This paper explores the possibility that the human mind underwent substantial changes in recent history. Assuming that consciousness is a substantial trait of the mind, the paper focuses on the suggestion made by Julian Jaynes that the Mycenean Greeks had a "bicameral" mind instead of a conscious one. The suggestion is commonly dismissed as patently absurd, for instance by critics such as Ned Block. A closer examination of the intuitions involved, considered from different theoretical angles , reveals that the idea (...) of 'Greek zombies' should be taken more seriously than is commonly assumed. (shrink)

This article presents a formal theory of robot perception as a form of abduction. The theory pins down the process whereby low‐level sensor data is transformed into a symbolic representation of the external world, drawing together aspects such as incompleteness, top‐down information flow, active perception, attention, and sensor fusion in a unifying framework. In addition, a number of themes are identified that are common to both the engineer concerned with developing a rigorous theory of perception, such as the one on (...) offer here, and the philosopher of mind who is exercised by questions relating to mental representation and intentionality. (shrink)

This paper examines the nature of theory structure in biology and considers the implications of those theoretical structures for theory reduction. An account of biological theories as interlevel prototypes embodying causal sequences, and related to each other by strong analogies, is presented, and examples from the neurosciences are provided to illustrate these middle-range theories. I then go on to discuss several modifications of Nagel''s classical model of theory reduction, and indicate at what stages in the development of reductions these models (...) might best apply. Finally I consider several implications of these analyses of theory structure and reduction for disciplinary integration in biology. (shrink)

The major part of our beliefs and our knowledge of the world is based on, or grounded in, sensory experience. But, how is it that we can have perceptual beliefs that things are thus and so, and, moreover, be justified in having them? What conditions must experience satisfy to rationally warrant, and not merely to cause, our beliefs? Against the currently very popular contention that experience itself already has to be propositionally and conceptually structured, I will rehabilitate the claim that (...) there is given element in experience which is independent of thought and which is possessed of a distinctive nonpropositional and nonconceptual content. Further, I will argue that this given element is indeed fit to play a significant evidential role in the justification of our beliefs about the world. (shrink)

The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositional attitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.

In the first part of my paper I discuss eight arguments in favour of the theory-dependence of observation: realistic content, guidance function of theories, perception as cognitive construction, expectation-dependence of perception, theory-dependence of scientific data, continuity between observational and theoretical concepts, language-dependence, and meaning holism. I argue that although these arguments make correct points, they do not exclude the existence of observations that are weakly theory-neutral in the sense that they don’t depend on acquired background knowledge. In the second part (...) I suggest an experimental method, the method of ostensive learning experiments, by which the degree of theory- and language-independence of a concept can be tested. (shrink)

The doctrine of eliminative materialism holds that belief-desire psychology is massively referentially disconnected. We claim, however, that it is not at all obvious what it means to be referentially (dis)connected. The two major accounts of reference both lead to serious difficulties for eliminativism: it seems that elimination is either impossible or omnipresent. We explore the idea that reference fixation is a much more local, partial, and context-dependent process than was supposed by the classical accounts. This pragmatic view suggests that elimination (...) is not the prime model for understanding the complex relations between the mind and brain sciences, and that we have little ground for concluding that in general psychological kinds do not exist. We suggest that reference changes are better seen as continuous rather than completely eliminative. (shrink)

According to Hume, no knowledge attainable by human beings would ever justify rational belief in recurrent physical properties and causal effects. He arrived at this conclusion because he denied the possibility of knowing--but not the reality of--either the 'inner natures' or the 'secret powers' of objects which would enable one to intuit or to demonstrate a 'necessary connection' between the internal structures of objects and their observable properties, or between the causal powers of entities and their effects. The purpose of (...) this article is to show that while Hume's scepticism was justifiable in his day given the generally accepted limitations then of scientific inquiry and explanations, it no longer is reasonable in light of later scientific discoveries and theories. To a degree to which no eighteenth-century philosopher or scientist could anticipate, experimental inquiry has disclosed the inherent natures of objects and the underlying causes of phenomena that attest to the interconnectedness of physical reality and thus justify, at least to some extent, our instinctive beliefs in the uniformity of nature and predictability of events. (shrink)

This article responds to two unresolved and crucial problems of cognitive science: (1) What is actually accomplished by functions of the nervous system that we ordinarily describe in the intentional idiom? and (2) What makes the information processing involved in these functions semantic? It is argued that, contrary to the assumptions of many cognitive theorists, the computational approach does not provide coherent answers to these problems, and that a more promising start would be to fall back on mathematical communication theory (...) and, with the help of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology, to attempt a characterization of the adaptive processes involved in visual perception. Visual representations are explained as patterns of cortical activity that are enabled to focus on objects in the changing visual environment by constantly adjusting to maintain levels of mutual information between pattern and object that are adequate for continuing perceptual control. In these terms, the answer proposed to (1) is that the intentional functions of vision are those involved in the establishment and maintenance of such representations, and to (2) that semantic features are added to the information processes of vision with the focus on objects that these representations accomplish. The article concludes with proposals for extending this account of intentionality to the higher domains of conceptualization and reason, and with speculation about how semantic information-processing might be achieved in mechanical systems. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection (...) on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended. (shrink)

dilemma, a dilemma concerning the individuation of psychological states that explain behavior. Beliefs are individuated by most functionahsts in terms of that 'that'-clauses; functional states are individuated 'narrowly' (i.e.

It is crucial, first of all, to stress the importance Churchland attaches to the idea that the neural networks whose assemblages he holds to be “engines of reason” must be recurrent. Non-recurrent networks, of the sort best known among philosophers, simply discover patterns in input data presented to them as sets of features. The learning capacities of such networks, extensively discussed since the publication of Rumelhart and McClelland et al., are indeed impressive; and Churchland describes them clearly and gracefully as (...) preparation for introducing recurrent networks. Now, the importance of recurrence as a feature of the networks Churchland hypothesizes as forming the basis of cognitive activity is well motivated. A cognitive system that was an assembly of non-recurrent networks would be, in essence, a stimulus-response machine of the sort that early behaviourists took themselves to be studying when they examined the mind/brain. Such a system could learn to find novel patterns in data. However, it is empirically evident that human— and some non-human—cognitive capacities go well beyond this. People dream, imagine scenarios that never existed, reconceptualize their perceptions, and theorize. All these activities seem to require not merely inferring patterns from data, but reconceiving the nature of the data itself in light of the inferential structures built through learning. For this to be possible, the data cannot be “clamped,” as they are in the case of non-recurrent networks. Hence the importance of recurrence. A recurrent network can be defined as one which takes some or all of its own output and then treats that output as a source of input. This allows for the recognition of meta-patterns. Furthermore, if some such networks are feeding their output as input to other networks with which they are linked, the possibility of reasoning and conceptualizing by analogy arises; and this ability, as Churchland argues, seems to be an essential aspect of genuine creativity in science, art, and the continuously ongoing re-design of the social order. The actual existence of simulated recurrent networks, and the capacities they demonstrate, constitute an impressive possibility argument that a system with enormous cognitive plasticity and behavioural flexibility could be built out of parallel distributed processing networks, so long as at least many of these networks were recurrent. The importance of this possibility argument should not be under-emphasized, but it of course invites an obvious question: how good are our grounds for supposing that the possibility in question is actually realized in the biological domain? (shrink)

In this paper, I compare theory-laden perceptions with imputed data sets. The similarities between the two allow me to show how the phenomenon of theory-ladenness can manifest itself in statistical analyses. More importantly, elucidating the differences between them will allow me to broaden the focus of the existing literature on theory-ladenness and to introduce some much-needed nuances.

The mind-society problem deals with the relations between mental and social phenomena. The problem is crucial in the main methodologies of social sciences. The thesis of hermeneutics is that we can only understand but not explain the relationship between beliefs and social action because mental and social events are not natural events. The thesis of social holism is that social phenomena are emergent and irreducible to mental phenomena. The thesis of rational choice theory is that social phenomena are reducible to (...) mental phenomena and this reduction is explained by unrealistic a priori principles of rationality. These theses depend on their different solutions to the following fundamental philosophical issues: the mind-body identity; the causal nature of social explanation; the realistic goal of science. A positive answer to these issues implies support of a different solution to the mind-society problem: social phenomena are conventional concepts and they can be reduced and explained in terms of realistic concepts describing the causal mechanisms of individual reasoning and decision-making. Cognitive psychology seems to supply us some initial tentative models to explain social action, but research into neuropsychology might be able to generate the proper causal representations of the relation between mind and action. (shrink)