Gibson's Ecological Approach: Perceiving What Exists
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1 Merleau-Ponty for Cognitive Science
Chapter 1 1 Merleau-Ponty for Cognitive Science Preamble: A Remarkable Convergence My attention was first drawn to the relevance of Merleau-Ponty for cognitive science through reading Andy Clark's Being There (1997). Clark indicates that Merleau-Ponty's depiction of everyday intelligent activities in terms of "the playing out of whole organism-body-world synergies" is close in spirit and execution to Clark's own project. Moreover, Clark is particularly fond of Merleau-Ponty's stress on the activity of the organism in perception, and he coins the term 'continuous reciprocal causation' to describe this interaction between perceiver and perceived. Clark thus sees Merleau-Ponty as presenting a kind of 'free-form interactive dance' view of perception, which he endorses on the grounds of its compatibility with "recent work in the computational foundations of animate vision." (Clark 1997, p172) I want to take a moment to look at the compatibility that Clark refers to – with the findings of researchers in animate vision – which I think is surprisingly compelling. I offer this as a kind of intuition pump for appreciating the affinity between Merleau-Ponty's writing and certain developments within cognitive science. In the main part of this chapter, I'll go through the ways in which this affinity has been cashed out, supported, and formalised. Merleau-Ponty and animate vision Animate vision is a new engineering paradigm of robot vision which seeks to replace the traditional account of a system which constructs and updates an accurate 3-D model of the viewer's surroundings. This traditional approach is often unfavourably referred to as passive or pure vision and is generally criticised on the grounds that it makes infeasible computational demands on the observer robot, especially when it comes to tasks involving a moving object, a moving observer, or, in the worst case, both. -
Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition*
1 Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition* In recent decades, an intriguing view of human cognition has garnered increasing support. According to this view, which I will call ‘the hypothesis of extended cognition’ (‘HEC’, hereafter), human cognitive processing literally extends into the environment surrounding the organism, and human cognitive states literally comprise—as wholes do their proper parts— elements in that environment; in consequence, while the skin and scalp may encase the human organism, they do not delimit the thinking subject.1 The hypothesis of extended cognition should provoke our critical interest. Acceptance of HEC would alter our approach to research and theorizing in cognitive science and, it would seem, significantly change our conception of persons. Thus, if HEC faces substantive difficulties, these should be brought to light; this paper is meant to do just that, exposing some of the problems HEC must overcome if it is to stand among leading views of the nature of human cognition. The essay unfolds as follows: The first section consists of preliminary remarks, mostly about the scope and content of HEC as I will construe it. Sections II and III clarify HEC by situating it with respect to related theses one finds in the literature—the hypothesis of embedded cognition * I would like to thank Aaron Meskin, David Chalmers, Philip Robbins, and Josh Osbun for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Shorter versions of the paper were presented at the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference (2001), Texas Tech University, and the 2002 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. -
Mieli, Maailma Ja Referenssi. John Mcdowellin Mielenfilosofian Ja
JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH 328 Petteri Niemi Mieli, maailma ja referenssi John McDowellin mielen filosofian ja semantiikan kriittinen tarkastelu ja ontologinen täydennys JYVÄSKYLÄN YLIOPISTO JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH 328 Petteri Niemi Mieli, maailma ja referenssi John McDowellin mielenfilosofian ja semantiikan kriittinen tarkastelu ja ontologinen täydennys Esitetään Jyväskylän yliopiston yhteiskuntatieteellisen tiedekunnan suostumuksella julkisesti tarkastettavaksi yliopiston päärakennuksen salissa C1 tammikuun 12. päivänä 2008 kello 12. Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Jyväskylä, in the Main Building, Hall C1, on January 12, 2008 at 12 o'clock noon. UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2008 Mieli, maailma ja referenssi John McDowellin mielenfilosofian ja semantiikan kriittinen tarkastelu ja ontologinen täydennys JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH 328 Petteri Niemi Mieli, maailma ja referenssi John McDowellin mielenfilosofian ja semantiikan kriittinen tarkastelu ja ontologinen täydennys UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2008 Editors Jussi Kotkavirta Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy/philosophy, University of Jyväskylä Irene Ylönen, Marja-Leena Tynkkynen Publishing Unit, University Library of Jyväskylä URN:ISBN:9789513931988 ISBN 978-951-39-3198-8 (PDF) ISBN 978-951-39-3030-1 (nid.) ISSN 0075-4625 Copyright ©2008 , by University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä University Printing House, Jyväskylä 2008 ABSTRACT Niemi, Petteri Mind, World and Reference: A Critical Examination and Ontological Supple- ment of John McDowell’s Philosophy of Mind and Semantics Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2008, 283 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research 0075-4625; 328) ISBN 978-951-39-3198-8 (PDF), 978-951-39-3030-1 (nid.) Summary Diss. -
Cg 2014 Alexander D. Morgan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
c 2014 Alexander D. Morgan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ON THE MATTER OF MEMORY: NEURAL COMPUTATION AND THE MECHANISMS OF INTENTIONAL AGENCY by ALEXANDER D. MORGAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Philosophy written under the direction of Frances Egan and Robert Matthews and approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION On the Matter of Memory: Neural Computation and the Mechanisms of Intentional Agency by ALEXANDER D. MORGAN Dissertation Directors: Frances Egan & Robert Matthews Humans and other animals are intentional agents; they are capable of acting in ways that are caused and explained by their reasons. Reasons are widely held to be medi- ated by mental representations, but it is notoriously difficult to understand how the intentional content of mental representations could causally explain action. Thus there is a puzzle about how to `naturalize' intentional agency. The present work is motivated by the conviction that this puzzle will be solved by elucidating the neural mechanisms that mediate the cognitive capacities that are distinctive of intentional agency. Two main obstacles stand in the way of developing such a project, which are both manifestations of a widespread sentiment that, as Jerry Fodor once put it, \notions like computational state and representation aren't accessible in the language of neu- roscience". First, C. Randy Gallistel has argued extensively that the mechanisms posited by neuroscientists cannot function as representations in an engineering sense, since they allegedly cannot be manipulated by the computational operations required to generate structurally complex representations. -
Ruth Millikan/Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford, 2017) Summary Notes
Ruth Millikan/Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford, 2017) Summary Notes The notes below were produced by Dorit Bar-On in preparation for meetings of a reading group on Beyond Concepts and lightly edited by Ruth Millikan. The notes were prepared for online publication with the help of Drew Johnson. (Bullets in italics are reader glosses, comments, or questions.) Part I: Unicepts Introduction to Part I 0.1 Overview (p.1-2) - Kant’s q: How is knowledge possible? (p.3) Þ How is it possible for creatures with cognitive systems like ours to know the natural world? ● What must the natural world be like so that creatures like us could learn/acquire information about it? ● What must our cognitive system be like so that it can represent such a world? ● How can language be informative? - Priority claim: natural ontology comes before cognition (‘In the beginning there was the natural world’.) “Knowledge of the world is made possible in large part by the dense clumpings together of entities with common properties that constitute, first and foremost, the endurance of individuals over time, then the existence of real though rough kinds, and finally the existence of real categories of real kinds that can support meta-induction.” (p.6) 0.2 Selection Processes (p.4-6) - Backdrop: Using contemporary evolutionary theory and its analogues in learning and cultural selection to account for intentionality. - Background principle: “[I]ntentional explanation in psychology, explanation by reference to beliefs, desires, and so forth, is explanation by reference to a kind of engineering principle exemplified in mechanisms that have been formed by selection processes, natural selection, learning, cultural selection. -
PHIL-36 - Philosophy of Language Amherst College Spring 2009 – Visiting Prof
PHIL-36 - Philosophy of Language Amherst College Spring 2009 – Visiting Prof. Kevin C. Klement (UMass faculty member) Mondays and Wednesdays 12:30pm-1:50pm in Cooper House 201. Course description: “Caesar was stabbed.” With those words, I can make a claim about someone who lived in the distant past. How is that possible? How do our words succeed in picking out particular portions of reality, even ones with which we have had no contact? How does language enable us to convey thoughts about everything from Amherst College, to the hopes of a friend, to the stars beyond our galaxy? What are the thoughts, or the meanings, that our words carry? And whatever they turn out to be, how do they come to be associated with our words: through some mental activity on our part, or instead through our shared use of language? This course covers selected topics in 20th century analytic philosophy of language, including meaning, reference, naming, truth, speech acts, propositional attitudes, translation, and the nature of linguistic representation. Contact info: You may e-mail me at [email protected], which is often the best way to reach me. I have a mailbox in the Amherst College philosophy department office (208 Cooper House). My office at UMass is 353 Bartlett Hall, and I also have access to Prof. Alexander George’s Office (307 Cooper House) for meetings at Amherst College. My UMass office phone is 545-5784. My office hours there are Tuesdays 2:30-3:30pm, Thursdays 11am-12pm and other times by appointment. I am also happy to make an appointment to meet with you at AC instead. -
Some Strands of Wittgenstein's Normative Pragmatism, and Some
Some Strands of Wittgenstein’s Normative Pragmatism, and Some Strains of his Semantic Nihilism ROBERT B. BRANDOM §1. Strands of Normative Pragmatism FIRST READ THE TRIUMVIRATE of classical American pragmatists as an I undergraduate, under the tutelage of Bruce Kuklick. He saw them as instituting a vibrant philosophical tradition that was visibly continued not only by C. I. Lewis, but by his students Goodman and Quine. (More controversially, but I believe, also correctly, he further saw the semantic holism Quine shared with Sellars as picking up a central strand of the idealist tradition —represented in the Golden Age by Lewis’s teacher Josiah Royce— with which pragmatism had always been in conversation.) My Doktorvater Richard Rorty then made familiar to me an understanding of pragmatism sufficiently capacious to include such disparate and reciprocally unsympathetic philosophers as the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, as well as Sellars, and Quine’s student Davidson. I came to think of pragmatism as a house with many mansions, comprising a number of more or less closely related but distinct and separable commitments, relating various thinkers in the way Wittgenstein made famous under the rubric of “family resemblances.” Excavating the conceptual antecedents of those various pragmatist views led me to see some of the most central among them as rooted firmly in the thought of the German Idealists, Kant and Hegel —as Peirce and Dewey had explicitly avowed1. Among the most important of these antecedents is a thought that I take it serves as a fundamental orienting insight for the later Wittgenstein. This is the idea that intentionality is through and through a normative phenomenon. -
Why Evolution Has to Matter to Cognitive Psychology and to Philosophy of Mind Joëlle Proust
Why evolution has to matter to cognitive psychology and to philosophy of mind Joëlle Proust To cite this version: Joëlle Proust. Why evolution has to matter to cognitive psychology and to philosophy of mind. Biologi- cal Theory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), 2007, 2, pp.0-00. ijn_00139330 HAL Id: ijn_00139330 https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00139330 Submitted on 30 Mar 2007 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 1 In: Biological Theory, 2007, 2 Why evolution has to matter to cognitive psychology and to philosophy of mind Joëlle Proust CNRS Philosophy of mind has essentially been shaped by philosophers of language, epistemologists and philosophers of science, such as Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Jerry Fodor and Fred Drestke. Much valuable work has been done in their wake, in the logical, semantic and pragmatic analysis of belief-desire attribution, in the theory of intentionality and in the analysis of meaning as well as in the exploration of the mental content involved in all kinds of propositional attitudes (perception, memory, emotion, etc.). This line of research permeated various other domains in cognitive science, such as the development of mentalisation, the psychology of action and of reasoning, psycholinguistics, cognitive anthropology and A.I. -
Function, Natural Design, and Animal Behavior
FUNCTION, NATURAL DESIGN, AND ANIMAL BEHAVIOR: 3.5 WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY? PHILOSOPHICAL AND ETHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 3.6 SHOULD TELEOLOGICAL NOTIONS IN BIOLOGY BE ANALYZED DIRECTLY IN TERMS OF NATURAL SELECTION? Colin Allen1 and Marc Bekoff2 3.7 NATURAL SELECTION ACCOUNTS: FORWARD LOOKING OR BACKWARD LOOKING? 1 4. ATTRIBUTING FUNCTIONS TO BEHAVIOR: THE ROLE OF Department of Philosophy EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE Texas A&M University 5. PLURALISM ABOUT NOTIONS OF FUNCTION College Station, TX 77843-4237 Part Four: Distinguishing Design from Function <[email protected]> 1. DESIGN 2. TWO SENSES OF DESIGN IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TELEOLOGY 2 Department of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology 3. DESIGN AND FUNCTION IN PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXTS University of Colorado 4. NATURAL DESIGN DISTINGUISHED FROM BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION Boulder, CO 80309-0334 5. EVIDENCE BASES FOR NATURAL DESIGN <[email protected]> Concluding Remarks Acknowledgements In N.S. Thompson (ed.) Perspectives in Ethology, Volume 11: Behavioral Design. NY: References Plenum Press, pp.1-47 Figures and Tables Table of Contents Abstract Abstract Introduction This essay is on teleological notions in biology, particularly as they are applied to the study of 1. FUNCTION, DESIGN, AND TELEOLOGY behavior. Biologists and philosophers interested in the conceptual foundations of biology 2. DEFINITIONS (biophilosophers) have been greatly concerned about the role of teleological language in Part One: Philosophy and Biology evolutionary biology. We discuss the role of biophilosophy for understanding teleology in biology 1. BIOPHILOSOPHERS AND BIOPHILOSOPHY and explain why teleology is controversial in biology. We present an analytical survey of recent 2. REFORMERS AND ELUCIDATORS literature on teleology in biology, in the form of a classification tree. -
Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: from Planets to Mallards
Scientific enquiry and natural kinds: From planets to mallards a philosophical monograph by P.D. Magnus pmagnus<at>fecundity.com This is the authors' final draft. Any citations should refer to the final typeset book, published by Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to canonical pagination and nice binding, the book has a cool picture of mallards on the cover. DOI: 10.1057/9781137271259 c 2012 P.D. Magnus, except where indicated; some figures are used by per- mission or under open licenses Acknowledgements5 Introduction7 1 How to think about natural kinds 10 A Why history is no help...................... 11 B Some criteria considered..................... 13 B.1 The induction assumption................ 14 B.2 The essence assumption................. 24 B.3 The science assumption................. 25 B.4 The law assumption................... 26 B.5 Artifacts and artificial kinds............... 28 B.6 The sharpness assumption................ 31 B.7 Starting with language.................. 34 B.8 The intrinsic feature assumption............. 37 B.9 The hierarchy assumption................ 41 1 B.10 The scarcity assumption................. 43 B.11 The implicit simpliciter assumption........... 44 C Keeping score........................... 50 2 A modest definition 52 A First formulation......................... 52 B More or less natural kinds.................... 54 B.1 Lessons from underdetermination............ 55 B.2 The lessons applied.................... 57 C Induction redux.......................... 59 D Natural kinds for settled science................. 61 D.1 Example: the domain of chemistry........... 62 D.2 Fungible kinds....................... 66 3 Natural kinds put to work 72 A Eight planets, great planets................... 72 A.1 Numerology and asteroids................ 74 A.2 Enter Pluto........................ 75 A.3 The constraints of astronomy.............. 78 A.4 Natural kinds and the fate of Pluto.......... -
Toward a Naturalistic Theory of Rational Intentionality1
Forthcoming as Essay XIV of Reference and the Rational Mind (CSLI Publications) Toward a Naturalistic Theory of Rational Intentionality1 I. Preliminaries This essay some first steps toward the naturalization of what I call rational intentionality or alternatively type II intentionality. By rational or type II intentionality, I mean that full combination of rational powers and content-bearing states that is paradigmatically enjoyed by mature intact human beings. The problem I set myself is to determine the extent to which the only currently extant approach to the naturalization of the intentional that has the singular virtue of not being a non-starter can be aggregated up into an account of rational intentionality. I have in mind a broadly defined family of accounts whose main members are the indicator/information-theoretic approach of Dretske (1988), the asymmetric dependence theory of Jerry Fodor (1987, 1990, 1994) and the teleo-semantics of Ruth Millikan (1984, 1993). Somewhat inaccurately, I will call this family of approaches the information-theoretic family. To be sure, there is only a rough family resemblance among the members of the information-theoretic family. Indeed, several intense quarrels divide the members of that family one from another, but the precise outcome of those internecine struggles is not directly relevant to the aims of this essay. 2 Taken collectively, the information-theoretic family yields a compelling picture of the place of at least a crude form of intentionality -- what I call frog-like or type I intentionality -- in the natural order. Though frog-like or type I intentionality is, I think, a genuine species of intentionality, it may subsist in the absence of rational powers. -
A Deweyan Pragmatist Philosophy of Science
UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Science and experience : a Deweyan pragmatist philosophy of science Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08q037x9 Author Brown, Matthew J. Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Science and Experience A Deweyan Pragmatist Philosophy of Science A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy by Matthew J. Brown Committee in charge: Professor Paul Churchland, Chair Professor Nancy Cartwright, Co-Chair Professor Michael Cole Professor Gerald Doppelt Professor Roddey Reid Professor Donald Rutherford 2009 Copyright Matthew J. Brown, 2009 Some rights reserved. Licensed under the United States Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND). The dissertation of Matthew J. Brown is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Co-Chair Chair University of California, San Diego 2009 iii DEDICATION In memory of Professor Jon J. Johnston (1928-2008) Teacher, Mentor, Friend iv EPIGRAPH To work exclusively within the context provided by the sciences themselves is to ignore their vital context. The place of science in life, the place of its peculiar subject-matter in the wide scheme of materials we experience, is a more ultimate function of philosophy that is any self-contained reflection upon science as such. | John Dewey, Context and Thought (LW 6:19-20) v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page................................... iii Dedication...................................... iv Epigraph......................................v Table of Contents.................................. vi List of Figures................................... ix Preface.......................................x Acknowledgements................................