Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture (...) has no standing as the basic objective truth about the world; if anything has that standing, it is ordinary life. I conclude with some thoughts about how the notion of bare, “thin” perception of non-evaluative reality feeds a number of philosophical pathologies, such as behaviourism, and show how a “thicker”, more value-laden, understanding of our perceptions of the world can be therapeutic against them. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss theories that attempt to single out the class of intentional states by appealing to factors that are supposedly criterial for intentional sentences. The papers starts with distinguishing two issues that arise when one thinks about intentional expressions: the Taxonomy Problem and the Fundamental Demarcation Problem. The former concerns the relation between the classes of distinct intentional verbs and distinct intentional states. The latter concerns the question about how to distinguish intentional states and (...) acts from the non-intentional ones. Next, the general desiderata for theories providing criteria for singling out the class of intentional sentences are introduced. Finally, distinct proposals for providing such criteria are analyzed. Author argues that neither is satisfactory. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, action theorists propose necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of folk psychological action ascriptions. However, several key doctrinal and methodological features of contemporary action theory are troubling, in particular (i) the insistence that folk psychological kinds like beliefs and desires have neurophysiological correlates, (ii) the assumption that the concept of action is "classical" in structure (making it amenable to definition (...) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for its proper application), and (iii) the assumption that deferring to intuitions about the application of the concept of action amidst the context of fantastical thought experiments furnishes an effective method for judging the adequacy of proposed analyses. After consideration of these problems it is argued that action theory needs to be reoriented in a more naturalistic direction, the methods and aims of which are continuous with those of the empirical sciences. The paper concludes with a sketch (and defense) of the methodological foundations of a naturalistic approach to intentional action. (shrink)

We sketch a framework for building a unified science of cognition. This unification is achieved by showing how functional analyses of cognitive capacities can be integrated with the multilevel mechanistic explanations of neural systems. The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms , in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated (...) with multilevel mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

Abstract: Despite all the critical scrutiny they have received recently, contextualist views in philosophy are still not well understood. Neither contextualists nor their opponents have been entirely clear about what contextualist theses amount to and what they are based on. In this article I show that there are actually two kinds of contextualist view that rest on two very different semantic phenomena, namely, semantic incompleteness and semantic indeterminacy . I explain how contextualist approaches can be used to dissolve certain debates (...) in philosophy. According to such approaches, the same philosophical thesis can be correctly endorsed in some contexts and correctly denied in others: it is thus pointless to seek a context-independent solution to debates about this thesis. My purpose is not to defend particular contextualist views but to lay out the general framework on which they rest: this allows us to see more clearly the similarities and differences among contextualist views defended in various areas of philosophy. (shrink)

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional relations between them, we should reject these assumptions. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Many philosophers think that being in an intentional state is a matter of being related to a sentence in a mental language-a 'Language of Thought' (see especially Fodor 1975, 1987 Appendix; Field 1978). According to this view-which I shall call 'the LT hypothesis'-when anyone has a belief or a desire or a hope with a certain content, they have a sentence of this language, with that content, 'written' in their heads. The claim is meant quite literally: the mental representations that (...) make up the items of this language have semantic and syntactic properties. This is why, according to this view, cognitive psychology does, and should, treat that part of the mind which deals with intentional states as a semantic and a syntactic 'engine'. (shrink)

The formal conception of computation (FCC) holds that computational processes are not sensitive to semantic properties. FCC is popular, but it faces well-known difficulties. Accordingly, authors such as Block and Peacocke pursue a ?semantically-laden? alternative, according to which computation can be sensitive to semantics. I argue that computation is insensitive to semantics within a wide range of computational systems, including any system with ?derived? rather than ?original? intentionality. FCC yields the correct verdict for these systems. I conclude that there is (...) only one promising strategy for semantically-laden theorists: identify special computational systems that help generate their own semantic properties, and then show that computation within those systems is semantically-laden. Unfortunately, the few existing discussions that pursue this strategy are problematic. (shrink)

The expression, ‘the culture of the artificial’ results from the confusion between nature and culture, when nature mingles with culture to produce the ‘artificial’ and science becomes ‘the science of the artificial’. Artificial intelligence can thus be defined as the ultimate expression of the crisis affecting the very foundation of the system of legitimacy in Western society, i.e. Reason, and more precisely, Scientific Reason. The discussion focuses on the emergence of the culture of the artificial and the radical forms of (...) pragmatism, sophism and marketing from a French philosophical perspective. The paper suggests that in the postmodern age of the ‘the crisis of the systems of legitimacy’, the question of social acceptability of any action, especially actions arising out of the application of AI, cannot be avoided. (shrink)

Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often wished them dead ; so I was an easy mark. More to the point, (...) I was persuaded by Dennett without being persuaded by his arguments. This is not intended as a confession of a Kirkegaardian penchant for preferring to believe the conclusions of bad arguments. Dennett enabled me finally to kick qualia out of my private ontology by providing, in the later sections of his “Quining Qualia”, an alternative conceptual vocabulary for talking about the contents of perceptual and reflective experience that genuinely makes no appeal, surreptitious or otherwise, to qualia. Furthermore, Dennett's most general motivations for banishing qualia—the convictions that there is no compelling evidence for them, that they serve no reliable explanatory purpose and that the hypothesis of their non-existence dissolves some otherwise wrenching philosophical dilemmas—are the right ones, and his paper made this clear to me. However, I feel the need to quine qualia again for myself, because I want them to stay dead, and am afraid that, due to some infelicities in his argument, Dennett has only wounded them. (shrink)

Anastylosis is the reconstruction of a monument using the original fragments and filling in the missing parts with an easily distinguishable modern material. This long review of "The Fragmentation of Reason; Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation" (MIT, 1990) by Stephen P Stich reconstructs, while preserving their original shapes, the conceptions of reason, truth, and rationality that Stich attempts to shatter. The review agrees with Stich's Chapter 3 which is itself highly critical of some philosophical views about evolution (...) and rationality, and it disagrees with each of the other five chapters. Fanciful stories about food accompany and illustrate some of these disagreements. (shrink)

William Ramsey’s Representation Reconsidered is a superb, insightful analysis of the notion of mental representation in cognitive science. The book presents an original argument for a bold conclusion: partial eliminativism about mental representation in scientific psychology. According to Ramsey, once we examine the conditions that need to be satisfied for something to qualify as a representation, we can see those conditions are not fulfilled by the ‘representations’ posited by much of modern psychology. Cognitive science—or at least large swathes of it—has (...) no warrant for positing representations. The structure of Ramsey’s argument repeats a familiar eliminativist strategy (c.f. Churchland (1981); Stich (1983)).1 First step: argue that in order for something to be an X, it must satisfy a certain description D (say, beliefs must satisfy the description given in folk psychology). Second step: argue that to the best of our knowledge, nothing satisfies description D (e.g. folk psychology is false). Third step: conclude that since nothing satisfies description D, there are no Xs (no beliefs). Here is how the strategy is played out in the book. First, Ramsey argues for certain minimal conditions that a representation must satisfy (what he calls the ‘job description’). Second (this takes the bulk of the book), he considers the ways in which our best psychological theories use the notion of representation. Ramsey argues that none of these uses satisfy the job description associated with a genuine representation. (A wrinkle is that some representations—those posited by the classical computational theory of cognition—do qualify as true representations. But, Ramsey claims, classical theories are in a minority in cognitive science, and their hold on the field is shrinking.) Therefore, Ramsey concludes, in most of cognitive science, there are no mental representations. (shrink)