One of the fundamental problems in the philosophy of psychology is to determine the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations of human behavior. The problem of determining the relation between the personal and subpersonal levels is called the “interface problem”. This paper has two goals. The first is to introduce the domestic reader to the interface problem from the perspective of the philosophy of psychology. The second goal is to show that insufficient focus on the interface problem and its potential (...) solutions can lead to uncritical and fallacious reasoning that can have significant consequences for particular debates in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of law. (shrink)

According to a dominant interpretation of the simulation hypothesis, in recognizing an emotion we use the same neural processes used in experiencing that emotion. This paper argues that the view is fundamentally misguided. I will examine the simulational arguments for the three basic emotions of fear, disgust, and anger and argue that the simulational account relies strongly on a narrow sense of emotion processing which hardly squares with evidence on how, in fact, emotion recognition is processed. I contend that the (...) current body of empirical evidence suggests that emotion recognition is processed in an integrative system involving multiple cross-regional interactions in the brain, a view which squares with understanding emotion recognition as an information-rich, rather than simulational, process. In the final section, I discuss possible objections. (shrink)

Neuroeconomics illustrates our deepening descent into the details of individual cognition. This descent is guided by the implicit assumption that “individual human” is the important “agent” of neoclassical economics. I argue here that this assumption is neither obviously correct, nor of primary importance to human economies. In particular I suggest that the main genius of the human species lies with its ability to distribute cognition across individuals, and to incrementally accumulate physical and social cognitive artifacts that largely obviate the innate (...) biological limitations of individuals. If this is largely why our economies grow, then we should be much more interested in distributed cognition in human groups, and correspondingly less interested in individual cognition. We should also be much more interested in the cultural accumulation of cognitive artefacts: computational devices and media, social structures and economic institutions. (shrink)

This paper is divided into three sections. It aims to give some resources for making possible a straightforward debate on the mind-body problem as well as some serious researches in it. Having these goals into account, the first section offers an introduction to the mind-body problem and the second section explains briefly some of the most influential answers to this problem. The third section is devoted to eliminative materialism.

The comment addresses central issues of a "theory theory" approach as exemplified in Gopnik' and Goldman's BBS-articles. Gopnik, on the one hand, tries to demonstrate that empirical evidence from developmental psychology supports the view of a "theory theory" in which common sense beliefs are constructed to explain ourselves and others. Focusing the informational processing routes possibly involved we would like to argue that his main thesis (e.g. idea of intentionality as a cognitive construct) lacks support at least for two reasons: (...) one methodological and one structural. On the other hand, Goldman raises an important question when he is asking how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Reasons why Goldman's attempt to understand common sense mental representations by using an analogy from visual perception is problematic are discussed. The role which is attributed to a phenomenology is evaluated. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or (...) serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience. (shrink)

This is an amended version of material that first appeared in A. Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), Ch. 1, 2, and 6. It appears in German translation in Metzinger,T (Ed) DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM IN DER ZWEITEN HELFTE DES 20 JAHRHUNDERTS (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999).

Direct neurological and especially imaging-driven investigations into the structures essential to naturally occurring cognitive systems in their development and operation have motivated broadening interest in the potential for artificial consciousness modeled on these systems. This first paper in a series of three begins with a brief review of Boltuc’s (2009) “brain-based” thesis on the prospect of artificial consciousness, focusing on his formulation of h-consciousness. We then explore some of the implications of brain research on the structure of consciousness, finding limitations (...) in biological approaches to the study of consciousness. Looking past these limitations, we introduce research in artificial consciousness designed to test for the emergence of consciousness, a phenomenon beyond the purview of the study of existing biological systems. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has recently ventured to carve out a novel position in the epistemology of religious belief called quasi-fideism. Its core is an application of ideas from Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology to religious belief. Among its many advertised benefits are that it can do justice to two seemingly conflicting ideas about religious belief, to wit: that it is, at least at some level, a matter of ungrounded faith, but also that it can be epistemically rationally grounded. In this paper, I argue (...) that quasi-fideism fails. Its central tenets either have unattractive consequences or are implausible. (shrink)

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component (...) of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict. (shrink)

Until recently, the notions of function and multiple realization were supposed to save the autonomy of psychological explanations. Furthermore, the concept of supervenience presumably allows both dependence of mind on brain and non-reducibility of mind to brain, reconciling materialism with an independent explanatory role for mental and functional concepts and explanations. Eliminativism is often seen as the main or only alternative to such autonomy. It gladly accepts abandoning or thoroughly reconstructing the psychological level, and considers reduction if successful as equivalent (...) with elimination. In comparison with the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology has developed more subtle and complex ideas about functions, laws, and reductive explanation than the stark dichotomy of autonomy or elimination. It has been argued that biology is a patchwork of local laws, each with different explanatory interests and more or less limited scope. This points to a pluralistic, domain-specific and multi-level view of explanations in biology. Explanatory pluralism has been proposed as an alternative to eliminativism on the one hand and methodological dualism on the other hand. It holds that theories at different levels of description, like psychology and neuroscience, can co-evolve, and mutually influence each other, without the higher-level theory being replaced by, or reduced to, the lower-level one. Such ideas seem to tally with the pluralistic character of biological explanation. In biological psychology, explanatory pluralism would lead us to expect many local and non-reductive interactions between biological, neurophysiological, psychological and evolutionary explanations of mind and behavior. This idea is illustrated by an example from behavioral genetics, where genetics, physiology and psychology constitute distinct but interrelated levels of explanation. Accounting for such a complex patchwork of related explanations seems to require a more sophisticated and precise way of looking at levels than the existing ideas on (reductive and non-reductive) explanation in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper looks at the attribution of the ability to lie and not at lying or lies. It also departs from more familiar approaches by focussing on the appraisal of an ability and not on the ability in itself. We believe that this attribution perspective is required to bring out the cognitive and intentional basis of the ability to lie.

I discuss the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) as a new approach to folk psychology, by highlighting some of the main differences between the NPH and so-called 'principled approaches' and elaborating on the importance of the distinction between intentional and propositional attitudes. Furthermore, I address the question whether reason explanations as understood by the NPH constitute a distinctive and autonomous kind of explanation.

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening – something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society (...) could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim – the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument – and then defend it against three major objections. (shrink)

Double dissociations between perceivable colors and physical properties of colored objects have led many philosophers to endorse relationalist accounts of color. I argue that there are analogous double dissociations between attitudes of belief—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—and intrinsic cognitive states of belief—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—pitched at every level of psychological explanation. These dissociations provide good reason to refrain from conflating attitudes of belief with intrinsic cognitive states (...) of belief. I suggest that interpretivism provides an attractive account of the former. Like colors, attitudes of belief evolved to be ecological signifiers, not cogs in cognitive systems. (shrink)

It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemology is that normative assessment (...) is constrained by capacities: you cannot require someone to do something they cannot or, as it is usually put, ought implies can. This much we take to be uncontroversial. We argue that differences in architectures, goals and resources imply substantial differences in capacity, and that some of these differences are ineliminable. It follows that some differences in goals and architectural and computational resources matter at the normative level: they constrain what principles of normative epistemology can be used to describe and prescribe their behavior. As a result, we can expect there to be important epistemic differences between the way brains, individuals, and science work. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that being in an intentional state is a matter of being related to a sentence in a mental language-a 'Language of Thought' (see especially Fodor 1975, 1987 Appendix; Field 1978). According to this view-which I shall call 'the LT hypothesis'-when anyone has a belief or a desire or a hope with a certain content, they have a sentence of this language, with that content, 'written' in their heads. The claim is meant quite literally: the mental representations that (...) make up the items of this language have semantic and syntactic properties. This is why, according to this view, cognitive psychology does, and should, treat that part of the mind which deals with intentional states as a semantic and a syntactic 'engine'. (shrink)

We argue that neuroeconomics should be a mechanistic science. We defend this view as preferable both to a revolutionary perspective, according to which classical economics is eliminated in favour of neuroeconomics, and to a classical economic perspective, according to which economics is insulated from facts about psychology and neuroscience. We argue that, like other mechanistic sciences, neuroeconomics will earn its keep to the extent that it either reconfigures how economists think about decision-making or how neuroscientists think about brain mechanisms underlying (...) behaviour. We discuss some ways that the search for mechanisms can bring about such top-down and bottom-up revision, and we consider some examples from the recent neuroeconomics literature of how varieties of progress of this sort might be achieved. (shrink)

I argue for a cognitive architecture in which folk psychology is supported by an interface of a ToM module and the language faculty, the latter providing the former with interpreted LF structures which form the content representations of ToM states. I show that LF structures satisfy a range of key features asked of contents. I confront this account of ToM with eliminativism and diagnose and combat the thought that "success" and innateness are inconsistent with the falsity of folk psychology. I (...) show that, while my ensemble account of ToM and language refutes the culturalist presuppositions that tend to underlie eliminativist arguments, the falsity of folk psychology is consistent with the account. (shrink)

The paper considers our ordinary mentalistic discourse in relation to what we should expect from any genuine science of the mind. A meta-scientific eliminativism is commended and distinguished from the more familiar eliminativism of Skinner and the Churchlands. Meta-scientific eliminativism views folk psychology qua folksy as unsuited to offer insight into the structure of cognition, although it might otherwise be indispensable for our social commerce and self-understanding. This position flows from a general thesis that scientific advance is marked by an (...) eschewal of folk understanding. The latter half of the paper argues that, contrary to the received view, Chomsky's review of Skinner offers not just an argument against Skinner's eliminativism, but, more centrally, one in favour of the second eliminativism. (shrink)

Can facts about subpersonal states and events be constitutively relevant to personal-level phenomena? And can knowledge of these facts inform explanations of personal-level phenomena? Some philosophers, like Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell, argue for two negative answers whereby questions about persons and their behavior cannot be answered by using information from subpersonal psychology. Knowledge of subpersonal states and events cannot inform personal-level explanation such that they cast light on what constitutes persons’ behaviors. In this paper I argue against this position. (...) After having distinguished between enabling and constitutive relevance, I defend the claim that at least some facts about subpersonal states and events are constitutively relevant to some personal-level phenomenon, and therefore can, and sometimes should, inform personal-level explanations. I draw some of the possible consequences of my claim for our understanding of personal-level behavior by focusing on the phenomenon of addiction. (shrink)

Can facts about subpersonal states and events be constitutively relevant to personal-level phenomena? And can knowledge of these facts inform explanations of personal-level phenomena? Some philosophers, like Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell, argue for two negative answers whereby questions about persons and their behavior cannot be answered by using information from subpersonal psychology. Knowledge of subpersonal states and events cannot inform personal-level explanation such that they cast light on what constitutes persons? behaviors. In this paper I argue against this position. (...) After having distinguished between enabling and constitutive relevance, I defend the claim that at least some facts about subpersonal states and events are constitutively relevant to some personal-level phenomenon, and therefore can, and sometimes should, inform personal-level explanations. I draw some of the possible consequences of my claim for our understanding of personal-level behavior by focusing on the phenomenon of addiction. (shrink)

: Interpreting results of contemporary neuroscientif studies, I present a non-reductive physicalist account of mind-brain relationship from which the criticism of unintelligibility ascribed to the notion of mental causation is considered. Assuming that a paradigmatic criticism addressed to the notion of mental causation is that presented by Jaegwon Kim’s analysis on the theory of mind-body supervenience, I present his argument arguing that it encompasses a formulation of the problem of mental causation, which leads to difficulties by him pointed. To ask (...) "how mental events, being a non-physical property of the brain, could act causally on brain structure and functioning?", is not to treat the mind as a property of the brain, but as a Cartesian substance. I argue that, rather than asking "how does mind could act causally on the brain?", as if the mind were something apart and independent of the brain, it would be more in line with a non-reductive physicalist view to ask "how the brain, guided by its mind, could act causally on itself?". To justify this last formulation of the problem of mental causation, I propose a "double face view", which consists in considering the consciousness as the essential property of the mind, and mind and brain as inseparable, dependent and irreducible faces. It means, in general terms, that the conscious mind is the result of brain structure and activity - "conscious mind as brain" - and that the brain, using its conscious mind as a guide to its actions, interacts with its body, and with the physical and sociocultural environment, constructing and being constructed by both - "brain as conscious mind". Resumo: Interpretando resultados de estudos neurocientíficos contemporâneos, apresento, em linhas gerais, uma abordagem fisicalista não-reducionista da relação mente-cérebro, a partir da qual a crítica de ininteligibilidade atribuída à noção de causação mental é considerada. Assumindo que uma crítica paradigmática à noção de causação mental é aquela apresentada por Jaegwon Kim, em suas reflexões sobre a teoria da superveniência mente-corpo, considero criticamente o seu argumento, oferecendo uma concepção geral a respeito da relação mente-cérebro, a qual acredito tornar a noção de causação mental inteligível. Penso que o principal problema do argumento de Kim se relaciona à formulação da questão da causação mental por ele aceita. Por exemplo, ao perguntar "como os eventos mentais, sendo propriedades não-físicas do cérebro, podem agir causalmente sobre a estrutura e funcionamento do cérebro?" a mente está sendo considerada não como uma propriedade do cérebro, mas como uma substância cartesiana. Entendo que, em vez de perguntar "como a mente age causalmente sobre o cérebro?", como se a mente fosse algo dele separada e independente, seria mais conforme a uma concepção fisicalista não-reducionista perguntar "como o cérebro, guiado por sua mente, pode agir causalmente sobre si mesmo?" Para justificar essa formulação do problema da causação mental, proponho uma "abordagem dupla face" da relação mente-cérebro, segundo a qual a consciência é a propriedade essencial da mente, sendo a mente inseparável do cérebro, embora a ele irredutível, e a estrutura e funcionamento do cérebro dependente numa certa medida da existência da mente. Isso significa, em termos gerais, que a mente consciente resulta da estrutura e funcionamento do cérebro - "mente consciente como cérebro" -, e que o cérebro, usando a mente consciente como um guia para sua ação, interage com seu corpo e com o ambiente físico e sociocultural circundante, construindo e sendo construído por ambos - "cérebro como mente consciente". (shrink)

If we were to connect two individuals’ brains together, how would this affect the individuals’ conscious experiences? In particular, it is possible for two people to share any of their conscious experiences; to simultaneously enjoy some token experiences while remaining distinct subjects? The case of the Hogan twins—craniopagus conjoined twins whose brains are connected at the thalamus—seems to show that this can happen. I argue that while practical empirical methods cannot tell us directly whether or not the twins share conscious (...) experiences, considerations about the locality of content processing in the brain entails that they most likely do so. (shrink)

En philosophie de l’esprit, la compréhension d’autrui est volontiers présentée comme le fruit d’une activité complexe d’attribution d’états mentaux, ou mindreading. La question centrale est alors celle de savoir comment accéder à l’esprit d’autrui. L’article soutient que cette façon d’aborder le sujet doit être rejetée, au profit d’une élucidation de la compréhension repartant de notre capacité à décrire spontanément ce que fait quelqu’un. Identifier une action apparaît comme l’exercice d’une capacité conceptuelle acquise par l’insertion dans un enchevêtrement de pratiques qui (...) caractérise un monde social. L’examen des conditions de l’apprentissage des concepts jette alors une lumière nouvelle sur le phénomène de l’incompréhension. (shrink)

Abstract Meeting the eliminativist challenge to folk psychology requires showing that beliefs have explanatory virtues unlikely to be duplicated by non?cognitive accounts of behavior. The explanatory power of beliefs is rooted in their intentionality. That beliefs have a distinctive kind of intentionality is shown by the distinctive intensionality of the sentences which report them. Contrary to Fodor, the fundamental explanatory virtues of beliefs are not to be found in their capacity to make causally inactive properties relevant to the explanation of (...) behavior. Rather, the distinctive intentionality of beliefs provides the best explanation of the fact that fully intelligent behavior displays a selectivity of response to properties of the perceptual environment. (shrink)