How Beliefs Are Like Colors

Teresa believes in God. Maggie’s wife believes that the Earth is flat, and also that Maggie should be home from work by now. Anouk—a cat—believes it is dinner time. This dissertation is about what believing is: it concerns what, exactly, ordinary people are attributing to Teresa, Maggie’s wife, and Anouk when affirming that they are believers. Part I distinguishes the attitudes of belief that people attribute to each other (and other animals) in ordinary life from the cognitive states of belief theoretically posited by (some) cognitive scientists. Part II defends the view that to have an attitude of belief is to live—to be disposed to act, react, think, and feel—in a pattern that an actual belief attributor identifies with taking the world to be some way. Drawing on scientific, scholarly, and literary sources of evidence, How Beliefs are like Colors provides a framework for research on belief across the humanities and sciences of the mind

A Teleofunctionalist Solution to the Problem of Deviant Causal Chains of Actions

Donald Davidson’s causal theory of actions states that actions must be rationalized and caused by a belief-desire-pair. One problem of such a causal theory are cases of deviant causal chains. In these cases, the rationalized action is not caused in the right way but via a deviant causal chain. It therefore intuitively seems to be no action while all conditions of the causal theory are met. I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains can be solved by adding a teleofunctionalist condition. This condition requires that the belief-desire pair that rationalizes an action must cause that action in a selection-historically normal way. I try to show that this additional condition drops counterintuitive cases of deviant causal chains out of the class of actions while being flexible enough to classify such cases as actions in which causal detours are intuitively permissible

Representation Re-construed: Construal-based Norms for Ascribing Natural Representations

Many philosophers worry that cognitive scientists apply the concept REPRESENTATION too liberally. For example, William Ramsey argues that scientists often ascribe natural representations according to the “receptor notion,” a causal account with absurd consequences. I rehabilitate the receptor notion by augmenting it with a background condition: that natural representations are ascribed only to systems construed as organisms. This Organism-Receptor account rationalizes our existing conceptual practice, including the fact that scientists in fact reject Ramsey’s absurd consequences. The Organism-Receptor account raises some worrying questions, but as a more faithful characterization of scientific practice it is a better guide to conceptual reform

Representation Re-construed: Answering the Job Description Challenge with a Construal-based Notion of Natural Representation

Many philosophers worry that cognitive scientists apply the concept REPRESENTATION too liberally. For example, William Ramsey argues that scientists often ascribe natural representations according to the “receptor notion,” a causal account with absurd consequences. I rehabilitate the receptor notion by augmenting it with a background condition: that natural representations are ascribed only to systems construed as organisms. This Organism-Receptor account rationalizes our existing conceptual practice, including the fact that scientists in fact reject Ramsey’s absurd consequences. The Organism-Receptor account raises some worrying questions, but as a more faithful characterization of scientific practice it is a better guide to conceptual reform

Predictive processing and mental representation

According to some (e.g. Friston, 2010) predictive processing (PP) models of cognition have the potential to offer a grand unifying theory of cognition. The framework defines a flexible architecture governed by one simple principle – minimise error. The process of Bayesian inference used to achieve this goal results in an ongoing flow of prediction that both makes sense of perception and unifies it with action. Such a provocative and appealing theory naturally has caused ripples in philosophical circles, prompting several commentaries (e.g. Hohwy, 2012; Clark, 2016). This thesis tackles one outstanding philosophical problem in relation to PP – the question of mental representation. In attempting to understand the nature of mental representations in PP systems I touch on several contentious points in philosophy of cognitive science, including the explanatory power of mechanisms vs. dynamics, the internalism vs. externalism debate, and the knotty problem of proper biological function. Exploring these issues enables me to offer a speculative solution to the question of mental representation in PP systems, with further implications for understanding mental representation in a broader context. The result is a conception of mind that is deeply continuous with life. With an explanation of how normativity emerges in certain classes of self-maintaining systems of which cognitive systems are a subset. We discover the possibility of a harmonious union between mechanics and dynamics necessary for making sense of PP systems, each playing an indispensable role in our understanding of their internal representations