DOCSLIB.ORG

Intentionality from Philosophy to Psychology

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Intentionality from Philosophy to Psychology INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile ADVERTIMENT. L'accés als continguts d'aquesta tesi doctoral i la seva utilització ha de respectar els drets de la persona autora. Pot ser utilitzada per a consulta o estudi personal, així com en activitats o materials d'investigació i docència en els termes establerts a l'art. 32 del Text Refós de la Llei de Propietat Intel·lectual (RDL 1/1996). Per altres utilitzacions es requereix l'autorització prèvia i expressa de la persona autora. En qualsevol cas, en la utilització dels seus continguts caldrà indicar de forma clara el nom i cognoms de la persona autora i el títol de la tesi doctoral. No s'autoritza la seva reproducció o altres formes d'explotació efectuades amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva comunicació pública des d'un lloc aliè al servei TDX. Tampoc s'autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant als continguts de la tesi com als seus resums i índexs. ADVERTENCIA. El acceso a los contenidos de esta tesis doctoral y su utilización debe respetar los derechos de la persona autora. Puede ser utilizada para consulta o estudio personal, así como en actividades o materiales de investigación y docencia en los términos establecidos en el art. 32 del Texto Refundido de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual (RDL 1/1996). Para otros usos se requiere la autorización previa y expresa de la persona autora. En cualquier caso, en la utilización de sus contenidos se deberá indicar de forma clara el nombre y apellidos de la persona autora y el título de la tesis doctoral. No se autoriza su reproducción u otras formas de explotación efectuadas con fines lucrativos ni su comunicación pública desde un sitio ajeno al servicio TDR. Tampoco se autoriza la presentación de su contenido en una ventana o marco ajeno a TDR (framing). Esta reserva de derechos afecta tanto al contenido de la tesis como a sus resúmenes e índices. WARNING. Access to the contents of this doctoral thesis and its use must respect the rights of the author. It can be used for reference or private study, as well as research and learning activities or materials in the terms established by the 32nd article of the Spanish Consolidated Copyright Act (RDL 1/1996). Express and previous authorization of the author is required for any other uses. In any case, when using its content, full name of the author and title of the thesis must be clearly indicated. Reproduction or other forms of for profit use or public communication from outside TDX service is not allowed. Presentation of its content in a window or frame external to TDX (framing) is not authorized either. These rights affect both the content of the thesis and its abstracts and indexes. UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile Michele Gentile Intentionality, Modularity and Time Doctoral Thesis Supervisor: Dr. José Eugenio García-Albea Ristol Department of Psychology Tarragona, 2015 UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile I UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile II UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile “Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est; in huius rei unius fugacis ac lubricae possessionem natura nos misit, ex qua expellit quicumque vult.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca – Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium – Liber I Dedicato a mia madre, con l’amore di un figlio… III UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile IV UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 0IX PREFACE 0XI PART I: INTENTIONALITY 1 INTRODUCTION: INTENTIONALITY: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO PSYCHOLOGY 003 1. 1 The concept of Intentionality 003 1. 2 Cartesian Dualism and the Mind-body Problem 004 1. 3 Brentano’s account of Intentionality 006 1. 4 After Brentano: Intentionality, Representation and Understanding of Minds 008 CHAPTER 2: TOWARD THE COGNITIVE APPROACH 011 2. 1 From Academic Psychology to Cognitive Psychology 011 2. 2 The dominance of Behaviorism in Scientific Psychology 014 2. 3 From Behaviorism to Neobehaviorism 015 2. 4 The Cognitive Revolution and the birth of Cognitive Psychology 019 2. 5 The affirmation of Logical Behaviorism in Philosophy of Mind 020 2. 6 After Logical Behaviorism: Type-identity Theory 022 2. 7 The rise of Functionalism 023 2. 8 Functionalism, Cognitive Psychology and Mental Causation 025 CHAPTER 3: BEHIND FUNCTIONALISM: TWO FUNDAMENTAL COMMITMENTS 029 3. 1 Functionalism and Folk Psychology 029 3. 2 Folk Psychology and the Standard View of Mind 030 3. 3 Two interpretations of Folk Psychology: Theory-Theory vs. Simulation Theory 031 3. 4 Physicalism and mental reality 033 CHAPTER 4: COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES OF MIND 037 4. 1 The linkage between Functionalism and Cognitive Sciences 037 4. 2 Putnam: Computational Functionalism 038 4. 3 Fodor’s Computational Theory of Mind 040 4. 4 CTM and Intentional States 040 4. 5 CTM and Intentional Processes 042 4. 6 An argument for CTM: Concept Acquisition 043 CHAPTER 5: MENTAL REPRESENTATION 047 V UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile 5. 1 The Problem of Mental Representation 047 5. 2 Naturalistic Theories of Content 047 5. 3 Fodor’s Theory of Content and Informational Semantics 049 5. 4 The Disjunctive Problem 050 5. 5 A non-atomistic approach: Conceptual Role Semantics 051 CHAPTER 6: MENTAL CAUSATION 053 6. 1 The Problem of Mental Causation 053 6. 2 The Property-Based Problem 053 6. 3 The Anomalism Problem 054 6. 4 Epiphenomenalism and some hypotheses of solution 055 6. 5 The Exclusion Problem 057 6. 6 Reductive Strategies vs. Non-reductive Strategies 058 6. 7 The Dual Explanandum Strategy 060 6. 8 The Externalism Problem 060 6. 9 The ‘Twin Earth Argument’ 061 6. 10 Broad Causation vs. Narrow Causation 062 6. 11 Dretske’s Causal-Informational Theoretic Approach 063 CHAPTER 7: A BRIEF CONCLUSION TO THE DISCOURSE OF INTENTIONALITY 067 PART II: MODULARITY AND TIME CHAPTER 8: FROM INTENTIONALITY TO MODULARITY 075 8. 1 The Computational Theory of Mind: a model for Symbol Manipulation 075 8. 2 The dispute between Classicists and Connectionists 077 CHAPTER 9: THE THEORY OF MODULARITY OF MIND 081 9. 1 The Modularity Thesis and the notion of Module 081 9. 2 Modularity: the fundamental features 082 9. 3 Globality of Central Systems: Isotropy and Quineanism 086 9. 4 The extent of Modularity: the Massive Modularity Thesis 088 9. 5 The Adaptionist View 090 CHAPTER 10: VISUAL, AUDITORY AND OTHER FORMS OF PERCEPTION0 093 10. 1 Visual Perception 093 10. 2 Marr’s Computational Theory of Vision 094 10. 3 Auditory Perception and the Analogy with Visual Perception 097 10. 4 Other forms of perception: Speech Perception and Music Perception 099 CHAPTER 11: TIME PERCEPTION 101 11. 1 The Importance of Time 101 VI UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile 11. 2 What is Time Perception? 102 11. 3 Two Paradigms of Time Perception: Prospective Time and Retrospective Time 103 11. 4 The Temporal Continuum Perspective 104 11. 5 The Internal Clock Theory: Pacemaker-counter Models vs. Oscillator Models 106 CHAPTER 12: TIME PERCEPTION IN THE CONTEXT OF NEUROSCIENCE 111 12. 1 The Study of Time Perception in Neurosciences 111 12. 2 The role of the Cerebellum in Temporal Processing 112 12. 3 The Basal Ganglia and the Cerebral Cortices 113 12. 4 Neurological mechanisms: Intrinsic Theories vs. Dedicated Theories 114 12. 5 Time scales of Time Perception 116 CHAPTER 13: TIME AND MODULARITY 119 13. 1 A further issue of temporal perception: Modularity 119 13. 2 The perceived objects of Time Perception: succession and duration of events 120 13. 3 Is there a module for time perception? 122 13. 4 Fraisse’s account of time processing: Perception and Estimation of Time 126 13. 5 The Time Module: the First Processor Component 131 13. 6 The Time Module: the Oscillator Processor Component 133 13. 7 The Modularity of Timing Mechanisms 137 13. 8 Time Processing and the possession of Fodor’s features 138 13. 9 Evidence from Neuroscience 141 13. 10 A brief summary 145 CONCLUSIONS 147 REFERENCES 153 VII UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile VIII UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to give special thanks to my supervisor, Dr. José Eugenio Garcia-Albea Ristol. Without his valuable guidance, suggestions and recommendations, this work would not have been possible. My dear Professor, thank you for the trust and support that you placed on me, and for the great esteem and friendship that you have always shown me, for which I am sincerely grateful. I would like to thank my family for supporting me when I needed it most: my brother Saverio and my sister Floriana for having been close to me, and my mother and father for the great affection they have always shown me. A big thank you also goes to my former colleagues in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bologna for supporting me in this project from the beginning. Finally, I want to thank my closest friends, particularly Dr. Vittorio Ceratti, for the interesting and stimulating discussions I had with him on the subject. IX UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile X UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INTENTIONALITY, MODULARITY AND TIME Michele Gentile PREFACE While drafting my bachelor's thesis I remember being “fascinated” by the correlation between the principle of entropy (postulated in the second law of thermodynamics) and the idea of temporal flow.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Folk Psychology of Souls
    BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29, 453–498 Printed in the United States of America The folk psychology of souls Jesse M. Bering Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, United Kingdom. [email protected] qub.ac.uk/icc http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/Staff/ JesseMBering/ Abstract: The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others.
    [Show full text]
  • 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 ).
    [Show full text]
  • In Defence of Folk Psychology
    FRANK JACKSON & PHILIP PETTIT IN DEFENCE OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY (Received 14 October, 1988) It turned out that there was no phlogiston, no caloric fluid, and no luminiferous ether. Might it turn out that there are no beliefs and desires? Patricia and Paul Churchland say yes. ~ We say no. In part one we give our positive argument for the existence of beliefs and desires, and in part two we offer a diagnosis of what has misled the Church- lands into holding that it might very well turn out that there are no beliefs and desires. 1. THE EXISTENCE OF BELIEFS AND DESIRES 1.1. Our Strategy Eliminativists do not insist that it is certain as of now that there are no beliefs and desires. They insist that it might very well turn out that there are no beliefs and desires. Thus, in order to engage with their position, we need to provide a case for beliefs and desires which, in addition to being a strong one given what we now know, is one which is peculiarly unlikely to be undermined by future progress in neuroscience. Our first step towards providing such a case is to observe that the question of the existence of beliefs and desires as conceived in folk psychology can be divided into two questions. There exist beliefs and desires if there exist creatures with states truly describable as states of believing that such-and-such or desiring that so-and-so. Our question, then, can be divided into two questions. First, what is it for a state to be truly describable as a belief or as a desire; what, that is, needs to be the case according to our folk conception of belief and desire for a state to be a belief or a desire? And, second, is what needs to be the case in fact the case? Accordingly , if we accepted a certain, simple behaviourist account of, say, our folk Philosophical Studies 59:31--54, 1990.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • How Music Makes Us Feel
    Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Philosophy Theses Department of Philosophy 8-7-2012 How Music Makes Us Feel Alexander Economides Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses Recommended Citation Economides, Alexander, "How Music Makes Us Feel." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses/106 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Philosophy at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HOW MUSIC MAKES US FEEL by ALEXANDER ECONOMIDES Under the Direction of Andrea Scarantino ABSTRACT According to folk psychology, instrumental music regularly elicits emotions in listeners. Philos- ophers and psychologists such as Kivy, Konecni and Zangwill have questioned the existence of these musically elicited emotions, arguing that instrumental music elicits moods or aesthetic judgments rather than emotions. I defend the folk psychological position against these skeptics. The first chapter sets up the debate surrounding musically elicited emotions, while chapters two and three defend the thesis that instrumental music elicits emotions against the critics’ argu- ments. Chapter four outlines the implications of this defense for a variety of fields. INDEX WORDS: Emotion, Affect, Mood, Cognitivism,
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • The Role of Language in Theory of Mind Development
    Top Lang Disorders Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 313–328 Copyright c 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins The Role of Language in Theory of Mind Development Jill G. de Villiers and Peter A. de Villiers Various arguments are reviewed about the claim that language development is critically connected to the development of theory of mind. The different theories of how language could help in this process of development are explored. A brief account is provided of the controversy over the capacities of infants to read others’ false beliefs. Then the empirical literature on the steps in theory of mind development is summarized, considering studies on both typically developing and various language-delayed children. Suggestions are made for intervention by speech language pathologists to enhance the child’s access to understanding the minds of others. Key words: conversation, false beliefs, false complements, language, narrative, theory of mind N THIS ARTICLE, we review arguments on interactions between language and ToM I and evidence for the claim that children’s in both typically developing and language- language acquisition is crucially connected to delayed children. We end with suggestions their development of a theory of mind (ToM). for using language interventions to facilitate Theory of mind refers to the child’s ability to children’s understanding of their own mental understand that other people have minds, and states as well as the minds of others. those minds contain beliefs, knowledge, de- sires, and emotions that may be different from THEORIES OF THE RELATIONSHIP those of the child. If the child can figure out BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND ToM those contents, then other people’s behavior will begin to make sense and, therefore, be Many writers have made a convincing case predictable and explainable.
    [Show full text]
  • Naive Psychology: Preschoolers' Understanding of Intention and False Belief and Its Relationship to Mental Word
    Naive Psychology: Preschoolers' Understanding of Intention and False Belief and Its Relationship to Mental Word Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Jian, Jianhua Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 29/09/2021 04:28:04 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193561 NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY: PRESCHOOLER S’ UNDERSTANDING OF INTENTION AND FALSE BELIEF AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO MENTAL WORD by Jianhua Jian _____________________ Copyright © Jianhua Jian 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AL PSYCHOLOGY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2 0 0 6 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jianhua Jian entitled Naïve psychology: Preschoolers’ understanding of intention and false belief and its relationship to mental word and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation require ment for the Deg ree of Doctor of Philosophy _______ ___________________________ __________________ ________ _______ ____ Date : 3/23/2006 Rosemary Rosser, Ph.D. _______ ___________________________ __________________ ________ ___________ Date: 3/23/2006 Lawre nce Aleamoni, Ph.D. _______ ___________________________ __________________ ________ ___________ Date: 3/23/2006 Sheri Bauman, Ph.D. _______ ___________________________ __________________ ________ ___________ Date: 3/23/2006 Glenda Wilkes, Ph.D.
    [Show full text]
  • A Pluralistic Folk Psychology
    WellBeing International WBI Studies Repository 11-2008 It's in Your Nature: A Pluralistic Folk Psychology Kristin Andrews York University Follow this and additional works at: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/acwp_asie Part of the Animal Studies Commons, Comparative Psychology Commons, and the Other Animal Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Andrews, K. (2008). It’s in your nature: a pluralistic folk psychology. Synthese, 165(1), 13-29. This material is brought to you for free and open access by WellBeing International. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the WBI Studies Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. It's in Your Nature: A Pluralistic Folk Psychology Kristin Andrews York University 1. Folk psychology as attribution of the attitudes The everyday human practices of predicting, explaining, interpreting, judging, coordinating and otherwise socially interacting with others are grounded in an understanding of others as minded agents. This understanding of others is commonly understood as requiring the ability to attribute mental states— paradigmatically beliefs and desires. However, there is good reason to think that the commonsense conception of the mind is pluralistic, and not limited to the attribution of propositional attitudes. While it is true that part of the commonsense view is that people act for reasons, and that those reasons are mentally represented propositions, the folk also think that people act because of who they are as persons. I will argue that people predict and explain behavior by appeal to personality traits, and that at least some personality traits cannot be understood as an oblique reference to beliefs, desires, or any other propositional attitude.
    [Show full text]
  • Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel
    Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel Jonathan Kramnick Rutgers University “I see into minds, you see,” the robot continued, “and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can’t begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them—but I try, and your novels help.” —Isaac Asimov, Liar! No one literary form has a proprietary stake in the mind, but as genres go the novel has since its inception taken remarkable interest in mental states. Among other things, eighteenth-century fiction is so much writing about the mind: about how thoughts represent things, cause other thoughts to happen, or lead to actions. The same might be said for empiricism. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy paid unusual attention to the content of minds and the nature of ideas, to “human understanding” as Locke and Hume put it. While the connection between empiricism and the rise of the novel is a touch- stone of literary studies, with a venerable tradition of scholarship dating back to the beginnings of the profession, only recently have critics drawn upon phi- losophy of mind and cognitive science to talk about the way in which thinking takes shape in particular works from the period.1 This is of course not so much of a surprise, since criticism is as a rule skeptical of framing older texts with present-day models. The risk is one of anachronism or universalism, either shoehorning recalcitrant descriptions of the mind into our current language of cognition or locating both within a timeless and unchanging account of the psyche.
    [Show full text]
  • Situated Cognition
    Roth, W.-M., & Jornet, A. G. (2013). Situated cognition. WIREs Cognitive Science, 4, xxx–xxx. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1242 Article type: Overview Article title: Situated cognition First author: Full name and affiliation; plus email address if corresponding author Wolff-Michael Roth*, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4, Canada [email protected] Second author: Full name and affiliation; plus email address if corresponding author Alfredo Jornet, InterMedia, University of Oslo, 0318 Oslo, Norway Abstract Following the cognitive revolution, when knowing and learning have come to be theorized in terms of representations stored and processed in the mind, empirical and theoretical developments in very different scholarly disciplines have led to the emergence of the situated cognition hypothesis, which consists of a set of interlocking theses: cognition is embodied, fundamentally social, distributed, enacted, and often works without representations. We trace the historical origins of this hypothesis and discuss the evidential support this hypothesis receives from empirical and modeling studies. We distinguish the question of where cognition is located from the question of what cognition is, because the confounding of the two questions leads to misunderstandings in the sometimes-ardent debates concerning the situated cognition hypothesis. We conclude with recommendations for interdisciplinary approaches to the nature of cognition. At the end of the 1980s, just about at the time when the cognitive revolution—based on information processing and the mind as computer metaphor—had become the dominant approach to cognition and learning, a new way of theorizing human performance emerged: situated cognition. There are claims that situated cognition view has grown rapidly over the past decade, including in the areas of cognitive and social neuroscience and (cognitive, social, and developmental) psychology.1 Such claims are substantiated by citation counts.
    [Show full text]
  • Consciousness Is a Thing, Not a Process
    applied sciences Opinion Consciousness Is a Thing, Not a Process Susan Pockett School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; [email protected] Received: 30 October 2017; Accepted: 23 November 2017; Published: 2 December 2017 Featured Application: If the theory outlined here is correct, the construction of artificial consciousness will certainly be possible, but a fundamentally different approach from that currently used in work on artificial intelligence will be necessary. Abstract: The central dogma of cognitive psychology is ‘consciousness is a process, not a thing’. Hence, the main task of cognitive neuroscientists is generally seen as working out what kinds of neural processing are conscious and what kinds are not. I argue here that the central dogma is simply wrong. All neural processing is unconscious. The illusion that some of it is conscious results largely from a failure to separate consciousness per se from a number of unconscious processes that normally accompany it—most particularly focal attention. Conscious sensory experiences are not processes at all. They are things: specifically, spatial electromagnetic (EM) patterns, which are presently generated only by ongoing unconscious processing at certain times and places in the mammalian brain, but which in principle could be generated by hardware rather than wetware. The neurophysiological mechanisms by which putatively conscious EM patterns are generated, the features that may distinguish conscious from unconscious patterns, the general principles that distinguish the conscious patterns of different sensory modalities and the general features that distinguish the conscious patterns of different experiences within any given sensory modality are all described. Suggestions for further development of this paradigm are provided.
    [Show full text]