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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.