Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

Following Quine, Davidson, and Dennett, I take mental states and linguistic meaning to be individuated with reference to interpretation. The regulative principle of ideal interpretation is to maximize rationality, and this accounts for the distinctiveness and autonomy of the vocabulary of agency. This rationality-maxim can accommodate empirical cognitive-psychological investigation into the nature and limitations of human mental processing. Interpretivism is explicitly anti-reductionist, but in the context of Rorty's neo-pragmatism provides a naturalized view of agents. The interpretivist strategy affords a less (...) despondent view of constructive philosophical activity than Rorty's own. (shrink)

This essay is a defence of the traditional notion of qualia - as properties of consciousness that are ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehensible - against the eliminative attempts of Daniel Dennett in the influential article "Quining Qualia." It is suggested that a thorough exploration of the concept is an appropriate starting point for future explanations of qualia, and the essay ends with some possible explanations of the four traditional properties.

In this interview Dennett is asked to clarify some of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of his theory of Intentionality, and of his philosophy in general, including his mild ontological realism, the relationships between ontology and science, naturalized epistemology, normativity, rationality, and the relation between science and philosophy. At the end of the interview, a critical bibliography points to the most important publications of Dennett up to 2000.

According to Oude Maatman (2020), our recent suggestion (Borsboom et al., 2019) that symptom networks are irreducible because they rely on folk psychological descriptions, threatens to undermine the main achievements of the network approach. In this article, we take up Oude Maatman’s challenge and develop an argument showing in what sense folk psychological concepts describe features of reality, and what it means to say that folk psychology is a causal language.

The question of the constituting nature of colour is largely open. The old dispute between colour objectivism and colour subjectivism is still relevant. The former has defended itself against accusations of not being able to explain colour structures, while the latter view has received criticism for not being able to provide a plausible theory of the location of colours. By weakening the notion of physical categories, making some of them perceiver-depended, colour objectivists have managed to overcome at least some of (...) the previous accusations. However, the arguments based on Crane’s and Piantanida’s findings of the existence of binary colours like greenish-red and yellowish-blue, indicate the inadequacy of colour objectivism. Consequently, we have colours but our theories of them are false. (shrink)

Neuroscientist Maxwell Bennett and philosopher Peter Hacker defend the need to eradicate the mereological fallacy of cognitive neuroscience. This fallacy attributes to the parts of an animal psychological predicates that make sense only when applied to the whole animal. In contrast, philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that it is possible to explain behavior and cognitive abilities by applying the Intentional Stance to the brain, a stance that attributes increasingly simple psychological capacities to increasingly less intelligent homunculi. So, among other things, taking (...) the intentional stance requires i) attributing psychological predicates to the brain and its parts, and ii) gradually replacing psychological predicates with non-psychological predicates.If the criticism of Bennett and Hacker is accepted, these requirements lead to two dilemmas. According to the first, the intentional stance would be inapplicable or fallacious: because it implies incurring in the mereological fallacy, and to deny is equivalent to rejecting the intentional stance. The horns of the second dilemma are dualism and explanatory vacuity: can be interpreted in a dualistic sense because it presupposes the distinction between psychological and non-psychological predicates; however, failing to respect generates an infinite regress. In this article I intend to show that both dilemmas are resolved by focusing on the details of the relationship between the intentional stance and the design stance. (shrink)

Is Present Time a Precondition for the Existence of the Material and Public World?. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782591.

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the (...) role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations. (shrink)

El artículo explora las posibilidades de la teoría de Dennett sobre los sistemas físicos, funcionales e intencionales como punto de vista no reduccionista sobre las intenciones y las funciones. Dennett defiende que el aprecio de las ventajas predictivas y los compromisos ontológicos con ciertas pautas de las perspectivas funcional e intencional impide el reduccionismo y, por tanto, el fisicismo con respecto a funciones e intenciones. Se propone aquí que ese argumento se complemente con otro que muestre que las pautas del (...) comportamiento físico no son más objetivas que las demás. (shrink)

This thesis is an empirical and theoretical exploration of the surprising finding that people often may fail to notice dramatic mismatches between what they want and what they get, a phenomenon my collaborators and I have named choice blindness. The thesis consists of four co-authored papers, dealing with different aspects of the phenomenon. Paper one presents an initial set of studies using a computerised choice procedure, and discusses the relation of choice blindness to the parent phenomenon of change blindness. Paper (...) two is the most central paper of the thesis. In this study, participants were shown pairs of pictures of female faces, and were instructed to choose which face in each pair they found most attractive. In addition, on some trials, immediately after their choice, they were asked to verbally describe the reasons for choosing the way they did. Unknown to the participants, on certain trials, a double-card ploy was used to covertly exchange one face for the other. On these trials, the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what they intended. Counting across all conditions of the experiment no more than a fourth of all such manipulated trials were detected. But not only were the participants in the experiment blind to the manipulation of their choices, they also offered introspectively derived reasons for preferring the alternative they were given instead. A second major conclusion of this paper is that normal participants may produce confabulatory reports when asked to describe the reasons behind their choices. Paper three applies this form of analysis of introspection and confabulation to a second corpus of reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. In this paper we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated and manipulated trials, but very few differences between these two groups of reports were found. In paper four, passer-by shoppers in a local supermarket were invited to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. After their choice, the participants were asked to again sample to chosen alternative and describe why that one was preferred. At this point, the content of the sample containers were secretly switched, so that the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what the participants intended. No more than a third of the manipulated trials were detected, thus demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness for the taste and smell of two different consumer goods. (shrink)

Dennett's intended rapprochement between physical realism and intentional relativism fails because it is premised upon conflicting arguments governing the status of design. Indeed, Dennett's remarks on design serve to highlight tensions buried deep within his theory. For inasmuch as Dennett succeeds in objectifying attributions of design, attributions of intentionality readily follow suit, leading to a form of intentional realism. But inasmuch as Dennett is successful in relativizing attributions of design, scientific realism at large is subject to renewed anti-realistic criticism. Dennettian-inspired (...) considerations of adaptationism substantiate the former move towards intentional realism, while considerations of the relativity of artifactual design encourage the latter move towards physical relativism. The ambivalence intrinsic to Dennett's ``mild realism'' can be viewed as a function of these two conflicting positions on design, for Dennett can no more avoid objectifying intentionality when he is realistic about design than he can avoid relativizing physical causality when relativistic about design. (shrink)

Interventionism is a theory of causal explanation developed by Woodward and Hitchcock. I defend an interventionist perspective on the causal explanations offered within scientific psychology. The basic idea is that psychology causally explains mental and behavioral outcomes by specifying how those outcomes would have been different had an intervention altered various factors, including relevant psychological states. I elaborate this viewpoint with examples drawn from cognitive science practice, especially Bayesian perceptual psychology. I favorably compare my interventionist approach with well-known nomological and (...) mechanistic theories of psychological explanation. (shrink)

Dennett’s theory of consciousness is often misread as broadly anti-realist. His aversion to ontology encourages readers to form their own interpretations, and the rhetoric he employs often seems to support the anti-realist reading. Dennett does offer defenses against the anti-realist charge, but these are piecemeal and diffuse. This paper examines Dennett’s most current expression, which proves insufficient on its own as a resolution to the ontological dispute. Drawing on related discussions in an attempt to find a resolution leads to a (...) further challenge from Schwitzgebel. Crucial distinctions between inner and outer, cause and effect, and reporting and expressing, unite in a general characterization of how a realist explanation of consciousness should bottom out. Dennett’s form of realism depends upon distinguishing the explananda of consciousness from their doomed explanans; anti-realism about the latter makes room for genuine explanation of how things seem to us. (shrink)

In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, non-representational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, her work (...) has not met with any critical appraisal. -/- It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. -/- The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness. (shrink)

To suggest that Daniel Dennett is a deist is to invite ridicule. Dennett is both an avowed atheist and defender of naturalism in philosophy. Yet if we pay heed to the entirety of Dennett’s claims a curious picture emerges. My suggestion is that Hegel and Marx represent the rival responses to what we might call the modern predicament: what is the nature of existence in a world which seems a mechanism? Dennett’s response to this question is Hegelian, and involves a (...) commitment to a religiosity which might surprise those otherwise receptive to his arguments. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the holistic claim that the description and explanation of human behaviour is irreducibly social in nature. I focus on the more specific thesis that human behaviour is rule-guided and that 'rule' is an irreducibly social notion. Against this claim I defend a teleofunctional and reductionist view. Following Millikan (1990), who argues that 'rule' can be explicated in functional terms, I extend her argument to cover social rules as well, and argue that rules are laws. (...) I conclude that human rule-guided behaviour can be described and explained in functional, and in the end causal, i.e. causal-historical, terms. (shrink)

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)has been identified as part of a supervisoryattentional network for selecting alternativemotor programs in response to top-down corticalprocessing, particularly in situationsinvolving conflicting cognitive tasks.Bilateral lesions to the ACC may be causallyassociated with akinetic mutism, where patientsare unable to voluntarily initiate responses.The clinical and neuroanatomical evidence forthis presumed causal association is examined atlength. However, given the many reciprocalprojections between cerebral, motor, limbic andparalimbic structures within the executivesupervisory network, the association ofvoluntary behavior with a particular structure(the ACC) is (...) highly controversial and thereforepremature at this time. Also considered is theclaim that our subjective sense of voluntarycontrol and free will is simply due toour not having conscious access to theunderlying neural computations that precede our decisions and actions. On thecontrary, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary thoughts and actions mayrather be a matter of temporal and directionallag between parallel computations in differentneural areas. Finally, with reference toDennett, there is an extended discussion ofwhether patients with akinetic mutism are (i) conscious automata, (ii) non-intentional systems, and (iii) in azombie-like state. The relevance of (i)–(iii) for the cognitive neuroscientificliterature is then briefly addressed. (shrink)

Dennett (1995) argues that memes or cultural replicators are largely autonomous of genes, and that they are fairly efficacious in determining who we are and what we do. I argue that Dennett's arguments are wrong in several aspects, which we can see by analyzing processes at appropriate levels. Specifically, I argue that it is not true that we as persons are created largely by memes, that our memes are not largely independent of our genes, and that we can use the (...) universality of memes to make inferences about genetic predispositions. Finally, by suggesting an innate psychological mechanism for morality, I argue that morality may be largely the effect of genetic predispositions rather than autonomous. (shrink)