In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...) (1958) thesis that the predictive power of a scientific theory is directly proportional to its explanatory potential, and vice versa. (shrink)

What is it for a sound or gesture to have a meaning, and how does it come to have one? In this paper, a range of simulations are used to extend the tradition of theories of meaning as use. The authors work throughout with large spatialized arrays of sessile individuals in an environment of wandering food sources and predators. Individuals gain points by feeding and lose points when they are hit by a predator and are not hiding. They can also (...) make sounds heard by immediate neighbours in the array, and can respond to sounds from immediate neighbours. No inherent meaning for these sounds is built into the simulation; under what circumstances they are sent, if any, and what the response to them is, if any, vary initially with the strategies randomized across the array. These sounds do take on a specific function for communities of individuals, however, with any of three forms of strategy change: direct imitation of strategies of successful neighbours, a localized genetic algorithm in which strategies are ‘crossed’ with those of successful neighbours, and neural net training on the behaviour of successful neighbours. Starting from an array randomized across a large number of strategies, and using any of these modes of strategy change, communities of ‘communicators’ emerge. Within these evolving communities the sounds heard from immediate neighbours, initially arbitrary across the array, come to be used for very specific communicative functions. ‘Communicators’ make a particular sound on feeding and respond to that same sound from neighbours by opening their mouths; they make a different sound when hit with a predator and respond to that sound by hiding. Robustly and persistently, even in simple computer models of communities of self-interested agents, something suggestively like signalling emerges and spreads. Keywords: meaning, communication, genetic algorithms, neural networks. (shrink)

The main message of the paper is that there is a disconnect between what many philosophers of mind think of as the scientific practice of reductive or reductionist explanation, and what the most relevant scientific work is actually like. I will sketch what I see as a better view, drawing on various ideas in recent philosophy of science. I then import these ideas into the philosophy of mind, to see what difference they make.1 At the end of the paper I (...) address a possible objection: the familiar package of ideas I reject in the philosophy of science should not be lightly discarded, because other popular views on fundamental issues depend on positions that I want to reject. I reply that those apparently attractive further ideas are not worth holding onto. (shrink)

This thesis develops methods for representing how the contents of theories of meaning become conceived by their users. These contents are treated as the range of systematically elicited conceptions afforded by a designated corpus of key texts. The approach being taken involves first detailing a formal scheme for the components of situations attributed to various entities. This scheme is then applied as a framing device to form a template which accounts for the shared structure between the mental spaces which embody (...) how people conceive different theories of meaning. For the purposes of this task, cognition is treated as embodied in the sense that both the form and content of personal conceptualisations are largely dependent on what both bodily and ecological factors afford. The purpose of this approach is to help understand how theories operate when viewed as worldly entities within a materialist framework. The significance of such understanding lies in enabling analyses and comparisons which account for the effects of material restrictions such as how a theory’s presentation must necessarily be selective and how human cognition operates on models set by precedent. The framework being provided here allows the conceptions each individual theory of meaning elicits to be reduced to formal, commensurate models which account for differences between typical influences on the conceptions characteristic of different demographics such as experts of related fields. Approaching theories of meaning from this angle also reveals new avenues of comparison concerning otherwise implicit details. One involves theory-internal conditions on the full material identity of meaning-instantiating entities. The other concerns the extent of the domains for aggregating applicable influences for which a theory accounts and the range of those it may accommodate. (shrink)

In this work, we will try to state the opposition between two approaches to the problem of the overall reliability of human knowing capacities, and a possible solution to that conflict. On the one hand, as we will point out, there exist a number of approaches that fall under the broad term of “evolutionary reliabilism” and according to which the reasons that we have for believing in the reliability of human cognition are empirical in character. Namely, the adaptive success of (...) our species in a biological environment characterised by the survival of the fittest provides us with a reason to believe that our belief-forming mechanisms are truth-tracking; if they were not, we would have gone extinct. On the other hand, nevertheless, we find analyses—of which we will focus on the case of Ernest Sosa—according to which the tenet that our knowing capacities are reliable cannot be empirically based, and thus contingent; on the contrary, they point out that we need to presuppose—without need of a proof—that such capacities are trustworthy. Given this conflict between an “empirical” defence and a defence “in principle” of our knowing capacities, we will consider two possible objections against Sosa’s proposal and try to answer them. (shrink)

2. Invariant Sensorimotor Features ("Affordances"). To say this is not to declare oneself a Gibsonian, whatever that means. It is merely to point out that what a sensorimotor system can do is determined by what can be extracted from its motor interactions with its sensory input. If you lack sonar sensors, then your sensorimotor system cannot do what a bat's can do, at least not without the help of instruments. Light stimulation affords color vision for those of us with the (...) right sensory apparatus, but not for those of us who are color-blind. The geometric fact that, when we move, the "shadows" cast on our retina by nearby objects move faster than the shadows of further objects means that, for those of us with normal vision, our visual input affords depth perception. From more complicated facts of projective and solid geometry it follows that a 3-dimensional shape, such as, say, a boomerang, can be recognized as being the same shape Ð and the same size Ð even though the size and shape of its shadow on our retinas changes as we move in relation to it or it moves in relation to us. Its shape is said to be invariant under these sensorimotor transformations, and our visual systems can detect and extract that invariance, and translate it into a visual constancy. So we keep seeing a boomerang of the same shape and size even though the shape and size of its retinal shadows keep changing. (shrink)

I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences. (G.E. Moore, 1942, p. 14).

This dissertation is a study of the problem of beliefs about oneself, or so-called de se beliefs: for example, the beliefs that I would express by saying 'I am left-handed' or 'I am in Massachusetts'. The problem arises against the background conception of belief as a propositional attitude, i.e., as a relation between conscious subjects and abstract entities that are either true or false absolutely. ;Many philosophers have recently argued that the intentional objects of one's de se beliefs could not (...) be propositions: since, e.g., I can believe the proposition that Neil Feit is left-handed without believing myself to be left-handed , and I can believe any proposition expressed by a sentence of the form 'the F is left-handed'--where 'the F' is a qualitative description--without believing myself to be left-handed . ;I take the position that the argument is sound, and, after surveying various attempts to solve the problem, I defend the self-ascription view of belief: viz., the view that to have a belief is to ascribe a property to oneself. For example, I believe that I am left-handed simply by self-ascribing the property of being left-handed. ;I defend the view against various objections to it, discuss its relations to other views about the objects of belief and the other attitudes, and maintain that it can account for the acceptance of propositions and for beliefs about particular individuals as well as for beliefs directly about oneself. I argue that belief states are best taken to be self-ascribed properties, and try to solve some problems about de re belief from the perspective of the self-ascription view. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that an important notion of reduction depends on a four-place relation holding between expressions, concepts, properties, and events or states of affairs. I define this notion and argue against alternative accounts that are based on syntactic features of theories. Whilst these latter attempts fail to deliver a satisfactory explanation of why a certain theory or a certain expression reduces to another, the former can give a complete explanation of why, say, ‛human pain’ reduces to ‛C-fiber (...) stimulation’ or why the mind reduces to the physical. I briefly sketch the difference between the semantic approach that I favor, which is based on a particular notion of hyper-intensions, and classical model-theoretic versions of reduction. (shrink)

My goal is to try to understand the intentionality of consciousness from a naturalistic perspective. My basic methodological assumption is that embodied agents, through their sensory-motor, affective, and cognitive activities directed at objects, engage in intentional relations with these objects. Furthermore, I assume that intentional relations can be viewed from a first- and a third-person perspective. What is called primary consciousness is the first-person perspective of the agent engaged in a current intentional relation. While primary consciousness posits an implicit.

As part of the ongoing attempt to fully naturalize the concept of human being--and, more specifically, to re-center it around the notion of agency--this essay discusses an approach to defining the content of representations in terms ultimately derived from their central, evolved function of providing guidance for action. This 'guidance theory' of representation is discussed in the context of, and evaluated with respect to, two other biologically inspired theories of representation: Dan Lloyd's dialectical theory of representation and Ruth Millikan's biosemantics.

The following thesis starts from the question «why be moral?» and adresses an action-theoretic strategy for answering this question in the positive by reference to the constitutive natur of actions. In these debates, the epistemology of action has turned into a central issue. The thesis adresses these debates and develops a novel account of the epistemology: an account that may well turn out to provide a ground for the aforementioned constitutivist strategies.

Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic.

Kognitionswissenschaften – in einem weiten Sinn – sind einfach alle die Wissen- schaften, die sich mit der Analyse und Erklärung kognitiver Leistungen und Fähig- keiten befassen. Wenn man jedoch von der Kognitionswissenschaft im Singular spricht, dann ist in der Regel mehr gemeint. Für die Kognitionswissenschaft ist nicht nur ein bestimmter Forschungsgegenstand charakteristisch, sondern auch ein be- stimmter Erklärungsansatz: der Informationsverarbeitungsansatz. Stillings et al. z.B. schreiben gleich auf der ersten Seite ihres 1987 erschienenen Buches Cognitive Science – An Introduction: „Cognitive scientists (...) view the human mind as a complex system that receives, stores, retrieves, transforms, and transmits information.“ (Stil- lings et al. 1987: 1) Der Informationsverarbeitungsansatz führt jedoch sofort weiter zum Symbolverarbeitungsansatz. Denn offenbar kann ein System nur dann Informa- tionen empfangen, speichern und verarbeiten, wenn es über ein System von internen Repräsentationen oder Symbolen verfügt, über eine interne Sprache, in der diese In- formationen codiert sind. Zumindest ist das eine naheliegende Überlegung, die Peter Hacker so formuliert hat: „... if information is received, encoded, decoded, inter- preted and provides grounds for making plans, then there must be a language or sys- tem of representation in which this is all done.“ (Hacker 1987: 486f.) In der Tat ist die Annahme, daß es in kognitiven Systemen so etwas wie ein System interner Rep- räsentationen bzw. eine Sprache des Geistes1 gibt, die zentrale Grundannahme vieler neuerer Arbeiten in den Bereichen der Kognitionspsychologie und der kognitiven Neurobiologie. Für diese Wissenschaften hat diese Annahme den Status einer empi-. (shrink)

This dissertation explores philosophical issues in autism and defends a new version of the enactive approach to autism and social cognition. The discussion in this dissertation centres around the question “why do autistics encounter social interaction problems?”, addressing this question in ways that raise broader philosophical issues. Within the philosophy of mind, these include the problem of other minds, the nature of emotions, and narratives and their role in understanding the self. Beyond cognition, such issues are intertwined with questions in (...) metaphysics, philosophy of science, sociopolitical and moral philosophy, and disability studies. In responding to the question “why do autistics encounter social interaction problems?”, I argue that autistic social interaction problems result from the sensorimotor differences between autistics and non-autistics. This contrasts with the response to this question given by widely-endorsed views that emphasize instead the cognitive deficits that autistic people have. Such cognitivist views, such as the theory theory and simulation theory, are the focus of my first two critical chapters. I go on to offer a critique of two approaches that go beyond the focus on mindreading in appealing to sensorimotor problems as lying at the heart of the problem. These views, interaction theory and the original enactive approach, are the focus of the next two chapters. I then turn to defend a novel form of the enactive approach in the last part of the dissertation by emphasizing the role of emotions as the capacity for us to make sense of the world and to construct the sense of self from narratives. My new approach shifts the explanatory focus from perception and motion to emotion. This maintains the advantage of the original enactive approach, while avoiding its behaviouristically limited descriptions. My account thus expands the theory’s capacity to describe and explain internal states important to self-understanding and self-expression. This allows one to approach autistic social difficulties by attending to the first-person perspective, cohering with my reliance on first-person autistic narratives as a major source of evidence that supplements traditional scientific research on autism. (shrink)

“And maybe some of this stuff counts as philosophy after all. The form of a philosophical theory, often enough, is: Let’s try looking over here”- Jerry A. Fodor.

This paper starts from the familiar premise that psychological anti-individualism is incompatible with materialism. It attempts to state more clearly what this incompatibility consists in, and — rather than arguing in detail for any particular resolution — to inquire whether this incompatibility admits any resolution. However, the paper does offer a conditional argument concerning the possibility that the incompatibility is genuine and cannot be resolved. Provided that anti-individualism and materialism cannot be squared, and anti-individualism is correct, it follows that materialism (...) has to be abandoned. If so, the situation is not as disastrous as it might at first seem. We need not, in consequence of our inability to construe a coherent metaphysics of mind, give up on intentional vocabulary any more than we must stop, in consequence of our inability to make sense of induction, anticipating the future. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...) provide a more solid footing for philosophical anthropological discussions of uniquely human behavior. In particular, I have argued that art, religion and science, which are usually seen as achievements that are quite remote from ordinary modes of reasoning, are subserved by evolved cognitive processes that serve functions in everyday cognitive tasks, that arise early and spontaneously in cognitive development, that are shared cross-culturally, and that have evolved in response to selective pressures in our ancestral past. These mundane cognitive processes provide a measuring rod with which we can assess a diversity of cultural phenomena; they form a unified explanatory framework to approach human culture. I have argued that we can explain uncommon thoughts in terms of interactions between common minds. This dissertation is subdivided into four parts. Part I outlines the problem of human uniqueness, examining theories on how humans conceptualize the world, and what their mental tool box looks like. Part II discusses the evolutionary and cognitive origins of human artistic behavior. Part III focuses on the cognitive science of religion, especially on how it can be applied to the reasoning of theologians and philosophers of religion. Part IV considers the cognitive basis of scientific practice. (shrink)

Recent trends in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science can be fruitfully characterized as part of the ongoing attempt to come to grips with the very idea of homo sapiens--an intelligent, evolved, biological agent--and its signature contribution is the emergence of a philosophical anthropology which, contra Descartes and his thinking thing, instead puts doing at the center of human being. Applying this agency-oriented line of thinking to the problem of representation, this paper introduces the Guidance Theory, according to which (...) the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. We offer a brief account of the motivation for the theory, and a formal characterization. (shrink)

The current essay introduces the guidance theory of representation, according to which the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. The guidance theory offers a way of fixing representational content that gives the causal and evolutionary history of the subject only an indirect role, and an account of representational error, based on failure of action, that does not rely on any such notions as proper functions, ideal conditions, or (...) normal circumstances. Moreover, because the notion of error is defined in terms of failure of action, the guidance theory meets the “meta-epistemological requirement” that representational error should be potentially detectable by the representing system itself. In this essay, we offer a brief account of the biological origins of representation, a formal characterization of the guidance theory, some examples of its use, and show how the guidance theory handles some traditional problem cases for representation: the representation of fictional and abstract entities. Being both representational and actiongrounded, the guidance theory may provide some common ground between embodied and cognitivist approaches to the study of the mind. (shrink)

Proturječnost stavova o položaju biologije unutar ili izvan područja znanosti može se podijeliti na nekoliko osnovnih pristupa. Prvi pristup smješta biologiju izvan znanstvenog područja zbog nedostatka univerzalnosti, nedostatka strogih generalizacija i nedostatka stroge kvantitativne strukture. Drugi pristup smatra biologiju znanošću koju treba svesti na fiziku. Treći pristup vidi značajne razlike između biologije s jedne, i fizike i kemije s druge strane, ali ipak tvrdi da je biologija prava znanost, no samostalna i s vlastitim pojmovnikom i metodologijom. Poredba načela prirodne znanosti (...) s obilježjima biologije ukazuje na nedostatak determinizma, neprikladnost esencijalizma i manjkavosti redukcionističkog pristupa u području biološkog. S druge strane, biologija ima neka posebna obilježja. Biologija je znanost samostalna u određenju svoga područja i biranju prikladnog pojmovnika i metoda proučavanja. Njezino područje, pojmovnik, logika i metodologija ne podudaraju se potpuno s onima ostalih znanosti, ali se u potpunosti ni ne razilaze.Ambiguities of attitudes on the position of biology within or outside of science domain can be divided into few basic approaches. The first approach places biology outside the scientific domain due to its lack of universality, the lack of strong generalizations and the lack of strong quantitative structure. The second approach claims that science of biology should be reduced to physics. The third approach accepts significant differences between biology on one side, and physics and chemistry on the other side, but it still claims that biology is a hard science, autonomous and with its own terminology and methodology. Comparison of principles of natural science with features of biology demonstrates a lack of determinism, inappropriateness of essentialism and pitfalls of reductionist approach in biological sphere. On the other hand, biology has some specific features. Biology is a science that has autonomy in determining its domain and choice of appropriate terminology and inquiry methods. Its domain, terminology, logic and methodology are not entirely in accordance with other sciences, but also are not completely diverse. (shrink)

I argue that everyday folk-psychological skill might best be explained in terms of the deployment of something like a model, in a specific sense drawn from recent philosophy of science. Theoretical models in this sense do not make definite commitments about the systems they are used to understand; they are employed with a particular kind of flexibility. This analysis is used to dissolve the eliminativism debate of the 1980s, and to transform a number of other questions about the status and (...) role of folk psychology. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, action theorists propose necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of folk psychological action ascriptions. However, several key doctrinal and methodological features of contemporary action theory are troubling, in particular (i) the insistence that folk psychological kinds like beliefs and desires have neurophysiological correlates, (ii) the assumption that the concept of action is "classical" in structure (making it amenable to definition (...) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for its proper application), and (iii) the assumption that deferring to intuitions about the application of the concept of action amidst the context of fantastical thought experiments furnishes an effective method for judging the adequacy of proposed analyses. After consideration of these problems it is argued that action theory needs to be reoriented in a more naturalistic direction, the methods and aims of which are continuous with those of the empirical sciences. The paper concludes with a sketch (and defense) of the methodological foundations of a naturalistic approach to intentional action. (shrink)

Questions concerning the nature of representation and what representations are about have been a staple of Western philosophy since Aristotle. Recently, these same questions have begun to concern neuroscientists, who have developed new techniques and theories for understanding how the locus of neurobiological representation, the brain, operates. My dissertation draws on philosophy and neuroscience to develop a novel theory of representational content.

Concern over the nature of AI is, for the tastes many AI scientists, probably overdone. In this they are like all other scientists. Working scientists worry about experiments, data, and theories, not foundational issues such as what their work is really about or whether their discipline is methodologically healthy. However, most scientists aren’t in a field that is approximately fifty years old. Even relatively new fields such as nonlinear dynamics or branches of biochemistry are in fact advances in older established (...) sciences and are therefore much more settled. Of course, by stretching things, AI can be said to have a history reaching back t o Charles Babbage, and possibly back beyond that to Leibnitz. However, all of that is best viewed as prelude. AI’s history is punctuated with the invention of the computer (and, if one wants t o stretch our history back to the 1930s, the development of the notion of computation by Turing, Church, and others). Hence, AI really began (or began in earnest) sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s (some mark the conference a t Dartmouth in the summer of 1957 as the moment of our birth). And since those years we simply have not had time to settle into a routine science attacking reasonably well understood questions (for example, many of the questions some of us regard as supreme are regarded by others as inconsequential or mere excursions). (shrink)