Results for 'reasoning about mental states'

986 found
Order:
  1. Uncertain reasoning about agents' beliefs and reasoning.John A. Barnden - 2001 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 9 (2-3):115-152.
    Reasoning about mental states and processes is important in various subareas of the legal domain. A trial lawyer might need to reason and the beliefs, reasoning and other mental states and processes of members of a jury; a police officer might need to reason about the conjectured beliefs and reasoning of perpetrators; a judge may need to consider a defendant's mental states and processes for the purposes of sentencing and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  2. What we talk about when we talk about mental states.Zoe Drayson - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 147-159.
    Fictionalists propose that some apparently fact-stating discourses do not aim to convey factual information about the world, but rather allow us to engage in a fiction or pretense without incurring ontological commitments. Some philosophers have suggested that using mathematical, modal, or moral discourse, for example, need not commit us to the existence of mathematical objects, possible worlds, or moral facts. The mental fictionalist applies this reasoning to our mental discourse, suggesting that we can use ‘belief’ and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  3. Knowledge as a Mental State.Jennifer Nagel - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4:275-310.
    In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain. The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge. This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers--with the notable exception of Timothy Williamson-- have not. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   100 citations  
  4. Proceedings of the Workshop 'Reasoning about other minds: Logical and cognitive perspectives.J. van Eijck & R. Verbrugge (eds.) - 2011 - WEUR Proceedings.
    In recent years, the human ability to reasoning about mental states of others in order to explain and predict their behavior has come to be a highly active area of research. Researchers from a wide range of fields { from biology and psychology through linguistics to game theory and logic{ contribute new ideas and results. This interdisciplinary workshop, collocated with the Thirteenth International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XIII), aims to shed light (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Modeling inference of mental states: As simple as possible, as complex as necessary.Ben Meijering, Niels A. Taatgen, Hedderik van Rijn & Rineke Verbrugge - 2014 - Interaction Studies 15 (3):455-477.
    Behavior oftentimes allows for many possible interpretations in terms of mental states, such as goals, beliefs, desires, and intentions. Reasoning about the relation between behavior and mental states is therefore considered to be an effortful process. We argue that people use simple strategies to deal with high cognitive demands of mental state inference. To test this hypothesis, we developed a computational cognitive model, which was able to simulate previous empirical findings: In two-player games, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  6. A Trilemma about Mental Content.Susanna Schellenberg - 2013 - In Schear Joseph (ed.), Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world. Routledge. pp. 272-282.
    Schellenberg sheds light on the recent debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about the role and nature of concepts in perceptual experience, by considering the following trilemma: (C1) Non-rational animals and humans can be in mental states with the same kind of content when they are perceptually related to the very same environment. (C2) Non-rational animals do not possess concepts. (C3) Content is constituted by modes of presentations and is, thus, conceptually structured. She discusses reasons for accepting and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  7. Chimpanzee theory of mind: Looking in all the wrong places?Kristin Andrews - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (5):521-536.
    I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behavior. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s theoretical commitments should lead (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  8. Is intuition best treated as a sui generis mental state, or as a belief?Joshua Kelsall - 2017 - Aporia 16.
    It is common in philosophy for philosophers to consult their intuitions regarding philosophical issues, and then use those intuitions as evidence for their arguments. For instance, an incompatibilist about moral responsibility might argue that her position is correct because it is intuitive that, given a deterministic world, people cannot be morally responsible. One might ask whether or not the philosopher is justified in using intuitions in her argument, but it seems that in order to answer this, we require an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. How many kinds of reasons?Maria Alvarez - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (2):181 – 193.
    Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  10. Simulative reasoning, common-sense psychology and artificial intelligence.John A. Barnden - 1995 - In Martin Davies & Tony Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications - Reading in Mind and Language. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 247--273.
    The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  11. Anscombe on Acting for Reasons.Keshav Singh - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter discusses some of Anscombe’s contributions to the philosophy of practical reason. It focuses particularly on Anscombe’s view of what it is to act for reasons. I begin by discussing the relationship between acting intentionally and acting for reasons in Anscombe's theory of action. I then further explicate her view by discussing her rejection of two related views about acting for reasons: causalism (the view that reasons are a kind of cause of actions) and psychologism (the view that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  12. Epistemic Reasons II: Basing.Kurt Sylvan - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (7):377-389.
    The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  13. Are Reasons Causally Relevant for Action? Dharmakīrti and the Embodied Cognition Paradigm.Christian Coseru - 2017 - In Steven Michael Emmanuel (ed.), Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 109–122.
    How do mental states come to be about something other than their own operations, and thus to serve as ground for effective action? This papers argues that causation in the mental domain should be understood to function on principles of intelligibility (that is, on principles which make it perfectly intelligible for intentions to have a causal role in initiating behavior) rather than on principles of mechanism (that is, on principles which explain how causation works in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  14. The cultural evolution of mind-modelling.Richard Moore - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1):1751-1776.
    I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  15. Crimes Against Minds: On Mental Manipulations, Harms and a Human Right to Mental Self-Determination. [REVIEW]Jan Christoph Bublitz & Reinhard Merkel - 2014 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 8 (1):51-77.
    The neurosciences not only challenge assumptions about the mind’s place in the natural world but also urge us to reconsider its role in the normative world. Based on mind-brain dualism, the law affords only one-sided protection: it systematically protects bodies and brains, but only fragmentarily minds and mental states. The fundamental question, in what ways people may legitimately change mental states of others, is largely unexplored in legal thinking. With novel technologies to both intervene into (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   73 citations  
  16. Transparency and Reasons for Belief.Benjamin Wald - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):475-494.
    Belief has a special connection to truth, a connection not shared by mental states like imagination. One way of capturing this connection is by the claim that belief aims at truth. Normativists argue that we should understand this claim as a normative claim about belief – beliefs ought to be true. A second important connection between belief and truth is revealed by the transparency of belief, i.e. the fact that, when I deliberate about what to believe, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17. Holism, mental and semantic.Ned Block - 1996 - In Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal. New York: Routledge.
    Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  18. Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment.George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas & Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):96-125.
    Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   59 citations  
  19. Reasons-Responsive Theories and the Nature of Reasons.Qiuxuan Zheng - 2021 - Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research 594:319-324.
    In the contemporary free will debate between compatibilism — the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilism — that free will is incompatible with determinism, many scholars are sympathetic to compatibilism, yet disagree in how the position is best characterized. As one of the most important branches of source compatibilism, reasons-responsive theories attempt to address an important issue, namely, what type of person can be regarded as moral agents. There are several controversial points within the theory. This (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Believing for a Reason is (at least) Nearly Self-Intimating.Sophie Keeling - 2022 - Erkenntnis.
    This paper concerns a specific epistemic feature of believing for a reason (e.g., believing that it will rain on the basis of the grey clouds outside). It has commonly been assumed that our access to such facts about ourselves is akin in all relevant respects to our access to why other people hold their beliefs. Further, discussion of self-intimation - that we are necessarily in a position to know when we are in certain conditions - has centred largely around (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  21. Epistemic Reasons & Cognitive Self-Monitoring.Paulson Spencer - 2024 - Dissertation, Northwestern University
    This dissertation is about the relationship between Epistemology and other domains. In it I want to show that in an important sense, Epistemology is an autonomous domain. That is, epistemic vocabulary (e.g., “knowledge”, “justification”, “rationality”, “epistemic reason”, etc.) cannot be analyzed without remainder into non-epistemic vocabulary. Epistemic phenomena must be explained in terms of epistemic reasons and the form of assessment proprietary to them. Although epistemic vocabulary cannot be reduced to the vocabulary of other domains, Epistemology is nonetheless connected (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22. Doubts about One’s Own Existence.Wolfgang Barz - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (5-6):645-668.
    The aim of this paper is to show that it is not irrational to doubt one’s own existence, even in the face of introspective evidence to the effect that one is currently in a certain mental state. For this purpose, I will outline a situation in which I do not exist, but which cannot be ruled out on the basis of any evidence available to me—including introspective evidence about my current mental states. I use this ‘superskeptical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Biosemiotics, Aboutness, Meaning and Bio-intentionality. Proposal for an Evolutionary Approach (Biosemiotics Gatherings 2015).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    The management of meaningful information by biological entities is at the core of biosemiotics [Hoffmeyer 2010]. Intentionality, the ‘aboutness’ of mental states, is a key driver in philosophy of mind. Philosophers have been reluctant to use intentionality for non human animals. Some biologists have been in favor of it. J. Hoffmeyer has been using evolutionary intentionality and Peircean semiotics to discuss a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality [Hoffmeyer 1996, 2012]. Also, recent philosophical studies are bringing new (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  24. Hostile Affective States and Their Self-Deceptive Styles: Envy and Hate.Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran - 2023 - In Alba Montes Sánchez & Alessandro Salice (eds.), Emotional Self-Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper explores how individuals experiencing hostile affective states such as envy, jealousy, hate, contempt, and Ressentiment tend to deceive themselves about their own mental states. More precisely, it examines how the feeling of being diminished in worth experienced by the subject of these hostile affective states motivates a series of self-deceptive maneuvers that generate a fictitious upliftment of the subject’s sense of self. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper explores the main arguments (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25.  15
    The State of Nirvana Explained Through the Universal Formula.Angelito Malicse - manuscript
    The State of Nirvana Explained Through the Universal Formula -/- Nirvana, a concept often associated with Buddhism, represents a state of ultimate peace, liberation, and detachment from suffering. Traditionally, it is understood as the cessation of desires and the end of the cycle of birth and rebirth. However, using my universal formula, Nirvana can be understood more precisely as a state of perfect balance, where the system of human consciousness operates free from defects and external disturbances. By examining Nirvana through (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26. Holism, mental and semantic.Ned Block - 1996 - In Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal. New York: Routledge.
    Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  27. Thinking about Past Minds: Cognitive Science as Philosophy of Historiography.Adam Michael Bricker - 2023 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 17 (2):219-242.
    This paper outlines the case for a future research program that uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to investigate questions that traditionally fall under the remit of the philosophy of historiography. The central idea is this – the epistemic profile of historians’ representations of the past is largely an empirical matter, determined in no small part by the cognitive processes that produce these representations. However, as the philosophy of historiography is not presently equipped to investigate such cognitive questions, legitimate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Reflection, confabulation, and reasoning.Jennifer Nagel - forthcoming - In Luis Oliveira & Joshua DiPaolo (eds.), Kornblith and His Critics. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Humans have distinctive powers of reflection: no other animal seems to have anything like our capacity for self-examination. Many philosophers hold that this capacity has a uniquely important guiding role in our cognition; others, notably Hilary Kornblith, draw attention to its weaknesses. Kornblith chiefly aims to dispel the sense that there is anything ‘magical’ about second-order mental states, situating them in the same causal net as ordinary first-order mental states. But elsewhere he goes further, suggesting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. "Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation" by Jaegwon Kim.Tim Crane - 2000 - The Times Literary Supplement 1.
    As Jaegwon Kim points out in his excellent new book, “reductionism” has become something of a pejorative term in philosophy and related disciplines. But originally (eg, as expressed in Ernest Nagel’s 1961 The Structure of Science) reduction was supposed to be a form of explanation, and one may wonder whether it is reasonable to reject in principle the advances in knowledge which such explanations may offer. Nagel’s own view, illustrated famously by the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, was that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. Being In A 'Blanked-Out' State of Mind.Ayad Gharbawi - manuscript
    Being in a ‘Blanked Out State’ - Extinction of Self/Consciousness of A Human -/- Author: Ayad Gharbawi 2023 -/- Word Count: 1,088 Key Words: Human Existence; Human Non-existence; Mind; Awareness; Non-awareness; Extinction of Mind, Self and Physicality -/- Dear Sir/Madam; -/- I hope this email finds you well. -/- This paper seeks to prove that in certain mental states, the Mind can be in what we call in the English language, ‘being in a blanked-out state.’ This means the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. The justification of deductive inference and the rationality of believing for a reason.Gian-Andri Toendury - 2007 - Dissertation, Université de Fribourg
    The present PhD thesis is concerned with the question whether good reasoning requires that the subject has some cognitive grip on the relation between premises and conclusion. One consideration in favor of such a requirement goes as follows: In order for my belief-formation to be an instance of reasoning, and not merely a causally related sequence of beliefs, the process must be guided by my endorsement of a rule of reasoning. Therefore I must have justified beliefs (...) the relation between my premises and my conclusion. -/- The rationality of a belief often depends on whether it is rightly connected to other beliefs, or more generally to other mental states —the states capable of providing a reason to holding the belief in question. For instance, some rational beliefs are connected to other beliefs by being inferred from them. It is often accepted that the connection implies that the subject in some sense ‘takes the mental states in question to be reason-providing’. But views on how exactly this is to be understood differ widely. They range from interpretations according to which ‘taking a mental state to be reason-providing’ imposes a mere causal sustaining relation between belief and reason-providing state to interpretations according to which one ‘takes a mental state to be reason-providing’ only if one believes that the state is reason-providing. The most common worry about the latter view is that it faces a vicious regress. In this thesis a different but in some respects similar interpretation of ‘taking something as reason-providing’ is given. It is argued to consist of a disposition to react in certain ways to information that challenges the reason-providing capacity of the allegedly reason-providing state. For instance, that one has inferred A from B partly consists in being disposed to suspend judgment about A if one obtains a reason to believe that B does not render A probable. The account is defended against regress-objections and the suspicion of explanatory circularity. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Procurando razões [Looking for reasons].Waldomiro J. Silva Filho - manuscript
    The subject of this book came up in several different places and dates, scattered in my experience in the countless times I was asked to think, discuss or pronounce myself on the idea that we have (or should have) an ability to judge that is part of our human nature, that we have the power to weigh our own opinions and, with this, conduct our lives and carry out the valuable tasks of properly knowing the world and properly deciding what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Mental State Attributions and the Side-Effect Effect.Chandra Sripada - 2012 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (1):232-238.
    The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  34. Theory of mind in the Pacific: Reasoning across cultures.Jürg Wassmann, Birgit Träuble & Joachim Funke (eds.) - 2013 - Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
    The ascription of desires or beliefs to other people is a milestone of human sociality. It allows us to understand, explain, and predict human behaviour. During the last years, research on children's knowledge about the mental world, better known as theory of mind research, has become a central topic in developmental psychology and the role of cultural impact is subject of various theoretical yet hitherto few empirical accounts. This book is the result of intensive collaboration between anthropologists and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  35. Responsibility for Attitudes, Object-Given Reasons, and Blame.Sebastian Schmidt - 2020 - In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 149-175.
    I argue that the problem of responsibility for attitudes is best understood as a puzzle about how we are responsible for responding to our object-given reasons for attitudes – i.e., how we are responsible for being (ir)rational. The problem can be solved, I propose, by understanding the normative force of reasons for attitudes in terms of blameworthiness. I present a puzzle about the existence of epistemic and mental blame which poses a challenge for the very idea of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  36. Mental States, Conscious and Nonconscious.Jacob Berger - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (6):392-401.
    I discuss here the nature of nonconscious mental states and the ways in which they may differ from their conscious counterparts. I first survey reasons to think that mental states can and often do occur without being conscious. Then, insofar as the nature of nonconscious mentality depends on how we understand the nature of consciousness, I review some of the major theories of consciousness and explore what restrictions they may place on the kinds of states (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  37. (1 other version)The Mental States of Persons and their Brains.Tim Crane - 2015 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76:253-270.
    Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  38. Consciousness and Common Sense: Metaphors of Mind.John A. Barnden - 1997 - In S. O'Nuillain, Paul McKevitt & E. MacAogain (eds.), Two Sciences of Mind. John Benjamins. pp. 311-340.
    The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs carefully to consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance as to the real nature of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  39. Thinking about complex mental states: language, symbolic activity and theories of mind.Emanuele Arielli - 2012 - In Ernest W. B. Hess-Lüttich (ed.), Sign Culture Zeichen Kultur. pp. 491-501.
    One of the most important contributions in Roland Posner’s work (1993) was the extension and development of the Gricean paradigm on meaning (1957) in a systematic framework, providing thus a general foundation of semiotic phenomena. According to this approach, communication consists in behaviors or artifacts based on reciprocal assumptions about the intentions and beliefs of the subjects involved in a semiotic exchange. Posner’s model develops with clarity the hierarchical relationships of semiotic phenomena of different complexity, from simple pre-communicative behaviors (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. (1 other version)Functionalism, Computationalism, & Mental States.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2004 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (4):811-833.
    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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  41. Personal Autonomy, Decisional Capacity, and Mental Disorder.Lubomira V. Radoilska - 2012 - In Lubomira Radoilska (ed.), Autonomy and Mental Disorder. Oxford University Press.
    In this Introduction, I situate the underlying project “Autonomy and Mental Disorder” with reference to current debates on autonomy in moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of action. I then offer an overview of the individual contributions. More specifically, I begin by identifying three points of convergence in the debates at issue, stating that autonomy is: 1) a fundamentally liberal concept; 2) an agency concept and; 3) incompatible with (severe) mental disorder. Next, I explore, in the context (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  42. Group Action Without Group Minds.Kenneth Silver - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2):321-342.
    Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  43. Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism.Berislav Marušić & John Schwenkler - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (3):309-340.
    We argue that intentions are beliefs—beliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of one’s practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  44. Solving Frege's puzzle.Richard Heck - 2012 - Journal of Philosophy 109 (1-2):728-732.
    So-called 'Frege cases' pose a challenge for anyone who would hope to treat the contents of beliefs (and similar mental states) as Russellian propositions: It is then impossible to explain people's behavior in Frege cases without invoking non-intentional features of their mental states, and doing that seems to undermine the intentionality of psychological explanation. In the present paper, I develop this sort of objection in what seems to me to be its strongest form, but then offer (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  45. Reliabilism and Brains in Vats.Jon Altschul - 2011 - Acta Analytica 26 (3):257-272.
    According to epistemic internalism, the only facts that determine the justificational status of a belief are facts about the subject’s own mental states, like beliefs and experiences. Externalists instead hold that certain external facts, such as facts about the world or the reliability of a belief-producing mechanism, affect a belief’s justificational status. Some internalists argue that considerations about evil demon victims and brains in vats provide excellent reason to reject externalism: because these subjects are placed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  46. Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure.Daniel Fogal - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1033-1070.
    There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  47. Suspension of Judgment, Rationality's Competition, and the Reach of the Epistemic.Errol Lord - 2020 - In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 126-145.
    Errol Lord explores the boundaries of epistemic normativity. He argues that we can understand these better by thinking about which mental states are competitors in rationality’s competition. He argues that belief, disbelief, and two kinds of suspension of judgment are competitors. Lord shows that there are non-evidential reasons for suspension of judgment. One upshot is an independent motivation for a certain sort of pragmatist view of epistemic rationality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  48. Character, Will, and Agency.Roman Altshuler - 2016 - In Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 62-80.
    Character and the will are rarely discussed together. At most, philosophers working on the one mention the other in an eliminativist vein—if character is represented as something chosen, for example, it can be chalked up to the work of the will; if the will consists merely of a certain arrangement of mental states, it can be seen as little more than a manifestation of character. This mutual neglect appears perfectly justified. If both character and will are determinants of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. Aristotle on Actions from Lack of Control.Jozef Müller - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    The paper defends three claims about Aristotle’s theory of uncontrolled actions (akrasia) in NE 7.3. First, I argue that the first part of NE 7.3 contains the description of the overall state of mind of the agent while she acts without control. Aristotle’s solution to the problem of uncontrolled action lies in the analogy between the uncontrolled agent and people who are drunk, mad, or asleep. This analogy is interpreted as meaning that the uncontrolled agent, while acting without control, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  50. The Intentional Structure of Consciousness.Tim Crane - 2002 - In Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 33-56.
    Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   113 citations  
1 — 50 / 986