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  1. A new low: Reassessing (and revising) the local recurrency theory of consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Local Recurrency Theory (LR) holds that recurrent loops of neural activity localized to the visual cortex are necessary and sufficient for visual consciousness (if certain background conditions obtain). LR’s popularity has recently waned in favor of theories holding that higher-level types of processing are necessary for consciousness (for example, the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Higher-order Theory). This has been in part because of empirical evidence thought to disconfirm LR. However, these competing theories now face challenges of their own, often (...)
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  • Distal Content in Informational Teleosemantics: Challenges from Colour Constancy and Colour Chemistry.Lance Balthazar - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In general, visual experiences represent determinately. And visual experiences, generally, represent properties of distal objects like their colour, shape, and size, but they do not, generally, represent properties of proximal states like that of incoming light or the retina. By making perceptual constancies central to perceptual representation, Peter Schulte extends Karen Neander’s Causal-Informational Teleosemantic theory in order to accommodate these facts. However, by appealing to the psychophysics and chemistry of how light-related properties interact to produce stimulation to the visual system (...)
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  • Real Sparks of Artificial Intelligence and the Importance of Inner Interpretability.Alex Grzankowski - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The present paper looks at one of the most thorough articles on the intelligence of GPT, research conducted by engineers at Microsoft. Although there is a great deal of value in their work, I will argue that, for familiar philosophical reasons, their methodology, ‘Black-box Interpretability’ is wrongheaded. But there is a better way. There is an exciting and emerging discipline of ‘Inner Interpretability’ (also sometimes called ‘White-box Interpretability’) that aims to uncover the internal activations and weights of models in order (...)
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  • Metafizika lica.Miljana Milojevic - 2018
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  • A structuralist theory of phenomenal intentionality.Ben White - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper argues for a theory of phenomenal intentionality (herein referred to as ‘Structuralism’), according to which perceptual experiences only possess intentional content when their phenomenal components are appropriately related to one another. This paper responds to the objections (i) that Structuralism cannot explain why some experiences have content while others do not, or (ii) why contentful experiences have the specific contents that they have. Against (i), I argue that to possess content, an experience must present itself as an experience (...)
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  • Emergent Mental Properties are Not Just Double-Preventers.Andrei A. Buckareff & Jessica Hawkins - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-22.
    We examine Sophie Gibb’s emergent property-dualist theory of mental causation as double-prevention. Her account builds on a commitment to a version of causal realism based on a powers metaphysic. We consider three objections to her account. We show, by drawing out the implications of the ontological commitments of Gibb’s theory of mental causation, that the first two objections fail. But, we argue, owing to worries about cases where there is no double-preventive role to be played by mental properties, her account, (...)
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  • Altruistic Motivation Beyond Ultimate Desires.Junior Mendonca - 2023 - Dissertation, The University of Western Australia
    The term “altruism” is used in many ways. In this thesis, I discuss altruism as a motivation, which is an influential notion in philosophy and the social sciences. Questions about the nature and the possibility of altruistic motivation have inspired much debate, both in academia and in everyday conversations. How can we know when we are truly altruistic and when we are merely helping others as a means to some egoistic goal? Are humans even capable of genuine altruistic motivation or (...)
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  • (1 other version)Better Scared than Sorry: The Pragmatic Account of Emotional Representation.Kris Goffin - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2633-2650.
    Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...)
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Theories of Perceptual Content and Cases of Reliable Spatial Misperception.Andrew Rubner - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):430-455.
    Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017), and Schellenberg (2018). I show how such theories can be extended so that they cover such cases without giving (...)
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  • What is social structural explanation? A causal account.Lauren N. Ross - 2023 - Noûs 1 (1):163-179.
    Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...)
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  • Are There Really Social Causes?August Faller - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2):83-102.
    This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Elusive Role of Normal-Proper Function in Cognitive Science.Frances Egan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105:468-475.
    Comments on Karen Neander's A Mark of the Mental.
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  • Merely statistical evidence: when and why it justifies belief.Paul Silva - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2639-2664.
    It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...)
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  • What do we see in pictures? The sensory individuals of picture perception.Bence Nanay - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3729-3746.
    When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in philosophy of perception about (...)
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  • Moral Agency.Timothy Nailer - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Adelaide
    While there is a vast philosophical literature exploring the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold individuals morally responsible for their actions, relatively little attention has been paid to the related question of which kinds of individuals merit these responsibility ascriptions. Under normal circumstances, typical adult human beings are held morally responsible for their behaviour but infants and nonhuman animals are not. In this thesis, I aim to account for this difference. That is, I aim to give an analysis (...)
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  • Dissolving the Grounding Problem: How the Pen is Mightier than the Sword.Nancy Salay - 2017 - In R. Catrambone & S. Ohlsson (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    The computational metaphor for mind is still the central guiding idea in cognitive science despite many insightful and well-founded rejections of it. There is good reason for its staying power: when we are at our cognitive best, we reason about our world with our concepts. But the challengers are right, I argue, in insisting that no reductive account of that capacity is forthcoming. Here I describe an externalist account that grounds representations in organism-level engagement with its environment, not in its (...)
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  • Phenomenology: What’s AI got to do with it?Alessandra Buccella & Alison A. Springle - 2023 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (3):621-636.
    Nowadays, philosophers and scientists tend to agree that, even though human and artificial intelligence work quite differently, they can still illuminate aspects of each other, and knowledge in one domain can inspire progress in the other. For instance, the notion of “artificial” or “synthetic” phenomenology has been gaining some traction in recent AI research. In this paper, we ask the question: what (if anything) is the use of thinking about phenomenology in the context of AI, and in particular machine learning? (...)
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  • Phenomenal transparency, cognitive extension, and predictive processing.Marco Facchin - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (2):305-327.
    I discuss Clark’s predictive processing/extended mind hybrid, diagnosing a problem: Clark’s hybrid suggests that, when we use them, we pay attention to mind-extending external resources. This clashes with a commonly accepted necessary condition of cognitive extension; namely, that mind-extending resources must be phenomenally transparent when used. I then propose a solution to this problem claiming that the phenomenal transparency condition should be rejected. To do so, I put forth a parity argument to the effect that phenomenal transparency cannot be a (...)
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  • Normal‐proper functions in the philosophy of mind.Andrew Rubner - 2022 - Philosophy Compass (7):1-11.
    This paper looks at the nature of normal-proper functions and the role they play in theories of representational content. More specifically: I lay down two desiderata for a theory which tries to capture what's distinctive of normal-proper functions and discuss two prominent theories which claim to satisfy them. I discuss the advantages of having normal-proper functions ground a theory of representational content. And, I look at both orthodox and heterodox versions of such theories.
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  • Putting representations to use.Rosa Cao - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...)
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  • Are Propositional Attitudes Mental States?Umut Baysan - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (3):417-432.
    I present an argument that propositional attitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that if propositional attitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bear propositional attitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bear propositional attitudes, but they are not subjects of mental states. Although propositional attitudes (...)
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  • Remembering Emotions.Urim Retkoceri - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-26.
    Memories and emotions are both vital parts of everyday life, yet crucial interactions between the two have scarcely been explored. While there has been considerable research into how emotions can influence how well things are remembered, whether or not emotions themselves can be remembered is still a largely uncharted area of research. Philosophers and scientists alike have diverging views on this question, which seems to stem, at least in part, from different accounts of the nature of emotions. Here, I try (...)
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  • Adaptation and its Analogues: Biological Categories for Biosemantics.Hajo Greif - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90:298-307.
    “Teleosemantic” or “biosemantic” theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of “proper functions” as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms. This essay critically explores (...)
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  • Observing a superposition.Paul Skokowski - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7107-7129.
    The bare theory is a no-collapse version of quantum mechanics which predicts certain puzzling results for the introspective beliefs of human observers of superpositions. The bare theory can be interpreted to claim that an observer can form false beliefs about the outcome of an experiment which produces a superpositional result. It is argued that, when careful consideration is given to the observer’s belief states and their evolution, the observer does not end up with the beliefs claimed. This result leads to (...)
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  • Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content.Kim Soland - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...)
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  • Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-20.
    Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...)
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  • Retiring the “Cinderella view”: the spinal cord as an intrabodily cognitive extension.Marco Facchin, Marco Viola & Elia Zanin - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-25.
    Within the field of neuroscience, it is assumed that the central nervous system is divided into two functionally distinct components: the brain, which does the cognizing, and the spinal cord, which is a conduit of information enabling the brain to do its job. We dub this the “Cinderella view” of the spinal cord. Here, we suggest it should be abandoned. Marshalling recent empirical findings, we claim that the spinal cord is best conceived as an intrabodily cognitive extension: a piece of (...)
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  • Trends in the philosophy of information.Luciano Floridi - 2008 - In P. Adriaans & J. van Benthem (eds.), hilosophy of Information. MIT Press. pp. 113–131.
    This chapter reviews some interesting research trends in the philosophy of information (PI). First, PI is defined; then, a series of open problems in PI on which philosophers are currently working is considered. The conclusion highlights the innovative character of this new area of research.
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  • A unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation.Sille Obelitz Søe - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5929-5949.
    In this paper I develop and present a unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation and their interconnections. The unified account is rooted in Paul Grice’s notions of natural and non-natural meaning (in: Grice (ed) Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 213–223, 1957) and a corresponding distinction between natural and non-natural information (Scarantino and Piccinini in Metaphilosophy 41(3):313–330, 2010). I argue that we can specify at least three specific kinds of non-natural information. Thus, as varieties (...)
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  • Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism.Camil Golub - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7.
    How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought (...)
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  • Intrinsic colors - and what it is like to see them.Zoltan Jakab - 2003 - In R. Mausfeld & D. Heyer (eds.), Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World. Oxford University Press. pp. 303-306.
    This is a commentary on Laurence Maloney’s chapter in Mausfeld R., and Heyer, D. (Eds.): Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. I discuss two related proposals as to the nature of object color formulated by Maloney. On the first proposal colors are photoreceptor excitations; on the second, they are fundamental, universal reflectance characteristics of terrestrial surfaces. I argue that the second proposal is suitable for purposes of color objectivism, whereas the first one is not. (...)
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  • Unity and Application.Geoffrey Hall - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    Propositions represent the entities from which they are formed. This fact has puzzled philosophers and some have put forward radical proposals in order to explain it. This paper develops a primitivist account of the representational properties of propositions that centers on the operation of application. As we will see, this theory wins out over its competitors on grounds of strength, systematicity and unifying power.
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...)
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  • How beliefs are like colors.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7889-7918.
    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 (...)
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  • The disappearing agent as an exclusion problem.Johannes Himmelreich - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1321-1347.
    The disappearing agent problem is an argument in the metaphysics of agency. Proponents of the agent-causal approach argue that the rival event-causal approach fails to account for the fact that an agent is active. This paper examines an analogy between this disappearing agent problem and the exclusion problem in the metaphysics of mind. I develop the analogy between these two problems and survey existing solutions. I suggest that some solutions that have received significant attention in response to the exclusion problem (...)
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  • Folk psychology as a causal language.Annemarie Kalis & Denny Borsboom - 2020 - Theory & Psychology 5 (30):723-8.
    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.
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  • Group Action Without Group Minds.Kenneth Silver - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2):321-342.
    Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...)
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  • Strong liberal representationalism.Marc Artiga - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (3):645-667.
    The received view holds that there is a significant divide between full-blown representational states and so called ‘detectors’, which are mechanisms set off by specific stimuli that trigger a particular effect. The main goal of this paper is to defend the idea that many detectors are genuine representations, a view that I call ‘Strong Liberal Representationalism’. More precisely, I argue that ascribing semantic properties to them contributes to an explanation of behavior, guides research in useful ways and can accommodate misrepresentation.
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  • Embodied appearance properties and subjectivity.Miguel Angel Sebastian - 2018 - Adaptive Behavior 26 (Special Issue: Spotlight on 4E C):1-12.
    The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...)
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  • Is radically enactive imagination really contentless?Marco Facchin - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (5):1089-1105.
    Radical enactivists claim that cognition is split in two distinct kinds, which can be differentiated by how they relate to mental content. In their view, basic cognitive activities involve no mental content whatsoever, whereas linguistically scaffolded, non-basic, cognitive activities constitutively involve the manipulation of mental contents. Here, I evaluate how this dichotomy applies to imagination, arguing that the sensory images involved in basic acts of imaginations qualify as vehicles of content, contrary to what radical enactivists claim. To argue so, I (...)
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  • There are no i-beliefs or i-desires at work in fiction consumption and this is why.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 210-233.
    Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...)
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  • Creativity.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 262-296.
    Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...)
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  • (1 other version)The elusive role of normal‐proper function in cognitive science.Frances Egan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2):468-475.
    Comments on Karen Neander's A Mark of the Mental.
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  • Self-control, Attention, and How to live without Special Motivational Powers.Sebastian Watzl - 2019 - In Michael Brent & Lisa Miracchi Titus (eds.), Mental Action and the Conscious Mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 272-300.
    It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...)
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  • Explaining Imagination.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    ​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...)
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  • Consequences of a Functional Account of Information.Stephen Francis Mann - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):1-19.
    This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its competing interpretations. The second half explores three consequences of (...)
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  • Infinite Reasoning.Jared Warren - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):385-407.
    Our relationship to the infinite is controversial. But it is widely agreed that our powers of reasoning are finite. I disagree with this consensus; I think that we can, and perhaps do, engage in infinite reasoning. Many think it is just obvious that we can't reason infinitely. This is mistaken. Infinite reasoning does not require constructing infinitely long proofs, nor would it gift us with non-recursive mental powers. To reason infinitely we only need an ability to perform infinite inferences. I (...)
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  • Consciousness and Intentionality.David Pitt - 2018 - In Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. New York: Routledge. pp. 260-270.
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  • Subjective Moral Biases & Fallacies: Developing Scientifically & Practically Adequate Moral Analogues of Cognitive Heuristics & Biases.Mark H. Herman - 2019 - Dissertation, Bowling Green State University
    In this dissertation, I construct scientifically and practically adequate moral analogs of cognitive heuristics and biases. Cognitive heuristics are reasoning “shortcuts” that are efficient but flawed. Such flaws yield systematic judgment errors—i.e., cognitive biases. For example, the availability heuristic infers an event’s probability by seeing how easy it is to recall similar events. Since dramatic events, such as airplane crashes, are disproportionately easy to recall, this heuristic explains systematic overestimations of their probability (availability bias). The research program on cognitive heuristics (...)
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