Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)

Daniel C. Dennett; XIII*—Styles of Mental Representation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 213–226, https://doi.o.

Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory more than fifty years ago. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored (...) to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic. (shrink)

Examines the history and inherent flaws of the tests science has used to measure intelligence.

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...) “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of (...) homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all. (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie. What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkins's producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this (...) could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing—the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into his a priori biological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable. I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively selfinterested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood. (shrink)

La theorie physique? Ce titre, qui fut au debut de notre siecle celui d'un ouvrage controverse, suggere bien une question, celle de savoir si en matiere de science la theorie doit se qualifier en fonction d'un domaine plus particulier d'application. L'auteur, Pierre Duhem, n'aurait pas hesite, semble-t-il, a repondre par l'affirmative en ce qui concerne le vaste champ de la recherche que l'on peut signifier sous le nom de physique. Son ouvrage est en fait construit comme une preparation rigoureuse a (...) une telle reponse et bien que les annees aient modifie considerablement le contexte du champ sus-dit, les analyses proposees ont ete jugees suggestives par de nombreux epistemologues d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

The classic work by behaviorist B.F. Skinner offers his analysis of how a "technology of behavior" can condition human responses to the environment.

First published in 1976, this book presents a view of language as a matter of systematic communicative behaviour.

Nozick analyzes fundamental issues, such as the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundations of ethics, and the meaning of life.

By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...) three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., `the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., `the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to show why recent research in the psychology of deductive and probabilistic reasoning does not have.

Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...

This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing meaning as (...) a certain kind of information-carrying role. (shrink)

This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will.

Thoughts and other mental states are defined by their role in a functional system. Since it is easier to determine when we have knowledge than when reasoning has occurred, Gilbert Harman attempts to answer the latter question by seeing what assumptions about reasoning would best account for when we have knowledge and when not. He describes induction as inference to the best explanation, or more precisely as a modification of beliefs that seeks to minimize change and maximize explanatory coherence. Originally (...) published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paperback edition contains a preface placing the book in the context of recent work in the area.

A representation is a remnant of previous experience that allows that experience to affect later behavior. This paper develops a metatheoretical view of representation and applies it to issues concerning representation in animals. To describe a representational system one must specify the following: thedomainor range of situations in the represented world to which the system applies; thecontentor set of features encoded and preserved by the system; thecodeor transformational rules relating features of the representation to the corresponding features of the represented (...) world; themedium, or the representation's physical instantiation; and thedynamics, or how the system changes with time. In part because of the behaviorist assumption that the hypothetical, covert changes occurring in an organism during learning correspond to the overt physical changes that are observed, issues of representation in animal behavior have been largely ignored as irrelevant or misleading. However, it can be inferred that representations, acting as models of environmental regularities, operate at many levels of behavioral functioning, both cognitive and noncognitive. Objections to the use of this concept in explanations of animal behavior, based on the claim that it is indeterminate and on behaviorist considerations of parsimony, can be answered. Animal representations may be specialized in terms of tasks and species. Data from tasks involving spatial memory, delayed matching-to-sample, and sequence learning suggest some foundations for a general theory of animal representations. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

What knowledge would suffice to yield an interpretation of an arbitrary utterance of a language when such knowledge is based on evidence plausibly available to a nonspeaker of that language? it is argued that it is enough to know a theory of truth for the language and that the theory satisfies tarski's 'convention t' and that it gives an optimal fit to data about sentences held true, Under specified conditions, By native speakers.