 2000 B.A., Specialist in Philosophy, with high distinction, University of Toronto DISSERTATION Oct. 2006 Referentialism without Compromise: Semantics at the Intersection of Mind and Language Committee: Jerry Fodor, Barry Loewer, Stephen Neale, Georges Rey PUBLICATIONS 2014 "Keeping (Direct) Reference in Mind". Noûs 48(2), pp. 342-367. 2013 “Concepts”. Oxford Bibliographies (published online Sept. 30, 2013) http:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/ obo-9780195396577-0220.xml 2012 “Review of ‘The Extended Mind’, Edited by Richard Menary.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy: 1-3. 2011 “Higher-level Concepts and Their Heterogeneous Implementations: A Polemical Response to Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts”. Philosophical Psychology, 24(1), 119-133. 2010 “Review of David Thompson, Daniel Dennett”. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20167. 2010 “Unity Amidst Heterogeneity in Theories of Concepts”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 210-211. [Commentary on Machery, Doing Without Concepts (OUP)] 2010 “Concept Referentialism and the Role of Empty Concepts”. Mind & Language, 25(1), 89-118. !1 of !6 2009 “Referring When Push Comes to Shove”. In New Waves in the Philosophy of Language (pp. 60-86). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009 “What Concepts Do”. Synthese, 170(2), 289-310. PRESENTATIONS / COMMENTS / CHAIRED SESSIONS 2014 “The Concept of a Concept, in Philosophy, Psychology, and (Hopefully) Beyond. -
Anthropology's Disenchantment with the Cognitive Revolution
Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (2012) 354–361 Copyright Ó 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01199.x Anthropology’s Disenchantment With the Cognitive Revolution1 Richard A. Shweder Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago Received 25 June 2011; received in revised form 3 November 2011; accepted 28 November 2011 Abstract Beller, Bender, and Medin should be congratulated for their generous attempt at expressive aca- demic therapy for troubled interdisciplinary relationships. In this essay, I suggest that a negative answer to the central question (‘‘Should anthropology be part of cognitive science?’’) is not necessar- ily distressing, that in retrospect the breakup seems fairly predictable, and that disenchantment with the cognitive revolution is nothing new. Keywords: Cognitive revolution; Behaviorism; Anthropology; Jerome Bruner; Roy D’Andrade; Clifford Geertz; Roger Shepard Some of the leaders of the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s began parting from the cause almost as soon as it triumphed. Jerome Bruner, for example, who always enjoyed writing essays for both the left hand and the right hand, turned to hermeneutics, the study of law, and the interpretation of narratives (see Bruner, 1979, 1990). Even in the early days of the rebellion Bruner was attentive to language pragmatics, which may be one reason he named his 1960s big tent interdisciplinary center at Harvard University the ‘‘Center for Cognitive Studies’’ and not the ‘‘Center for Cognitive Science.’’ Bruner had just as much interest in the humanistic writings of E. H. Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, and Clifford Ge- ertz as in the latest claims about basic ⁄fundamental⁄universal cognitive processes coming out of experimental labs situated in Cambridge, London, or Geneva. -
Review of Jerry Fodor, the Mind Doesn't Work That Way
The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (review) Ray Jackendoff Language, Volume 78, Number 1, March 2002, pp. 164-170 (Review) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2002.0024 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/19286 [ Access provided at 10 May 2020 20:12 GMT from Linguistic Society of America ] 164 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 78, NUMBER 1 (2002) malist studies as the brief summary of the chapters has hopefully shown. All articles complement the work of the festschrift’s honoree, are well-written, and contain interesting data as well as intriguing analyses, pushing the minimalist spirit further ahead. REFERENCES BOSˇKOVIC´,Zˇ ELJKO. 1994. D-structure, theta-criterion, and movement into theta-positions. Linguistic Analysis 24.247–86. MM. 1997. Superiority effects with multiple wh-fronting in Serbo-Croatian. Lingua 102.1–20. CHOMSKY,NOAM. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MM. 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. GRIMSHAW,JANE, and ARMIN MESTER. 1988. Light verbs and -marking. Linguistic Inquiry 19.205–32. HORNSTEIN,NORBERT. 1995. Logical form: From GB to minimalism. Oxford: Blackwell. KAYNE,RICHARD S. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ZAS Ja¨gerstr. 10–11 10117 Berlin Germany [[email protected]] The mind doesn’t work that way: Thescopeand limits of computational psychology. By JERRY FODOR. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. 126. Reviewed by RAY JACKENDOFF, Brandeis University* As has been his wont in recent years, Jerry Fodor offers here a statement of deepest pessimism about the possibility of doing cognitive science except in a very limited class of subdomains. -
Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality, by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig
446 Book Reviews claim that should be accepted independently of whatever moral fiction one accepts. At any rate, all those who accept any moral fiction whatsoever should also accept the impermissibility of intransigence. Now, this is starting to look Downloaded from suspiciously like a fiction-independent moral truth. And if there is one such, why not more? Indeed, if there are any substantive constraints on acceptable moral fictions then there will inevitably be substantive moral propositions that are true in all allowable fictions. But then fictionalism is starting to look a bit like good old-fashioned moral realism. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ Moral Fictionalism is not an easy read. This is partly, but not entirely, a function of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and the novelty of Kal- deron’s position. But it is also a function of the fundamental tension implicit in fictionalism: of wanting to take morality seriously, but not being quite able to do so. In Kalderon’s hands, this plays out as the conflict between the imper- sonal and absolute authority of morality and the permissibility of a personal and recalcitrant moral intransigence. The book starts out by boldly affirming both and drawing some remarkable consequences, but it ends up, somewhat uneasily, affirming authority and retracting intransigence. In spite of this at Indiana University Libraries Technical Services/Serials Acquisitions on October 6, 2014 uneasy resting place, Kalderon advances the field in two important ways. Firstly, in combining factualism with non-cognitivism he carves out a radically new version of hermeneutic fictionalism. Secondly, his account focuses an interesting new light on the nature of non-cognitivism and that cluster of arguments directed against non-cognitivism known as the Frege-Geach objec- tion. -
Generics Analysis Canberra Plan.Pdf
Philosophical Perspectives, 26, Philosophy of Mind, 2012 CONCEPTS, ANALYSIS, GENERICS AND THE CANBERRA PLAN1 Mark Johnston Princeton University Sarah-Jane Leslie2 Princeton University My objection to meanings in the theory of meaning is not that they are abstract or that their identity conditions are obscure, but that they have no demonstrated use.3 —Donald Davidson “Truth and Meaning” From time to time it is said that defenders of conceptual analysis would do well to peruse the best empirically supported psychological theories of concepts, and then tailor their notions of conceptual analysis to those theories of what concepts are.4 As against this, there is an observation — traceable at least as far back to Gottlob Frege’s attack on psychologism in “The Thought” — that might well discourage philosophers from spending a week or two with the empirical psychological literature. The psychological literature is fundamentally concerned with mental representations, with the mental processes of using these in classification, characterization and inference, and with the sub-personal bases of these processes. The problem is that for many philosophers, concepts could not be mental items. (Jerry Fodor is a notable exception, we discuss him below.) We would like to set out this difference of focus in some detail and then propose a sort of translation manual, or at least a crucial translational hint, one which helps in moving between philosophical and psychological treatments of concepts. Then we will consider just how, given the translation, the relevant -
The Cognitive Revolution: a Historical Perspective
Review TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.3 March 2003 141 The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective George A. Miller Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 1-S-5 Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Cognitive science is a child of the 1950s, the product of the time I went to graduate school at Harvard in the early a time when psychology, anthropology and linguistics 1940s the transformation was complete. I was educated to were redefining themselves and computer science and study behavior and I learned to translate my ideas into the neuroscience as disciplines were coming into existence. new jargon of behaviorism. As I was most interested in Psychology could not participate in the cognitive speech and hearing, the translation sometimes became revolution until it had freed itself from behaviorism, tricky. But one’s reputation as a scientist could depend on thus restoring cognition to scientific respectability. By how well the trick was played. then, it was becoming clear in several disciplines that In 1951, I published Language and Communication [1], the solution to some of their problems depended cru- a book that grew out of four years of teaching a course at cially on solving problems traditionally allocated to Harvard entitled ‘The Psychology of Language’. In the other disciplines. Collaboration was called for: this is a preface, I wrote: ‘The bias is behavioristic – not fanatically personal account of how it came about. behavioristic, but certainly tainted by a preference. There does not seem to be a more scientific kind of bias, or, if there is, it turns out to be behaviorism after all.’ As I read that Anybody can make history. -
Jerry Fodor · Why Pigs Don't Have Wings: the Case Against Natural Selection
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. (More Information) × LOG IN REGISTER FOR ONLINE ACCESS Search the LRB LATEST ARCHIVE BOOKSHOP CONTACT US ABOUT THE LRB SUBSCRIBE INTRODUCTION BACK ISSUES CONTRIBUTORS CATEGORIES LETTERS AUDIO VIDEO Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007 facebook214 twitter 14 share email letter cite print pages 19-22 | 5138 words ‘We are larger | smaller now at our Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings most unequal Jerry Fodor since 1940’ You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Ben Rawlence Register for free and enjoy 24 hours of access to the entire LRB archive @ LRB blog Jerry Fodor has of over 12,500 essays and reviews. almost finished a book, with Zenon Pylyshyn, Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed about the semantics of with at least a presumption of happiness ever after. There are cross-currents and mental representation. undercurrents that make Meistersinger’s libretto subtle in ways that the librettos of He teaches at Rutgers. operas usually aren’t. But for once Nietzsche is nowhere in sight and nobody dies; the territory is closer to The Barber of Seville than to The Ring. Yet, in the first scene of Act 3, the avuncular Hans Sachs, whose benevolent interventions smooth the lovers’ MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR course, delivers an aria of bitter reflection on the human condition. -
Ronald Endicott, “Multiple Realizability” (Final Draft) Forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2Nd Edition, Macmillan Press, 2005
Ronald Endicott, “Multiple Realizability” (Final Draft) Forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, MacMillan Press, 2005 Multiple realizability is a key issue in debates over the nature of mind and reduction in the sciences. The subject consists of two parts: “multiplicity” and “realizability.” “Multiplicity” designates a kind of variability in the mechanism and materials from which a particular type of thing can be made. “Realizability” designates a specific relation that exists when there is the stated variability. Realizability Apart from the broad folk notion of realization meaning that a thing is “made real,” philosophers apply several technical notions to paradigm cases such computational states realized by engineering states, minds realized by brains, and persons realized by their bodies. The technical notions fall into three broad traditions: “mathematical,” “logico- semantic,” and “metaphysical.” The mathematical tradition equates realization with a form of mapping between objects. Generally speaking, x mathematically realizes y because elements of y map onto elements of x. The notion is useful for many purposes, for example, when constructing a formal model of a particular domain. However, since mapping extends to models as well as reality, it fails to distinguish between “simulated” versus “genuine” realizations. Heavenly stars can be mapped onto grains of sand, but grains of sand do not realize heavenly stars in any genuine sense. Similarly, the mental states described by a cognitive program can be mapped onto unthinking groups of things, but unthinking groups of things do not realize mental states in any genuine sense (Block, 1978). Hence, to capture what is essential to genuine realization, William Lycan (1987) adds ideas about evolutionary function, while David Chalmers (1994) emphasizes facts about causal structure. -
Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental States
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 811–833 www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa Functionalism, computationalism, and mental states Gualtiero Piccinini Department of Philosophy, Washington University, Campus Box 1073, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA Received 25 November 2003; received in revised form 24 February 2004 Abstract Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional rela- tions between them, we should reject these assumptions. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Functionalism; Computationalism; Computational functionalism; Mental states; Computa- tional theory of mind; Functional analysis 1. Introduction Particularly striking in retrospect was the widespread failure to distinguish the computational program in psychology from the functionalist program in meta- physics . (For an instance where the two are run together, see Fodor 1968[b]). (Fodor, 2000, p. 105 n. 4) Fodor is right: some philosophers of mind have conflated functionalism and computationalism about mental states. To a first approximation, functionalism is the metaphysical view that mental states are individuated by their functional rela- tions with mental inputs, outputs, and other mental states. Functionalism per se is E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Piccinini). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.02.003 812 G.Piccinini / Stud.Hist.Phil.Sci.35 (2004) 811–833 neutral on how those functional relations should be characterized. -
A Diatribe on Jerry Fodor's the Mind Doesn't Work That Way1
PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ Yes, It Does: A Diatribe on Jerry Fodor’s The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way1 Susan Schneider Department of Philosophy University of Pennsylvania 423 Logan Hall 249 S. 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 [email protected] © S. Schneider 2007 PSYCHE 13 (1), April 2007 REVIEW OF: J. Fodor, 2000. The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 144 pages, ISBN-10: 0262062127 Abstract: The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way is an expose of certain theoretical problems in cognitive science, and in particular, problems that concern the Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). The problems that Fodor worries plague CTM divide into two kinds, and both purport to show that the success of cognitive science will likely be limited to the modules. The first sort of problem concerns what Fodor has called “global properties”; features that a mental sentence has which depend on how the sentence interacts with a larger plan (i.e., set of sentences), rather than the type identity of the sentence alone. The second problem concerns what many have called, “The Relevance Problem”: the problem of whether and how humans determine what is relevant in a computational manner. However, I argue that the problem that Fodor believes global properties pose for CTM is a non-problem, and that further, while the relevance problem is a serious research issue, it does not justify the grim view that cognitive science, and CTM in particular, will likely fail to explain cognition. 1. Introduction The current project, it seems to me, is to understand what various sorts of theories of mind can and can't do, and what it is about them in virtue of which they can or can't do it.