What is the distinctively philosophical problem of perception? Here it is argued that it is the conflict between the nature of perceptual experience as it intuitively seems to us, and certain possibilities which are implicit in the very idea of experience: possibilities of illusion and to the world' which involves direct awareness of existing objects and their properties. But if one can have an experience of the same kind without the object being there -- a hallucination of an object -- (...) then it seems that perceptual experience cannot essentially be such a relation. This is the fundamentally philosophical problem of perception; the various philosophical theories of perception in the 20th and 21st centuries can be seen as responses to it. (shrink)

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of (...) perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

The idea of representation has been central in discussions of intentionality for many years. But only more recently has it begun playing a wider role in the philosophy of mind, particularly in theories of consciousness. Indeed, there are now multiple representational theories of consciousness, corresponding to different uses of the term "conscious," each attempting to explain the corresponding phenomenon in terms of representation. More cautiously, each theory attempts to explain its target phenomenon in terms of _intentionality_, and assumes that intentionality (...) is representation. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

Background: Interdisciplinarity is one of the current trends in the scientific world today, that began with the uneasiness about the loss of the unity of science. This trend also opens possibilities for explaining complex phenomena more comprehensively and creating more advanced applications and implementations of scientific theories. One of the biggest challenges to conducting interdisciplinary research is theoretical integration, how can we combine theories from various disciplines such that the combination is fruitful? Method: This dissertation attempts to answer this challenge (...) by analyzing the intertheoretical connections of some theories from various disciplines for some real interdisciplinary research. The structuralist metatheory of science is applied as the basic theory to model the intertheoretical connections formally. This research begins with modeling the scientific theories in question before modeling the intertheoretical connections and some modifications needed. This research focuses on some researches in cognitive science that involve psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The first research is the research conducted by van Veen et al., who research the activity of neurons in a brain's field called dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex during a phase of dissonance between cognitions. This research serves as a context for the analysis of intertheoretical reduction between the Festinger theory of cognitive dissonance and the Hawkins-Kandel computational neuroscientific theory. The other research is the consonance model of simulation built by Shultz and Lepper, which implements the Hopfield network to build a simulation of the cognitive dissonance. The third research is the connectionist model of simulation built by van Overwalle and Jordens, which implements the two-layers feed-forward perceptron and the delta rule as its learning rule to build a simulation of forced compliance dissonance. Result: Through this research, the author concludes that the structuralist metatheory of science can be applied for modeling and analyzing intertheoretical connections in the same discipline and between disciplines in real scientific research. The structuralist metatheory of science enables us to model and analyze the structure of the theories and their intertheoretical connections with great detail and brings very fruitful results. This research delivers some results not only for the structuralist theory science itself but also for the philosophy of science in general and interdisciplinary researches, especially cognitive science. First, by analyzing the models, a revision of the definition of intertheoretical specialization, and specialization of the concept of theory-holon according to the structuralist theory of science, called the V-pattern and strategy for combining scientific theories, are proposed. These V-pattern and strategy can serve as a tool for combining scientific theories. Second, unlike other approaches on intertheoretical reduction such as the GNS model, the structuralist metatheory of science does not intend to formulate a generalized model of reduction nor focus only on intertheoretical reduction. It provides us powerful tools for modeling various intertheoretical relations, including intertheoretical reduction, case by case. Although the intertheoretical reduction in the structuralist model is more epistemological than ontological, the structuralist models show how the reduction has empirical claims and intended applications by applying the r* function that maps the T-theoretical level to T-non-theoretical level. Third, related to the notion of the unity of science, this dissertation still sees that the unity of science is still a plausible and essential agenda for the philosophy of science and the scientific world in general. This dissertation's idea of the unity of science proposed does not assume essentialism, reductionism, and epistemological monism. This dissertation sees that the unity of science is closely related to scientific practice. Fourth, for interdisciplinary research, primarily cognitive science, this dissertation proposes an approach to model and analyze intertheoretical connections for any scientific research or any philosophical school in philosophy of science related to the idea of intertheoretical relation. This dissertation is the first example of such modeling and analysis. (shrink)

In this article, I develop an account of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. As pointed out by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, intentional language abounds in neuroscience theories. According to Bennett and Hacker, the subpersonal use of intentional predicates results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclusion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the contemporary philosophy of science, I show that although the (...) use of intentional predicates in mechanistic explanations sometimes leads to explanatorily inert claims, intentional predicates can also successfully feature in mechanistic explanations as tools for the functional analysis of the explanandum phenomenon. Despite the similarities between my account and Daniel Dennett's intentional-stance approach, I argue that intentional stance should not be understood as a theory of subpersonal causal explanation, and therefore cannot be used to assess the explanatory role of intentional predicates in neuroscience. Finally, I outline a general strategy for answering the question of what kind of language can be employed in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

Las sensaciones constituyen el mayor obstáculo para dar una explicación satisfactoria de la mente en términos no mentales, y se distinguen por la manera como se sienten, esto es, por sus qualia o su carácter fenoménico, que se resiste a ser explicado y que hace patente el hiato entre lo físico y lo mental. Pero, ¿en qué consiste este aspecto de las sensaciones? ¿Lograremos alguna vez dar cuenta de él adecuadamente? Éstas son dos de las preguntas fundamentales que se discuten (...) en los doce artículos de este volumen, los cuales, en particular, se sitúan en el debate actual sobre los problemas que los qualia presentan a las teorías fisicalistas, funcionalistas e intencionalistas de la mente. En el primero, las compiladoras ofrecen un panorama general de la discusión contemporánea en torno a las sensaciones y su carácter fenoménico; los demás son textos centrales en esta discusión, de T. Nagel, C. McGinn, F. Jackson, D. Lewis, G. Harman, N. Block, J. Fodor, M. Tye, D. Dennett y S. Shoemaker. (shrink)