In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy (...) of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language. (shrink)

“...a theory of meaning for a particular language should be conceived by a philosopher as describing the practice of linguistic interchange by speakers of the language without taking it as already understood what it is to have a language at all: that is what, by imagining such a theory, we are trying to make explict." – Michael Dummer (2004: 31).

Dharmakīrti, elaborating one of the Buddhist tradition's most complete defenses of rebirth, advanced some of this tradition's most explicitly formulated arguments for mind-body dualism. At the same time, Dharmakīrti himself may turn out to be vulnerable to some of the same kinds of arguments pressed against physicalists. It is revealing, then, that in arguing against physicalism himself, Dharmakīrti does not have available to him what some would judge to be more promising arguments for dualism (arguments, in particular, following Kant's 2nd (...) Critique) – and indeed, that these arguments actually cut against Dharmakīrti's own position. After elaborating and characterizing Dharmakīrti's case for rebirth, then, this article briefly considers an argument that Dharmakīrti cannot himself enlist for this purpose. (shrink)

A commentary on a target article by Alison Gopnik (1993) How we know our minds: the illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Focusing on evidence of how children acquire a theory of mind, this commentary argues that there are internal inconsistencies in theories that both argue for the functional role of conscious experiences and the irreducibility of those experiences to third-person viewable information processing.

Summary The paper considers arguments for and against correction and elimination of the basic conceptual categories as well as theories of social science. It is argued that some correction of at least some basic social notions is called for. A great part of the paper consists in a conceptual investigation of such notion of correction in terms of different notions of corrective explanation.

The project of a 'naive physics' has been the subject of attention in recent years above all in the artificial intelligence field, in connection with work on common-sense reasoning, perceptual representation and robotics. The idea of a theory of the common-sense world is however much older than this, having its roots not least in the work of phenomenologists and Gestalt psychologists such as K hler, Husserl, Schapp and Gibson. This paper seeks to show how contemporary naive physicists can profit from (...) a knowledge of these historical roots of their discipline, which are shown to imply above alla critique of the set-theory-based models of reality typically presupposed by contemporary work in common-sense ontology [1]. (shrink)

Abstract I aim to examine two questions. First, whether ‘folk psychology’ is a kind of theory and, second, more seriously, how are we to understand the system of principles of folk psychology. As to the first, there is a confusion between ‘theory’ and ‘science’. Much of the debate ignores the differences between these, and I argue that whereas folk psychology cannot be called a science there are grounds for calling it a theory. On the more serious question of interpretation, I (...) review the general considerations against instrumentalism and argue that they do not apply to folk psychology. The instrumentalist construal of folk psychology is strengthened by the remarkable fact that folk psychology is guaranteed to be successfully applicable to almost any system that has evolved under natural selection. Thus one can maintain that folk psychology is in fact a codification of certain quite general principles of evolutionary theory, and thus is an ancient and brilliant instrument for explaining the behaviour of complex evolved systems. It is, however, an instrument whose ‘theoretical posits’ may have very little to do with the actual springs of action which operate at the level of the neuron or assemblies of neurons. (shrink)