Realism and evidence in the philosophy of mind

This thesis evaluates a variety of important modern approaches to the study of the mind/brain in the light of recent developments in the debate about how evidence should be used to support a theory and its constituent hypotheses. Although all these approaches are ostensibly based upon the principles of scientific realism, this evaluation will demonstrate that all of them fall well short of these requirements. Consequently, the more modern, co-evolutionary theories of the mind/brain do not constitute the significant advance upon more traditional theories that their authors take them to be. There are two fundamental elements within my discussion of the relationship between evidence and the constituent hypotheses of a theory. Firstly, I shall demonstrate that the traditional veil-of-perception issue has a wider relevance than that which has historically been attributed to it, since it is the paradigm case of an attempt to construct a two level theory on the basis of evidence tha~ does not adequately support either hypothesis. This interpretation of the issue can be represented by constructing a semantically inconsistent tetrad. It is shown that similar tetrads can be constructed for each of the theories of the mind/brain discussed in this thesis. Secondly, I shall argue that the theories discussed all employ a variety of the bootstrap strategy. This strategy is a relatively recent development in the philosophy of science, which suggests a way in which the same evidence can be used to generate both a general and a specific hypothesis within a theory without violating the constraints of scientific realism. However, I contend that recent use of this strategy in the investigation of mind is largely unsatisfactory as a result of a neglect of structural as well as more informal influences upon the kinds of evidence employed to support the hypotheses contained in the theories. The thesis is divided into three major sections. The first (Section A) discusses the influence of the motivations of the individual theorists upon their arguments and provides a critical discussion of the issues of the veil-of-perception and bootstrapping. The second section (Section B) comprises a detailed examination of a range of modern theories of the mind/brain and critically analyses their success. The final section (Section C) draws together general conclusions and methodological consequences of the detailed analysis of the nature of realism and evidence in the philosophy of mind

Of One Mind: Proposal for a Non-Cartesian Cognitive Architecture

Intellectually, we may reject Cartesian Dualism, but dualism often dominates our everyday thinking: we talk of “mental” illness as though it were non-physical; we tend to blame people for the symptoms of brain malfunctions in a way that differs from how we treat other illnesses. An examination of current theories of mind will reveal that some form of dualism is not always limited to the non-scientific realm. While very few, if any, cognitive scientists support mind-body dualism, those who support the view of the mind as a symbol-manipulator are often constrained to postulate more than one cognitive system in response to the failure of the symbol-system model to account for all aspects of human cognition. In this dissertation, I argue for an empiricist, rather than a realist, theory of perception, for an internalist semantics, and for a model of cognitive architecture which combines a connectionist approach with highly-specialized, symbolic, computational component which includes functions that provide input to a a causally-inert conscious mind. I reject the symbol-system hypothesis and propose a cognitive architecture which, I contend, is biologically-plausible and more consistent with the results of recent neuroscientific studies. This hybrid model can accommodate the processes commonly discussed by dual-process theorists and can also accommodate the processes which have proved to be so problematic for models based on the symbol-system hypothesis

Husserl and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

The idea that science explains or ought to explain every phenomenon finds Cartesian dualism of mind and body to be an unsatisfactory thesis. Consequently we have a variety of materialist theories regarding mind and consciousness. In recent times, we come across many philosophers who are committed to the scientific world picture, trying to locate mind within a world that is essentially physical.The central problems these philosophers have to tackle consist of consciousness and mental causation. In what follows we discuss how Husserlian phenomenology responds to this debate

Persons Versus Brains: Biological Intelligence in Human Organisms

I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains

Semantics and the stratification of explanation in cognitive science

This work is concerned with a pervasive problem in Cognitive Science which I have called the "stratificational" approach. I argue that the division into "levels of explanation" that runs as a constant theme through much work in Cognitive Science and in particular natural language semantics, is in direct conflict with neuroscientific evidence. I claim it is also in conflict with a right understanding of the philosophical notion of "evidence". The neuroscientific work is linked with the philosophical problem to provide a critique of concrete cases of research within the natural language semantics community. More recent neuroscientifically aware research is examined and it is demonstrated that it suffers similar problems due to the same deep running assumptions as those which effect traditional formalist theory. The contribution of this thesis is thought to be that of a demonstration of the essential nature and indeed the ubiquity of the basic assumptions in the field. Also, a new link is forged between the concerns of the formalists and certain seemingly more abstract philosophical work. This link enables us to see how much philosophical problems infect research into cognition and language. It is argued that practical research in Cognitive Science simply cannot be seen to be independent of the philosophical basis of the entire subject. The resulting picture of Cognitive Science and its place is outlined and explored with special emphasis on what I have called the "Principle of Semantic Indistinguishabliity" which says that the contribution of what can be broadly termed "environment" is epitemologically opaque to our cognition. The importance of this principle is discussed.The purpose of this work is to draw out a fundamental thread of reasoning and methodology that underlies most traditional work, and some not so traditional work, in Cognitive Science. It will be argued that this line of reasoning is at odds with the implications of modern neuroscience and cannot base a reasonable claim to "explain" human cognition. The picture I shall identify is that which I shall call "stratified". This, in general, is an attempt at explanation that divides into "levels of explanation", each with its own concepts that are said to be essential to the explanation of a phenomenon. There are specific and pragmatic manifestations of this, I discuss these in Chapter 3 and 7 in particular. There are also more abstract expressions of the same tendency which I examine mainly in Chapter 6. One of the principle tasks is to demonstrate the links between the assumptions of the more abstract formulations of this approach and th eir pragmatic instantiations in work in Cognitive Science. This allows it to be made clear that certain methodological problems are ubiquitous within the field and are not simply a result of the particular pragmatics of a particular research area.In Cognitive Science as a whole, it is generally appreciated today that there are problems to do with integration of traditional formal systems and the evolutionary and biological aspects of human cognition. One aim of this work is exactly to give an argument, supported from work in the brain sciences, that a certain methodology - particularly that enshrined within formal systems in language semantics - is strongly denied its evidential basis as a result of certain empirical considerations. It is also denied much of its basis as a result of the incongruity between the original motivations of logical formalism and the use to which this formalism is put today. The conclusion of this is that Cognitive Science's role in certain areas is severely limited and it crucially relies on an amount of empirical brain research in places thought usually to be completely separate from the "low-level" evidence from neuroscience. Part of my thesis is that stratified systems and particularly systems of formal logic within linguistics and semantics, cannot possibly be independent in the way imagined. There is also exploration of a general point regarding the character of the relation between strata in a stratified theory. There is, I shall argue, an irresolvable tension between the desire to have separate strata which are both independent but related. We shall see this both in concrete terms in the discussion of Fodor and in the abstract in the discussion of McDowell.George Lakoffhas expressed agreement with this particular premise: " ... linguistic results ... indicate that human reason uses some of the same mechanisms involved in perception and ... human reason can be seen as growing out of perceptual and motor mechanisms."1If this is correct, then I think that there are enormous implications for Cognitive Science in its practise of semantics since the mechanisms of motor and perceptual systems impose radical constraints when applied in the area of semantics.Given this, my aim is to demonstrate that certain seemingly theoryindependent areas of research in Cognitive Science such as linguistics and natural language semantics are actually infected with damaging assumptions from certain misguided philosophical positions. The idea that we can simply model things in Cognitive Science and wait for someone else to sort out the theoretical structure into which all of the models will fit is not tenable. I shall demonstrate this in several concrete cases and couple this with a critique from neuroscience which is crucially related to a more philosophical critique of fundamental assumptions. The structure of the work is as follows. Firstly, I give an overview of foundational issues in Cognitive Science by discussing central works. Then, I introduce the main problems in concrete form by way of an examination of certain approaches to inference in formal semantics. Chapter 4 expands on this in an analysis of the notion of "compositionality" with reference to the "stratificational" approach I find apparent in traditional work in Cognitive Science and the assumptions it disguises. Chapter 5 introduces the themes from neuroscience and the relations they have to the philosophical critique in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, I demonstrate that the assumptions I have identified are present even in work motivated by a desire to leave behind the formalist program. I explain why this is the case and the implications this has for a correct view of "evidence" in Cognitive Science. At this point, I deal with pertinent objections to my view stemming from the parts of the discipline I have mentioned. Chapter 8 condenses the problem and shows the fundamentals of the whole problem in relief, suggesting what all of the preceding means for Cognitive Science

Content and computation : a critical study of some themes in Jerry Fodor's philosophy of mind

In this thesis I address certain key issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology via a study of Jerry Fodor's hugely important contributions to the discussion of those issues. The issues in question are: (i) the nature of scientific psychology; (ii) the individuation of psychological states for the purposes of scientific psychological explanation; and (iii) the project of naturalising mental content. I criticise many of Fodor's most significant and provocative claims but from within a framework of shared assumptions. I attempt to motivate and justify many of these shared assumptions. Chapter 1 constitutes an overview of the key themes in Fodor's philosophy of mind. In Chapter 2 an account of scientific psychology within the orthodox computationalist tradition is developed according to which that discipline is concerned with explaining intentionally characterised cognitive capacities. Such explanations attribute both semantic and syntactic properties to subpersonal representational states and processes. In Chapters 3 and 5 Fodor's various arguments for the conclusion that scientific psychology does (or should) individuate psychological states individualistically are criticised.I argue that there are pragmatic reasons why scientific psychology should sometimes attribute contents that are not locally supervenient. In Chapter 4 I consider Marr's theory of vision and conclude that the contents that Marr attributes to the states of the visual module are locally supervenient. Inconsistency is avoided by stressing the continuity of scientific psychological content with folk psychological content. In Chapter 6 I develop an account of the project of naturalising mental content that vindicates that project. In Chapter 7 I address the question of whether Fodor's theory of content constitutes a successful engagement in that project. I argue for a negative answer before drawing some morals as to how we should proceed in the light of the failure of Fodor's theory

How to stop thinking : a massively modular response to the frame problem

We commonly turn to the metaphor of the mind as a sort of computer, yet we are incapable of programming a computer to perform even the simplest cognitive tasks that humanity is capable of, and this stark failure speaks to the centrality of the problem of framing. This 'frame problem' is one of determining relevance--of limiting thought regarding an impending action to that (and only that) which falls within the context at hand--in such a way that computationally tractable thought processing can take place. The simple fact is that we do, in fact, do this in day to day cognition, ubiquitously and quite efficiently. Yet it is not at all clear how we manage to do it without entailing a constant and nearly infinite revision of the entire epistemic background, resulting in combinatorial explosion. It is a question of how to stop thinking. This thesis endeavours to obviate the frame problem with a massively modular model of cognition based largely on the work of Peter Carruthers in his 2006 book The Architecture of the Mind. Where Carruthers' argument is vulnerable, other recent work in psycholinguistics is offered in defense and, ultimately, an account is presented explaining how we frame cognitive tasks in such as way as to adequately account for the inferential and holistic reasoning abilities we take for granted while still maintaining a materialist model that is neither strained by computational intractability, nor necessitates a central executive control mechanism, or 'ghost in the machine.

The epiphenomenal mind

The Epiphenomenal Mind is both a deflationary attack on the powers of the human mind and a defence of human subjectivity. It is deflationary because in the thesis I argue that consciousness is an epiphenomenal consequence of events in the brain. It is a defence of human subjectivity because I argue that the mind is sui generis real, irreducible, and largely an endogenous product (i.e. not dependent on society or its resources). Part I is devoted to arguing that the conscious mind is epiphenomenal. Arguing from, the irreducibility of mental states, the causal closure of the physical domain, and the principle of causal explanatory exclusion, I seek to demonstrate that all theories of mental causation necessarily violate one or more of these premises. Contemporary approaches to mental causation come under two broad categories, those that argue that mental events are supervenient on physical events (such as Davidson, Kim and Horgan) and those (like Haskar) who argue that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. Supervenience based theories, I argue, end up reducing mental states in their search for a theory of mental causation and emergence based theories end up violating the principle of the causal closure of the physical. In part II, I explore some of the consequences of epiphenomenalism for social theory. This exploration comes in the context of a defence of human subjectivity against (i.) those sociological imperialists who view the mind and self as a 'gift of society', and (ii.) social situationalists who have abandoned the concept of action and an interest in 'what's in the head' of the actor, in favour of a concept of social action which views behaviour as action only to the extent that it is socially meaningful. The conclusion is that the social sciences should return to an interpretative style (Weberian) methodology

Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron- Cohen et al. 's (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) `Chinese Room', shows 'that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology. To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science