The present essay is addressed simultaneously to two distinct audiences.

A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the...

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on (...) the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

There are two broad classes of empirical theories of consciousness, which I will call the biological and the functional. The biological approach is based on empirical correlations between experience and the brain. For example, there is a great deal of evidence that the neural correlate of visual experience is activity in a set of occipetotemporal pathways, with special emphasis on the infero-temporal cortex. The functionalist approach is a successor of behaviorism, the view that mentality can be seen as tendencies to (...) emit certain behavioral outputs given certain sensory inputs. The trouble with behaviorism is that it did not allow that mental states were causes and effects, but functionalists do allow this. They characterize consciousness in terms of its causal role: the causal influence on it from inputs and other mental states, and its causal efficacy with respect to other mental states and behavior. The central idea of functionalism is a proposal about the concept of consciousness, but scientific functionalists have filled the view in with empirical details—the idea is that a representation is conscious if it is broadcast in a global neuronal workspace. The functional approach says consciousness is a role, whereas the biological approach says consciousness is a realizer of that role. For example, one could take solubility to be a role—dissolving in certain circumstances—or, as with the biological view of consciousness, the physico-chemical configuration that has that role. The. (shrink)

Die von Jens Timmermann besorgte Neuausgabe innerhalb der Philosophischen Bibliothek bietet den vollständigen Wortlaut der beiden Originalausgaben von 1781 und 1787. Der Kantische Text wurde unter Wahrung der Interpunktion und sprachlicher Eigenheiten sehr behutsam an die heutigen orthographischen Regeln angeglichen. Die semantisch bedeutenden Korrekturvorschläge späterer Herausgeber (nicht nur der Akademie-Ausgabe) sind, wo sie nicht in den Text Aufnahme gefunden haben, am Fuß der Seite verzeichnet. Alle wesentlichen Unterschiede zwischen den Originalausgaben sind durch Kursivdruck hervorgehoben, größere Abweichungen ganzer Textstücke - etwa (...) in der Einleitung und im Kapitel über Phaenomena und Noumena - wurden synoptisch gegenübergestellt, so daß Art und Umfang der Umarbeitung unmittelbar abgelesen werden können. Die durchgängig neu bearbeitete Studienausgabe folgt in den Grundprinzipien der seit 1926 in Forschung und Lehre maßgeblichen Ausgabe von Raymund Schmidt, die hiermit abgelöst wird. Sie wird ergänzt durch eine umfangreiche Bibliographie von Heiner Klemme sowie durch einen ausführlichen Personen- und Sachindex. (shrink)

I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within (...) it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. -/- Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology. (from the HUP website). (shrink)

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

Presenting the cultural and neuronal forces that power our distinctively human modes of awareness, the author proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a cognitive network. Reprint. 11,500 first printing.

The renowned philosopher Jerry Fodor, a leading figure in the study of the mind for more than twenty years, presents a strikingly original theory on the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of cognitive science is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, deals out witty and pugnacious demolitions of rival theories, and (...) suggests that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations. This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford Cognitive Science Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitive science will never be the same again. (shrink)

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

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less powerful (...) the conceptual resources of the object language. (shrink)

With some help from the commentators, a few adjustments to the characterizations of A-consciousness and P-consciousness can avoid some trivial cases of one without the other. But it still seems that the case for the existence of P without A is stronger than that for A without P. If indeed there can be P without A, but not A without P, this would be a remarkable result that would need explanation.