Taking inspiration from developments in neurocomputational modeling, Paul Church-land develops his positions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Concerning the former, Churchland relaxes his eliminativism at various points and seems to endorse a traditional identity account of sensory qualia. Although he remains unsympathetic to folk psychology, he no longer seeks the elimination of normative epistemology, but rather its transformation to a philosophical enterprise informed by current developments in the relevant sciences. Churchland supplies suggestive discussions of the (...) character of knowledge, simplicity, explanation, theory, and conceptual change. Many of his treatments turn on his prototype activation model of neural representation, which looks to the notion of a 'prototype' as it is employed in the psychological literature on concept representation, however, this and other features of Churchland's neurocomputational program do not square well with some of his views about cross-scientific relations. (shrink)

Rejecting Klein's claims that normative epistemology and naturalism are mutually exclusive, I defend the normative naturalism of my "Epistemology in an Age of Cognitive Science". When insisting that epistemic standards simultaneously external to, superior to, and independent of those of science do not exist, I hold neither that science exhausts standards of rationality nor that relevant extra-scientific considerations do not exist. Cognitive science may transform how we pose some normative questions in epistemology. Concurring with Klein that the burden of evidence (...) resides with normative naturalism, I explore suggestive proposals that Churchland and Thagard have offered on just this front. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemology has assumed that knowledge is represented in sentences or propositions. However, a variety of extensions and alternatives to this view have been proposed in other areas of investigation. We review some of these proposals, focusing on (1) Ryle's notion of knowing how and Hanson's and Kuhn's accounts of theory-laden perception in science; (2) extensions of simple propositional representations in cognitive models and artificial intelligence; (3) the debate concerning imagistic versus propositional representations in cognitive psychology; (4) recent treatments of (...) concepts and categorization which reject the notion of necessary and sufficient conditions; and (5) parallel distributed processing (connectionist) models of cognition. This last development is especially promising in providing a flexible, powerful means of representing information nonpropositionally, and carrying out at least simple forms of inference without rules. Central to several of the proposals is the notion that much of human cognition might consist in pattern recognition rather than manipulation of rules and propositions. (shrink)

It is one of the premises of eliminative materialism that commonsense psychology constitutes a theory. There is agreement that mental states can be construed as posited entities for the explanation and prediction of behavior. Disputes arise when it comes to the range of the commonsense theory of mental states. In chapter one, I review major arguments concerning the span and nature of folk psychology. In chapter two, relying on arguments by Quine and Sellars, I argue that the precise scope of (...) commonsense psychology cannot be determined because there are no resources to distinguish claims that are commonsense from all others. I use this conclusion to evaluate Churchland’s proposal that folk psychology should be eliminated in favor of a scientific theory. I argue that, although such an elimination is possible, it is unnecessary because commonsense psychology is in part informed by scientific theories. The properties that are usually attributed to mental states, on my view, are not common sense and would re-emerge even if we replaced our current theory with a scientific one. In chapter three, I examine how this affects eliminativist arguments, such as Churchland’s proposals for how to solve the emergence of the phenomenal character of sensations. I argue that it might be the case that some phenomenal properties are the result of endorsing a particular theory, but phenomenal character as such is a permanent feature of any theory about internal states. Addressing the problem of the incorrigibility of mental states, in chapter four, I challenge Rorty’s idea that such a property is the mark of the mental and can be attributed to our mental states based on our everyday usage of mental terms. The position asserted in the dissertation is compatible with the view that any theory can be revised, but doubts are expressed concerning the likelihood for a complete replacement of the current folk-psychological theory. Taking inspiration form Sellars, in chapter five, I argue that the establishment of a conceptual framework entails a wholistic jump from no concepts to a rudimentary framework. With this leap some properties are solidified and stand in the way of elimination. (shrink)

Naturalistic epistemologists frequently assume that their aim is to identify generalities (i.e. general laws) about the effectiveness of particular reasoning processes and methods. This paper argues that the search for this kind of generality fails. Work that has been done thus far to identify generalities (e.g. by Goldman, Kitcher and Thagard) overlooks both the complexity of reasoning and the relativity of assessments to particular contexts (domain, stage and goal of inquiry). Examples of human reasoning which show both complexity and contextuality (...) are given. The paper concludes with a discussion of the kind of multivariate model of reasoning that naturalistic epistemologists can use to evaluate processes and methods for specific domains. (shrink)

There has been much discussion concerning the consequences of 'going natural', i.e., of replacing a priori epistemology with empirical psychology. Traditionalists claim that a naturalized epistemology is not viable—to eliminate the normative from an account of knowledge is to cease to do epistemology at all. Naturalists claim that a naturalized account is the only viable one—assuming, in step with the urgings of Quine, that there are no standards independent of (and external to) science, science itself must act as the sole (...) epistemic norm. In the wake of the above debate some epistemologists have attempted to argue in favor of, and develop, a middle-ground position— normative naturalism . Such a position is intended to be consistent with the naturalist's intuition that the traditional search for a 'first philosophy'is misguided and consistent with the traditionalist's intuition that a complete elimination of the normative would leave epistemology impotent. In this paper I will examine one argument in favor of a normative naturalism . / will show that such a proposal is inherently problematic and argue that naturalism and normativity are mutually exclusive concepts. Therefore, I suggest that, even in the 'age of cognitive science', epistemologists continue to do traditional epistemology by attempting to develop, a priori , the general criteria for determining the justificatory status of our (scientific) beliefs. (shrink)