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  1. How to think about mental content.Frances Egan - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (1):115-135.
    Introduction: representationalismMost theorists of cognition endorse some version of representationalism, which I will understand as the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are representational capacities. Of course, notions such as ‘representation’ and ‘information-using’ are terms of art that require explication. As a first pass, representations are “mediating states of an intelligent system that carry information” (Markman and Dietrich 2001, p. 471). They have two important features: (1) they are physically realized, and so (...)
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  • Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind.Robert A. Wilson - 2017 - Oxford Bibliographies.
    Annotated bibliography of works on externalism and internalism in the philosophy of mind.
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  • (2 other versions)What Is the Problem of Perception?Tim Crane - 2005 - Synthesis Philosophica 20 (2):237-264.
    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 -- (...)
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  • The Sound of Music: Externalist Style.Luke Kersten & Robert A. Wilson - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2):139-154.
    Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Segal 1989). Music cognition is an area in the (...)
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  • Ten questions concerning extended cognition.Robert A. Wilson - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (1):19-33.
    This paper considers ten questions that those puzzled by or skeptical of extended cognition have posed. Discussion of these questions ranges across substantive, methodological, and dialectical issues in the ongoing debate over extended cognition, such as whether the issue between proponents and opponents of extended cognition is merely semantic or a matter of convention; whether extended cognition should be treated in the same way as extended biology; and whether conscious mental states pose a special problem for the extended mind thesis. (...)
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  • Dynamics and Cognition.Lawrence A. Shapiro - 2013 - Minds and Machines 23 (3):353-375.
    Many who advocate dynamical systems approaches to cognitive science believe themselves committed to the thesis of extended cognition and to the rejection of representation. I argue that this belief is false. In part, this misapprehension rests on a warrantless re-conception of cognition as intelligent behavior. In part also, it rests on thinking that conceptual issues can be resolved empirically. Once these issues are sorted out, the way is cleared for a dynamical systems approach to cognition that is free to retain (...)
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  • Semiotic Systems, Computers, and the Mind: How Cognition Could Be Computing.William J. Rapaport - 2012 - International Journal of Signs and Semiotic Systems 2 (1):32-71.
    In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also argue that, if semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans and computers are (...)
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  • Embedded Seeing: Vision in the Natural World.Nicoletta Orlandi - 2011 - Noûs 47 (4):727-747.
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  • Embedded seeing-as: Multi-stable visual perception without interpretation.Nicoletta Orlandi - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (4):1-19.
    Standard models of visual perception hold that vision is an inferential or interpretative process. Such models are said to be superior to competing, non-inferential views in explanatory power. In particular, they are said to be capable of explaining a number of otherwise mysterious, visual phenomena such as multi-stable perception. Multi-stable perception paradigmatically occurs in the presence of ambiguous figures, single images that can give rise to two or more distinct percepts. Different interpretations are said to produce the different percepts. In (...)
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  • Levels of Explanation Vindicated.Víctor M. Verdejo & Daniel Quesada - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1):77-88.
    Marr’s celebrated contribution to cognitive science (Marr 1982, chap. 1) was the introduction of (at least) three levels of description/explanation. However, most contemporary research has relegated the distinction between levels to a rather dispensable remark. Ignoring such an important contribution comes at a price, or so we shall argue. In the present paper, first we review Marr’s main points and motivations regarding levels of explanation. Second, we examine two cases in which the distinction between levels has been neglected when considering (...)
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  • Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational States.José Luis Bermúdez - 1995 - Mind and Language 10 (4):333-369.
    Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...)
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  • Extended Vision.Robert A. Wilson - 2010 - In Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary & Finn Spicer (eds.), Perception, action, and consciousness: sensorimotor dynamics and two visual systems. New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    Vision constitutes an interesting domain, or range of domains, for debate over the extended mind thesis, the idea that minds physically extend beyond the boundaries of the body. In part this is because vision and visual experience more particularly are sometimes presented as a kind of line in the sand for what we might call externalist creep about the mind: once all reasonable concessions have been made to externalists about the mind, visual experience marks a line beyond which lies a (...)
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  • (1 other version)Is there a role for representational content in scientific psychology?Frances Egan - 2009 - In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 14.
    Steve Stich used to be an eliminativist. As far as I can tell, he renounced eliminativism about the time that he moved from the west to the east pole.1 Stich was right to reject eliminativism, though I am not convinced that he rejected it for the right reasons. Stich 1983 contains a comprehensive attack on representational content, a central feature of both folk psychology and the Representational Theory of Mind, the leading philosophical construal of scientific psychology. Stich’s current position on (...)
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  • Semantic externalism and the mechanics of thought.Carrie Figdor - 2009 - Minds and Machines 19 (1):1-24.
    I review a widely accepted argument to the conclusion that the contents of our beliefs, desires and other mental states cannot be causally efficacious in a classical computational model of the mind. I reply that this argument rests essentially on an assumption about the nature of neural structure that we have no good scientific reason to accept. I conclude that computationalism is compatible with wide semantic causal efficacy, and suggest how the computational model might be modified to accommodate this possibility.
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  • Narrow mental content.Curtis Brown - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Narrow mental content is a kind of mental content that does not depend on an individual's environment. Narrow content contrasts with “broad” or “wide” content, which depends on features of the individual's environment as well as on features of the individual. It is controversial whether there is any such thing as narrow content. Assuming that there is, it is also controversial what sort of content it is, what its relation to ordinary or “broad” content is, and how it is determined (...)
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  • Metaphysics, method, and the mouth: Philosophical lessons of speech perception.J. D. Trout - 2001 - Philosophical Psychology 14 (3):261-291.
    This paper advances a novel argument that speech perception is a complex system best understood nonindividualistically and therefore that individualism fails as a general philosophical program for understanding cognition. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I describe a "replaceability strategy", commonly deployed by individualists, in which one imagines replacing an object with an appropriate surrogate. This strategy conveys the appearance that relata can be substituted without changing the laws that hold within the domain. Second, I advance a "counterfactual test" (...)
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  • Computation without representation.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 137 (2):205-241.
    The received view is that computational states are individuated at least in part by their semantic properties. I offer an alternative, according to which computational states are individuated by their functional properties. Functional properties are specified by a mechanistic explanation without appealing to any semantic properties. The primary purpose of this paper is to formulate the alternative view of computational individuation, point out that it supports a robust notion of computational explanation, and defend it on the grounds of how computational (...)
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  • Realization: Metaphysics, mind, and science.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):985-996.
    This paper surveys some recent work on realization in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.
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  • Meaning making and the mind of the externalist.Robert A. Wilson - 2010 - In Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. pp. 167--188.
    This paper attempts to do two things. First, it recounts the problem of intentionality, as it has typically been conceptualized, and argues that it needs to be reconceptualized in light of the radical form of externalism most commonly referred to as the extended mind thesis. Second, it provides an explicit, novel argument for that thesis, what I call the argument from meaning making, and offers some defense of that argument. This second task occupies the core of the paper, and in (...)
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  • Content, computation, and individuation.Keith Butler - 1998 - Synthese 114 (2):277-92.
    The role of content in computational accounts of cognition is a matter of some controversy. An early prominent view held that the explanatory relevance of content consists in its supervenience on the the formal properties of computational states (see, e.g., Fodor 1980). For reasons that derive from the familiar Twin Earth thought experiments, it is usually thought that if content is to supervene on formal properties, it must be narrow; that is, it must not be the sort of content that (...)
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  • In defence of narrow mindedness.Frances Egan - 1999 - Mind and Language 14 (2):177-94.
    Externalism about the mind holds that the explanation of our representational capacities requires appeal to mental states that are individuated by reference to features of the environment. Externalists claim that ‘narrow’ taxonomies cannot account for important features of psychological explanation. I argue that this claim is false, and offer a general argument for preferring narrow taxonomies in psychology.
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  • Individualism and Marr’s Computational Theory of Vision.Keith Butler - 1996 - Mind and Language 11 (4):313-37.
    A great deal of philosophical work has addressed the question of whether Man’s computational theory of early vision is individualistic. Burge and Davies have argued that, according to Marr’s theory, visual states are individuated non-individualistically. Segal has denied that Marr’s theory has these non-individualistic implications. More recently, Shapiro has argued that the entire debate has been misguided. I argue that Shapiro is mistaken in a fairly deep way, attention to which allows us to raise and clarify several important issues involved (...)
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  • Individualism and perceptual content.Martin Davies - 1991 - Mind 100 (399):461-84.
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  • A clearer vision.Lawrence A. Shapiro - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (1):131-53.
    Frances Egan argues that the states of computational theories of vision are individuated individualistically and, as far as the theory is concerned, are not intentional. Her argument depends on equating the goals and explanatory strategies of computational psychology with those of its algorithmic level. However, closer inspection of computational psychology reveals that the computational level plays an essential role in explaining visual processes and that explanations at this level are nonindividualistic and intentional. In conclusion, I sketch an account of content (...)
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  • Against A Priori arguments for individualism.Robert A. Wilson - 1993 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):60-79.
    Argues against several influential a priori arguments for individualism in the philosophy of mind that were influential in the 1980s.
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  • Causal depth, theoretical appropriateness, and individualism in psychology.Robert A. Wilson - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (1):55-75.
    Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness. Reflection on the depth and appropriateness of other wide explanations of behavior, such as evolutionary explanations, clarifies why wide psychological explanations sometimes have more causal depth and theoretical appropriateness than narrow psychological explanations. I also argue for the rejection of eliminative materialism.
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  • Externalism about mental content.Joe Lau - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way.
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  • Does twin earth rest on a mistake?Katalin Farkas - 2003 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 3 (8):155-169.
    In this paper I argue against Twin-Earth externalism. The mistake that Twin Earth arguments rest on is the failure to appreciate the force of the following dilemma. Some features of things around us do matter for the purposes of conceptual classification, and others do not. The most plausible way to draw this distinction is to see whether a certain feature enters the cognitive perspective of the experiencing subject in relation to the kind in question or not. If it does, we (...)
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  • (1 other version)Content, Computation and Externalism.Christopher Peacocke - 1995 - Philosophical Issues 6:227-264.
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  • The direct relational model of object perception.Nicolas J. Bullot - unknown
    This text aims at presenting a general characterization of the act of perceiving a particular object, in a framework in which perception is conceived of as a mental and cognitive faculty having specific functions that other faculties such as imagination and memory do not possess. I introduce the problem of determining the occurrence of singular perception of a physical object, as opposed to the occurrence of other mental states or attitudes. I propose that clarifying this occurrence problem requires making explicit (...)
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  • Individualism and the nature of syntactic states.Thomas Bontly - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4):557-574.
    It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are type-individuated by their semantic or intentional properties. First, I argue that this assumption is implausible for theories like David Marr's [1982] that seek to provide computational or syntactic explanations of psychological processes. Second, I examine the implications of this conclusion for the debate over psychological individualism. While most philosophers suppose that syntactic states supervene on the intrinsic physical states of information-processing systems, I contend they may not. Syntatic descriptions (...)
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  • Individualism, computation, and perceptual content.Frances Egan - 1992 - Mind 101 (403):443-59.
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  • Holism, conceptual role, and conceptual similarity.Joey Pollock - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (3):396-420.
    Holistic views of content claim that we each speak and think in distinct and idiosyncratic idiolects: although we may often entertain thoughts with similar contents, the content of our thoughts can...
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  • The Problem of Perception in Analytic Philosophy.Tim Crane - unknown
    It will be obvious to anyone with a slight knowledge of twentieth-century analytic philosophy that one of the central themes of this kind of philosophy is the nature of perception: the awareness of the world through the five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. Yet it can seem puzzling, from our twenty-first-century perspective, why there is a distinctively philosophical problem of perception at all. For when philosophers ask ‘what is the nature of perception?’, the question can be confused (...)
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  • Computational models: a modest role for content.Frances Egan - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (3):253-259.
    The computational theory of mind construes the mind as an information-processor and cognitive capacities as essentially representational capacities. Proponents of the view claim a central role for representational content in computational models of these capacities. In this paper I argue that the standard view of the role of representational content in computational models is mistaken; I argue that representational content is to be understood as a gloss on the computational characterization of a cognitive process.Keywords: Computation; Representational content; Cognitive capacities; Explanation.
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  • Why we view the brain as a computer.Oron Shagrir - 2006 - Synthese 153 (3):393-416.
    The view that the brain is a sort of computer has functioned as a theoretical guideline both in cognitive science and, more recently, in neuroscience. But since we can view every physical system as a computer, it has been less than clear what this view amounts to. By considering in some detail a seminal study in computational neuroscience, I first suggest that neuroscientists invoke the computational outlook to explain regularities that are formulated in terms of the information content of electrical (...)
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  • Individualism, twin scenarios and visual content.M. J. Cain - 2000 - Philosophical Psychology 13 (4):441-463.
    In this paper I address an important question concerning the nature of visual content: are the contents of human visual states and experiences exhaustively fixed or determined (in the non-causal sense) by our intrinsic physical properties? The individualist answers this question affirmatively. I will argue that such an answer is mistaken. A common anti-individualist or externalist tactic is to attempt to construct a twin scenario involving humanoid duplicates who are embedded in environments that diverge in such a way that it (...)
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  • Computation, individuation, and the received view on representation.Mark Sprevak - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (3):260-270.
    The ‘received view’ about computation is that all computations must involve representational content. Egan and Piccinini argue against the received view. In this paper, I focus on Egan’s arguments, claiming that they fall short of establishing that computations do not involve representational content. I provide positive arguments explaining why computation has to involve representational content, and how that representational content may be of any type. I also argue that there is no need for computational psychology to be individualistic. Finally, I (...)
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  • Does matter mind content?Veronica Gómez Sánchez - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Let ‘semantic relevance’ be the thesis that the wide semantic properties of representational mental states (like beliefs and desires) are causally relevant to behavior. A popular way of arguing for semantic relevance runs as follows: start with a sufficient counterfactual condition for causal or explanatory relevance, and show that wide semantic properties meet it with respect to behavior (e.g., Loewer & Lepore (1987,1989), Rescorla (2014), Yablo (2003)).This paper discusses an in‐principle limitation of this strategy: even the most sophisticated counterfactual criteria (...)
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  • Individualism and vision theory.Frances Egan - 1994 - Analysis 54 (4):258-264.
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  • (1 other version)1. Marr on Computational-Level Theories Marr on Computational-Level Theories (pp. 477-500).Oron Shagrir, John D. Norton, Holger Andreas, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Aris Spanos, Eckhart Arnold, Elliott Sober, Peter Gildenhuys & Adela Helena Roszkowski - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (4):477-500.
    According to Marr, a computational-level theory consists of two elements, the what and the why. This article highlights the distinct role of the Why element in the computational analysis of vision. Three theses are advanced: that the Why element plays an explanatory role in computational-level theories, that its goal is to explain why the computed function is appropriate for a given visual task, and that the explanation consists in showing that the functional relations between the representing cells are similar to (...)
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  • The embedded view, its critics, and a radically non-representational solution.Thomas van Es - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 1):195-211.
    Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, the argument against explanatory exclusionism, the (...)
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  • Review of Robert A. Wilson: Cartesian psychology and physical minds: Iindividualism and the sciences of mind. [REVIEW]Gabriel Segal - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (1):151--156.
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  • Content, computation, and individualism in vision theory.Keith Butler - 1996 - Analysis 56 (3):146-154.
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  • The Price of Twin Earth.Brandon James Ashby - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):689-710.
    Liberals about perceptual contents claim that perceptual experiences can represent kinds and specific, familiar individuals as such; they also claim that the representation of an individual or kind as such by a perceptual experience will be reflected in the phenomenal character of that experience. Conservatives always deny the latter and sometimes also the former claim. I argue that neither liberals nor conservatives have adequately appreciated how the content internalism/externalism debate bears on their views. I show that perceptual content internalism entails (...)
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