MULTIPLE REALIZATION, COMPUTATION and the TAXONOMY of PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES Two Decades Ago, Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor Introd
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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. -
Journal of Philosophy, Inc
Journal of Philosophy, Inc. The Harder Problem of Consciousness Author(s): Ned Block Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 99, No. 8 (Aug., 2002), pp. 391-425 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 Accessed: 04-08-2015 15:41 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Tue, 04 Aug 2015 15:41:39 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME XCIX, NO. 8, AUGUST 2002 THE HARDER PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS* H. Huxley' famously said: "How it is that anything so re- T. markable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the ap- pearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp" (ibid., p. 19). We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the hard problemof consciousness.2 My aim here is to present another problem of consciousness. -
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. -
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 -
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. -
Emergence, Function, and Realization
To appear in Routledge Handbook of Emergence. Please cite the published version. EMERGENCE, FUNCTION, AND REALIZATION Umut Baysan “Realization” and “emergence” are two concepts that are sometimes used to describe same or similar phenomena in philosophy of mind and the special sciences, where such phenomena involve the synchronic dependence of some higher-level states of affairs on the lower-level ones. According to a popular line of thought, higher-level properties that are invoked in the special sciences are realized by, and/or emergent from, lower-level, broadly physical, properties. So, these two concepts are taken to refer to relations between properties from different levels where the lower-level ones somehow “bring about” the higher-level ones. However, for those who specialise in inter-level relations, there are important differences between these two concepts – especially if emergence is understood as strong emergence. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight these differences. Realizing a Function Realization, as an inter-level relation, is often thought to be tightly related to the notion of a function, and this is arguably due to the fact that the notion of realization was imported into the contemporary philosophy of mind literature with a defence of functionalism alongside the refutation of the view that mental properties (e.g. being in pain) are identical with physical properties (e.g. having C-fibre stimulation). It was suggested by Putnam (1967) that mental properties are multiply realizable by different physical properties in different organisms – such that it is possible for two organisms to instantiate the same mental property without having any physical properties in common – therefore, a given mental property cannot be identified with any particular physical property. -
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. -
UC San Diego UC San Diego Previously Published Works
UC San Diego UC San Diego Previously Published Works Title Logical consequence: An epistemic outlook Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66m8m3gp Journal Monist, 85(4) ISSN 0026-9662 Author Sher, G Publication Date 2002 DOI 10.5840/monist200285432 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Logical Consequence: An Epistemic Outlook Author(s): Gila Sher Source: The Monist, Vol. 85, No. 4, Consequences (OCTOBER 2002), pp. 555-579 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27903798 Accessed: 10-08-2015 00:28 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Monist. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 137.110.34.89 on Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:28:56 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Logical Consequence: An Epistemic Outlook The Ist-order thesis, namely, the thesis that logical consequence is standard lst-order logical consequence,1 has been widely challenged in recentdecades. My own challenge to this thesis inThe Bounds ofLogic (and related articles2) was motivated by what I perceived to be its inade quate philosophical grounding.The bounds of logic are, in an important sense, the bounds of logical constants, yet the bounds of the standard logical constants are specified by enumeration, i.e., dogmatically, without grounding or explanation. -
1 Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics Lecture XI: Mind As a Computer
Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics Lecture XI: Mind as a Computer: Machine Functionalism Tim Black California State University, Northridge Spring 2004 I. MULTIPLE REALIZABILITY AND FUNCTIONALISM a. Mental states (and events and properties) are multiply realizable. That is, one and the same mental state can be realized in different ways in different physical systems. “Mental property M—say, being in pain—may be such that in humans C-fiber activation realizes it but in other species (think of octopuses and reptiles) the physiological mechanism that realizes pain may well be vastly different” (p. 74). Moreover, the multiple realizability of mental states creates a problem for the Psychoneural (Type) Identity Theory. For, if one and the same mental state can be realized in different ways in different creatures, then there is no one type of physical state with which any particular type of mental state is identical. Pain, for example, is not identical to C-fiber activation since pain is realized in other creatures by some other type of physical state. b. The multiple realizability of mental states pushes us away from the Psychoneural (Type) Identity Theory, and toward Functionalism. “According to functionalism, a mental kind is a functional kind, or a causal-functional kind, since the “function” involved is to fill a certain causal role. … Thus, the concept of pain is defined in terms of its function, and the function involved is to serve as a causal intermediary between typical pain inputs (tissue damage, trauma, etc.) and typical pain outputs (winces, groans, escape behavior, etc.). The functionalist will say that this is generally true of all mental kinds: Mental kinds are causal-functional kinds, and what all instances of a given mental kind have in common is the fact that they serve a certain causal role distinctive of that kind. -
The Non-Reductionist's Troubles with Supervenience
ROBERT M. FRANCESCOTTI THE NON-REDUCTIONIST'S TROUBLES WITH SUPERVENIENCE (Received in revised form 29 May 1996) Most physicalists today believe that mental properties can be neurologically realized in many different ways. If some brand of functionalism is correct, then an internal event realizes a mental property in virtue of playing the right functional role, and not because of its intrinsic physical features. This allows that events that differ in neural type might realize the same mental property, the only con- straint being that each of these event can play the functional role de®nitive of that mental property. The belief in multiple realizability is one of the main reasons for the popularity of non-reductive physicalism. If mental states are multiply realizable at the neural level, then they are also multiply realizable, and to a far greater degree, at more basic levels of physical structure ± e.g., the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels. Of course, the properties of the physical sciences are also multiply realizable; the property of being a carbon atom, for instance, is multiply realizable with respect to subatomic features. However, the problem with mental properties is that they, unlike chemical properties, are thought to be multiply realizable with respect to the entire range of features mentioned by the physical sciences. That is, for any mental property M, and for any event of physical type P, it is possible that M is realized by an event of some physical type other than P. If so, and if this possibility is nomological as well as metaphysical, then mental properties are irreducible in the sense that (NR1) there are no nomologically true biconditionals connecting mental properties with physical properties (i.e., properties of the physical sciences).