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Knowledge and the Flow of Information

Mind 92 (367):457-461 (1981)

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  1. Iconological Dualism Re-Thought: A New Variation on Two Old Theories.Frédéric Wecker - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (4):494-509.
    This article aims at defending the old theory of iconological dualism that opposes ‘handmade’ pictures to photographic pictures. I defend a new version of that theory, according to which photographs always enable viewers to have singular thoughts on the things photographed, while handmade pictures by themselves never enable viewers to have singular thoughts but only enable them to have what I call ‘thoughts by depiction’. To this end, I defend the old theory according to which singular thoughts require a special (...)
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  • Naturalness by law.Verónica Gómez Sánchez - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):100-127.
    The intuitive distinction between natural and unnatural properties (e.g., green vs. grue) informs our theorizing not only in fundamental physics, but also in non-fundamental domains. This paper develops a reductive account of this broad notion of naturalness that covers non-fundamental properties: for a property to be natural, I propose, is for it to figure in a law of nature. After motivating the account, I defend it from a potential circularity charge. I argue that a suitably broad notion of lawhood can (...)
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  • Stop and smell the what? Two kinds of olfactory representation.Christopher F. Masciari - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-21.
    There are many accounts of representation in the philosophical literature. However, regarding olfaction, Burge’s (2010) account is widely endorsed. According to his account, perceptual representation is always of an objective reality, that is, perception represents objects as such. Many authors presuppose this account of representation and attempt to show that the olfactory system itself issues in representations of that sort. The present paper argues that this myopia is a mistake and, moreover, that the various arguments in favor of olfactory objects (...)
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  • Remembering is not a kind of knowing.Changsheng Lai - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):333.
    This paper purports to disprove an orthodox view in contemporary epistemology that I call ‘the epistemic conception of memory’, which sees remembering as a kind of epistemic success, in particular, a kind of knowing. This conception is embodied in a cluster of platitudes in epistemology, including ‘remembering entails knowing’, ‘remembering is a way of knowing’, and ‘remembering is sufficiently analogous to knowing’. I will argue that this epistemic conception of memory, as a whole, should be rejected insofar as we take (...)
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  • Towards a bioinformational understanding of AI.Rahul D. Gautam & Balaganapathi Devarakonda - 2022 - AI and Society 37:1-23.
    The article seeks to highlight the relation between ontology and communication while considering the role of AI in society and environment. Bioinformationalism is the technical term that foregrounds this relationality. The study reveals instructive consequences for philosophy of technology in general and AI in particular. The first section introduces the bioinformational approach to AI, focusing on three critical features of the current AI debate: ontology of information, property-based vs. relational AI, and ontology vs. constitution of AI. When applied to the (...)
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  • Predication and Hume's Conceivability Principle.Hsueh Qu - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):442-464.
    In this paper, I will make the case that an associative account of predication in Hume seems to allow for impossible predicative conceptions—that is, the conceiving of impossible states of affairs involving subjects instantiating properties or qualities—which violate his Conceivability Principle. The natural response is to argue that such conceptions are not clear and distinct, but substantive worries are raised about a number of attempted solutions along these lines. This poses a predicament for Hume scholars: either we must modify or (...)
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  • What the Senses Cannot ‘Say’.Jonathan Brink Morgan - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):557-579.
    Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...)
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  • Two pictures of communication: from content identity to coordination.Andrea Onofri - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-20.
    In this paper, I discuss two influential pictures of communication and the relation between them. One picture holds that successful communication requires identity of content: The speaker has a belief that she expresses with her utterance, and the hearer acquires a belief with the same content by understanding the utterance. The second picture was proposed by Lewis in his classic work Convention and then refined in “Languages and Language.” It sees communication as coordination among speakers—a technical notion that Lewis draws (...)
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  • The precision of content characterizations.Fabian Hundertmark - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (3):678-694.
    The contents of representations in non-human animals, human core cognition, and perception cannot precisely be characterized by sentences of a natural language. However, this fact does not stop us from giving imprecise characterizations of these contents through natural language. In this paper, I develop an account of the precision of content characterizations by appealing to possible-world semantics combined with set and measurement theory.
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  • Perception as a contentful relation.Daniel E. Kalpokas - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):740-754.
    European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 740-754, June 2022.
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  • Between Deflationism and Inflationism: A Moderate View on Truth and Reference.Graham Seth Moore - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):673-694.
    This essay argues for a two-part thesis concerning the deflationist theories of truth and reference. First, I identify two points of contrast between the deflationist theories and their traditional inflationary opponents: (1) they each employ different orders of explanation for the variety of semantic phenomena, and (2) the inflationist is typically taken to be beholden to a reductive explanation of reference, whereas the deflationist is doubtful of this project. Secondly, I argue that these two points of contrast need not come (...)
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  • Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti.Amit Chaturvedi - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):3-29.
    Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...)
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  • Multi-Frequency Information Flows between Global Commodities and Uncertainties: Evidence from COVID-19 Pandemic.Emmanuel Asafo-Adjei, Siaw Frimpong, Peterson Owusu Junior, Anokye Mohammed Adam, Ebenezer Boateng & Robert Ofori Abosompim - 2022 - Complexity 2022:1-32.
    Owing to the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on world economies, it is expected that information flows between commodities and uncertainties have been transformed. Accordingly, the resulting twisted risk among commodities and related uncertainties is presumed to rise during stressed market conditions. Therefore, investors feel pressured to find safe haven investments during the pandemic. For this reason, we model a mixture of asymmetric and non-linear bi-directional causality between global commodities and uncertainties at different frequencies through the information flow theory. (...)
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  • What Are Neural Representations? A Cummins Functions Approach.Ori Hacohen - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (4):701-720.
    This paper introduces the Cummins Functions Approach to neural representations, which aims to capture the notion of representation that is relevant to contemporary neuroscientific practice. CFA shares the common view that “to be a representation of X” amounts to “having the function of tracking X,” but maintains that the relevant notion of function is defined by Robert Cummins’s account. Thus, CFA offers a notion of neural representation that is dependent on explanatory context. I argue that CFA can account for the (...)
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  • A Philosophically Neutral Semantics for Perception Sentences.Samuele Iaquinto & Giuseppe Spolaore - 2022 - Theoria 88:532-544.
    Jaakko Hintikka proposed treating objectual perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob,” as de re propositional perception sentences. Esa Saarinen extended Hintikka’s idea to eventive perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob smile.” These approaches, elegant as they may be, are not philosophically neutral, for they presuppose, controversially, that the content of all perceptual experiences is propositional in nature. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal treatment of objectual and eventive perception sentences that builds on Hintikka’s modal (...)
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  • Dretske and Informational Closure.Yves Bouchard - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (2):311-322.
    Christoph Jäger has argued that Dretske’s information-based account of knowledge is committed to both knowledge and information closure under known entailment. However, in a reply to Jäger, Dretske defended his view on the basis of a discrepancy between the relation of information and the relation of logical implication. This paper shares Jäger’s criticism that Dretske’s externalist notion of information implies closure, but provides an analysis based on different grounds. By means of a distinction between two perspectives, the mathematical perspective and (...)
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  • Is Honesty Rational?1.Giorgio Sbardolini - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):979-1001.
    According to the Maxim of Quality, rational agents tend to speak honestly. Due to the influence of Grice, a connection between linguistic rationality and honesty is often taken for granted. However, the connection is not obvious: structural rationality in language use does not require honesty, any more than it requires dishonesty. In particular, Quality does not follow from the Cooperative Principle and structural rationality. But then what is honest rational speech? I propose to move the discussion in the context of (...)
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  • Action control, forward models and expected rewards: representations in reinforcement learning.Jami Pekkanen, Jesse Kuokkanen, Otto Lappi & Anna-Mari Rusanen - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14017-14033.
    The fundamental cognitive problem for active organisms is to decide what to do next in a changing environment. In this article, we analyze motor and action control in computational models that utilize reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In reinforcement learning, action control is governed by an action selection policy that maximizes the expected future reward in light of a predictive world model. In this paper we argue that RL provides a way to explicate the so-called action-oriented views of cognitive systems in (...)
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  • Can Information Concepts have Physical Content?Javier Anta - 2023 - Perspectives on Science 31 (2):207-232.
    In this paper, I analyze the physical content of the main information concepts in the history of physics of the last seven decades. I argue that this physical character should be evaluated not by appealing to analytical-linguistic confusion (Timpson 2013) or to the usefulness of its applicability (Lombardi et al. 2016), but properly from its capacity to allow us to acquire significant knowledge about the physical world. After systematically employing this epistemic criterion of physical significance I will conclude by rejecting (...)
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  • Introspective knowledge by acquaintance.Anna Giustina - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-23.
    Introspective knowledge by acquaintance is knowledge we have by being directly aware of our phenomenally conscious states. In this paper, I argue that introspective knowledge by acquaintance is a sui generis kind of knowledge: it is irreducible to any sort of propositional knowledge and is wholly constituted by a relationship of introspective acquaintance. My main argument is that this is the best explanation of some epistemic facts about phenomenal consciousness and introspection. In particular, it best explains the epistemic asymmetry between (...)
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  • Information-Theoretic Adverbialism.Joshua Gert - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4):696-715.
    ABSTRACT Adverbialism is the view that to have a conscious perceptual experience is to be consciously experiencing in a certain way, and that this way is not to be understood in relational or representational terms. We might compare what it is for a conscious being to be experiencing in a certain way with what it is for a string to be vibrating in a certain way. This paper makes a new case for adverbialism by appealing to the fact that we (...)
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  • “What on Earth Is Smenkhkare?” WH-Questions, Truth-Makers, and Causal-Informational Account of Reference.Jani Sinokki - 2021 - Theoria 88 (2):326-347.
    Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 326-347, April 2022.
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  • Digital Phenotyping: an Epistemic and Methodological Analysis.Simon Coghlan & Simon D’Alfonso - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):1905-1928.
    Some claim that digital phenotyping will revolutionize understanding of human psychology and experience and significantly promote human wellbeing. This paper investigates the nature of digital phenotyping in relation to its alleged promise. Unlike most of the literature to date on philosophy and digital phenotyping, which has focused on its ethical aspects, this paper focuses on its epistemic and methodological aspects. The paper advances a tetra-taxonomy involving four scenario types in which knowledge may be acquired from human “digitypes” by digital phenotyping. (...)
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  • A Dual Proposal Of Minimal Conditions For Intentionality.Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho - 2022 - Synthese 200 (115):1-22.
    Naturalist theories of representation have been attacked on the grounds of being too liberal on the minimal conditions for intentionality: they treat several states that are not representational as genuine representations. Behind this attack lies the problem of demarcation: what are the minimal conditions for intentionality that a state should satisfy to be genuinely representational? What are the limits of intentionality? This paper develops a dual proposal to solve this problem. First, I defend the explanatory role criterion in order to (...)
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  • Crane and the mark of the mental.Andrea Raimondi - 2022 - Analysis 81 (4):683-693.
    Brentano’s suggestion that intentionality is the mark of the mental is typically spelled out in terms of the thesis that all and only mental states are intentional. An influential objection is that intentionality is not necessary for mentality. What about the idea that only mental states are intentional? In his 2008 paper published in Analysis, Nes shows that on a popular characterization of intentionality, notably defended by Crane, some non-mental states come out as intentional. Crane replies that the concept of (...)
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  • Choice Points for a Theory of Normality.Annina J. Loets - 2022 - Mind 131 (521):159-191.
    A variety of recent work in epistemology employs a notion of normality to provide novel theories of knowledge or justification. While such theories are commonly advertised as affording particularly strong epistemic logics, they often make substantive assumptions about the background notion of normality and its logic. This article takes recent normality-based defences of the KK principle as a case study to submit such assumptions to scrutiny. After clarifying issues regarding the natural language use of normality claims, the article isolates a (...)
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  • Better Scared than Sorry: The Pragmatic Account of Emotional Representation.Kris Goffin - 2021 - Erkenntnis (6):1-18.
    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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  • Introspection of Emotions.Bertille De Vlieger & Anna Giustina - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):551-580.
    In this paper, we argue that knowledge of emotions essentially depends on introspecting the phenomenology of emotional experiences, and that introspection of emotional experiences is a process by stages, where the most fundamental stage is a non-classificatory introspective state, i.e., one that does not depend on the subject’s classifying the introspected emotion as an instance of any experience type. We call such a non-classificatory kind of introspection primitive introspection. Our main goal is to show that, although not sufficient, primitive introspection (...)
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  • Is Your Neural Data Part of Your Mind? Exploring the Conceptual Basis of Mental Privacy.Abel Wajnerman Paz - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (2):395-415.
    It has been argued that neural data are an especially sensitive kind of personal information that could be used to undermine the control we should have over access to our mental states, and therefore need a stronger legal protection than other kinds of personal data. The Morningside Group, a global consortium of interdisciplinary experts advocating for the ethical use of neurotechnology, suggests achieving this by treating legally ND as a body organ. Although the proposal is currently shaping ND-related policies, it (...)
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  • The Structure of Analog Representation.Andrew Y. Lee, Joshua Myers & Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):209-237.
    This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...)
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  • Cognitive Instrumentalism about Mental Representations.Samuel D. Taylor - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):518-550.
    Representationalists and anti-representationalists disagree about whether a naturalisation of mental content is possible and, hence, whether positing mental representations in cognitive science is justified. Here, I develop a novel way to think about mental representations based on a philosophical description of (cognitive) science inspired by cognitive instrumentalism. On this view, our acceptance of theories positing mental representations and our beliefs in (something like) mental representations do not depend on the naturalisation of content. Thus, I conclude that if we endorse cognitive (...)
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  • The expression of emotion in pictures.Vanessa Brassey - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (9):e12767.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 16, Issue 9, September 2021.
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  • Perceiving agency.Mason Westfall - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):847-865.
    When we look around us, some things look “alive,” others do not. What is it to “look alive”—to perceive animacy? Empirical work supports the view that animacy is genuinely perceptual. We should construe perception of animacy as perception of agents and behavior. This proposal explains how static and dynamic animacy cues relate, and explains how animacy perception relates to social cognition more broadly. Animacy perception draws attention to objects that are apt to be well‐understood folk psychologically, enabling us to marshal (...)
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  • In search of an ontology for 4E theories: from new mechanism to causal powers realism.Charles Lassiter & Joseph Vukov - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9785-9808.
    Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended theorists do not typically focus on the ontological frameworks in which they develop their theories. One exception is 4E theories that embrace New Mechanism. In this paper, we endorse the New Mechanist’s general turn to ontology, but argue that their ontology is not the best on the market for 4E theories. Instead, we advocate for a different ontology: causal powers realism. Causal powers realism posits that psychological manifestations are the product of mental powers, and that (...)
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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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  • Nonnatural Personal Information. Accounting for Misleading and Non-misleading Personal Information.Sille Obelitz Søe - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):1243-1262.
    Personal information is key to informational privacy and the algorithmically generated profiles of individuals. However, the concept of personal information and its nature is rarely discussed. The concept of personal information thus seems to be based on an idea of information as objective and truthful—as natural information—that is depicted as digital footprints in the online and digital realm. I argue that the concept of personal information should exit the realm of natural information and enter the realm of nonnatural information—grounded in (...)
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  • Biosemiotics and Development: Metaphors and Facts.Guillermo Lorenzo - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (2):479-497.
    As a field of scientific expertise, semiotics has the interesting property of being a relevant tool for understanding how scientists represent any domain of research, including the semiotic domain itself. This feature is particularly expressive in the case of biology, as it appears to be the case that a certain range of biological phenomena are of a semiotic character. However, it is not consensual the extent to which semiotics pervades biology. This paper deals with this issue for the particular case (...)
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  • Mapping the Visual Icon.Sam Clarke - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):552-577.
    It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its (...)
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  • Intelligence as Accurate Prediction.Trond A. Tjøstheim & Andreas Stephens - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):475-499.
    This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...)
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  • Epistemic feelings, metacognition, and the Lima problem.Nathaniel Greely - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6803-6825.
    Epistemic feelings like tip-of-the-tongue experiences, feelings of knowing, and feelings of confidence tell us when a memory can be recalled and when a judgment was correct. Thus, they appear to be a form of metacognition, but a curious one: they tell us about content we cannot access, and the information is supplied by a feeling. Evaluativism is the claim that epistemic feelings are components of a distinct, primitive metacognitive mechanism that operates on its own set of inputs. These inputs are (...)
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  • Going on as one ought: Kripke and Wittgenstein on the normativity of meaning.Hannah Ginsborg - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):876-892.
    Kripke’s thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein’s conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one’s use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from prevous uses of the expression. I argue that (...)
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  • Structural representations do not meet the job description challenge.Marco Facchin - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5479-5508.
    Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...)
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  • Weighing in on decisions in the brain: neural representations of pre-awareness practical intention.Robyn Repko Waller - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):5175-5203.
    Neuroscientists have located brain activity that prepares or encodes action plans before agents are aware of intending to act. On the basis of these findings and broader agency research, activity in these regions has been proposed as the neural realizers of practical intention. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the case for taking these neural states to be neural representations of intention. I draw on work in philosophy of action on the role and nature of practical intentions to (...)
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  • Semantics of Pictorial Space.Gabriel Greenberg - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (4):847-887.
    A semantics of pictorial representation should provide an account of how pictorial signs are associated with the contents they express. Unlike the familiar semantics of spoken languages, this problem has a distinctively spatial cast for depiction. Pictures themselves are two-dimensional artifacts, and their contents take the form of pictorial spaces, perspectival arrangements of objects and properties in three dimensions. A basic challenge is to explain how pictures are associated with the particular pictorial spaces they express. Inspiration here comes from recent (...)
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  • Causation and Information: Where Is Biological Meaning to Be Found?Mark Pharoah - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (3):309-326.
    The term ‘information’ is used extensively in biology, cognitive science and the philosophy of consciousness in relation to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘causation’. While ‘information’ is a term that serves a useful purpose in specific disciplines, there is much to the concept that is problematic. Part 1 is a critique of the stance that information is an independently existing entity. On this view, and in biological contexts, systems transmit, acquire, assimilate, decode and manipulate it, and in so doing, generate (...)
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  • Temporal externalism, conceptual continuity, meaning, and use.Henry Jackman - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):959-973.
    ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...)
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  • Basic knowledge and the normativity of knowledge: The awareness‐first solution.Paul Silva - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):564-586.
    [Significantly updated in Chapter 7 of Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge] Many have found it plausible that knowledge is a constitutively normative state, i.e. a state that is grounded in the possession of reasons. Many have also found it plausible that certain cases of proprioceptive knowledge, memorial knowledge, and self-evident knowledge are cases of knowledge that are not grounded in the possession of reasons. I refer to these as cases of basic knowledge. The existence of basic knowledge forms a (...)
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  • Knowledge before belief.Jonathan Phillips, Wesley Buckwalter, Fiery Cushman, Ori Friedman, Alia Martin, John Turri, Laurie Santos & Joshua Knobe - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e140.
    Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...)
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  • Consequences of a Functional Account of Information.Stephen Francis Mann - 2020 - 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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  • Innate Mind Need Not Be Within.Riin Kõiv - 2021 - Acta Analytica 36:101-121.
    It is a widely accepted thesis in the cognitive sciences and in naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of at least some mental representations are innate. A question that has popped up in discussions concerning innate mental representations is this. Are externalist theories of mental content applicable to the content of innate representations? Views on the matter vary and sometimes conflict. To date, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the relationship between content externalism and content innateness. The aim (...)
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