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Author: Steven Horst
Publisher: Steven Horst
ISBN: 0984017631
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
Author: Steven Horst
Publisher: Steven Horst
ISBN: 0984017631
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Robert K. Shope
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847692873
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Shope presents a unified perspective on meaningfulness, spanning such varied topics as the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions and conventional signs, Freud's conception of the meaningfulness of various mental phenomena and instances of behavior, a person's meaning to do something, meaning in the arts, and even life's having a meaning. Shope's perspective is based upon a 'constitutive' analysis of what it is for one item to represent another. Criticizing the views of philosophers who attempt to analyze such representing in causal terms, or merely in epistemological terms, he shows that a successful analysis needs to invoke both types of considerations.
Author: John R. Searle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674267214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 116
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Book Description
Minds, Brains and Science takes up just the problems that perplex people, and it does what good philosophy always does: it dispels the illusion caused by the specious collision of truths. How do we reconcile common sense and science? John Searle argues vigorously that the truths of common sense and the truths of science are both right and that the only question is how to fit them together. Searle explains how we can reconcile an intuitive view of ourselves as conscious, free, rational agents with a universe that science tells us consists of mindless physical particles. He briskly and lucidly sets out his arguments against the familiar positions in the philosophy of mind, and details the consequences of his ideas for the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, questions of action and free will, and the philosophy of the social sciences.
Author: Susan Schneider
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262527456
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A philosophical refashioning of the Language of Thought approach and the related computational theory of mind. The language of thought (LOT) approach to the nature of mind has been highly influential in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind; and yet, as Susan Schneider argues, its philosophical foundations are weak. In this philosophical refashioning of LOT and the related computational theory of mind (CTM), Schneider offers a different framework than has been developed by LOT and CTM's main architect, Jerry Fodor: one that seeks integration with neuroscience, repudiates Fodor's pessimism about the capacity of cognitive science to explain cognition, embraces pragmatism, and advances a different approach to the nature of concepts, mental symbols, and modes of presentation. According to the LOT approach, conceptual thought is determined by the manipulation of mental symbols according to algorithms. Schneider tackles three key problems that have plagued the LOT approach for decades: the computational nature of the central system (the system responsible for higher cognitive function); the nature of symbols; and Frege cases. To address these problems,] Schneider develops a computational theory that is based on the Global Workspace approach; develops a theory of symbols, "the algorithmic view"; and brings her theory of symbols to bear on LOT's account of the causation of thought and behavior. In the course of solving these problems, Schneider shows that LOT must make peace with both computationalism and pragmatism; indeed, the new conception of symbols renders LOT a pragmatist theory. And LOT must turn its focus to cognitive and computational neuroscience for its naturalism to succeed.
Author: Robert A. Wilson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262731447
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1106
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Book Description
Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.
Author: Tim Crane
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corp
ISBN: 0203426312
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A fascinating exploration of the theories and arguments surrounding the notions of thought and representation. Now in its 2nd edition, Cranes's classic text has introduced thousands to some of the most important ideas in philosophy of mind.
Author: Paul S. MacDonald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441151796
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Intentionality - the relationship between conscious states and their objects - is one of the most discussed topics in contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience and the study of consciousness. Long a foundational concept in Phenomenology, it has also received considerable coverage in the writings of analytic philosophers. This book is the first study to offer an impartial, well-informed assessment of the two traditions' approaches through an in-depth investigation of the principal thinkers' ideas, so that their positions emerge side-by-side, converging and diverging on certain shared themes. Beginning with a historical discussion of the development of the term in the work of Continental thinkers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the book considers the work of Brentano and Husserl and subsequent existentialist critiques. From there, it explores how empirical-analytic philosophers took up the topic, drawn as they were to materialist and computer models of the mind. Finally MacDonald presents a new 'hybrid' account of intentionality that will be a crucial work for scholars working on consciousness and the mind.
Author: Uriah Kriegel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199380317
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.
Author: Steven Horst
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190295589
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.
Author: Gualtiero Piccinini
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633429
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Gualtiero Piccinini articulates and defends a mechanistic account of concrete, or physical, computation. A physical system is a computing system just in case it is a mechanism one of whose functions is to manipulate vehicles based solely on differences between different portions of the vehicles according to a rule defined over the vehicles. The Nature of Computation discusses previous accounts of computation and argues that the mechanistic account is better. Many kinds of computation are explicated, such as digital vs. analog, serial vs. parallel, neural network computation, program-controlled computation, and more. Piccinini argues that computation does not entail representation or information processing although information processing entails computation. Pancomputationalism, according to which every physical system is computational, is rejected. A modest version of the physical Church-Turing thesis, according to which any function that is physically computable is computable by Turing machines, is defended.
