Two Problems in the Philosophy of Mind

The philosophy of mind has historically been concerned to a large part with two central phenomenon of human experience. The first is the intentionality of our mental states, the fact that they seem to be meaningful. The second is the fact that humans are conscious beings. Not only do we receive and process information, we seem to be aware of the experiences which constitute our input and are cognizant and in control of many of the processes which are performed upon this information. It is of obvious interest how we manage to have intentional mental states and be conscious beings. Traditional discussion of these phenomena has usually relied upon the postulation of a mind which implies a dualist ontology. The presumption of a mind, which is composed of non-physical, mental, substance makes these problems relatively easy to solve. Mental substance which is by nature unobservable can serve just about any purpose which we can imagine for it, including possesing meaning and constituting consciousness

Mad Dog Nativism

In his recent book, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Jerry Fodor retracts the radical concept-nativism he once defended. Yet that position stood, virtually unchallenged, for more than twenty years. This neglect is puzzling, as Fodor's arguments against concepts being learnable from experience remain unanswered, and nativism has historically been taken very seriously as a response to empiricism's perceived shortcomings. In this paper, I urge that Fodorean nativism should indeed be rejected. I argue, however, that its deficiencies are not so obvious that they can simply be taken for granted. Fodor can counter extant objections by stressing two distinctions: between historicist and counterfactual semantic theories and between explaining reference and explaining concept-acquisition. But, I argue, this victory is pyrrhic. Reformulated as objections to his account qua theory of concept-acquisition, and not qua theory of reference, analogous difficulties are fatal to the Fodorean position

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

Natural intensions

There is an attractive way to explain representation in terms of adaptivity: roughly, an item R represents a state of affairs S if it has the proper function of co-occurring with S (that is, if the ancestors of R co-occurred with S and this co-occurrence explains why R was selected for, and thus why R exists now). Although this may be an adequate account of the extension or reference of R, what such explanations often neglect is an account of the intension or sense of R: how S is represented by R. No doubt such an account, if correct, would be complex, involving such things as the proper functions of the mechanisms that use R, the mechanisms by which R fulfills its function, and more. But it seems likely that an important step toward such an account would be the identification of the norms that govern this process. The norms of validity and Bayes' Theorem can guide investigations into the actual inferences and probabilistic reasoning that organisms perform. Is there a norm that can do the same for intension-fixing? I argue that before this can be resolved, some problems with the biosemantic account of extension must be resolved. I attempt to do so by offering a complexity-based account of the natural extension of a representation R: for a given set of ancestral co-occurrences Z, the natural extension is the extension of the least complex intension that best covers Z. Minimal description length is considered as a means for measuring complexity. Some advantages of and problems with the account are identified

Ceteris Paribus Laws

Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws

More on the Interactive Indexing Semantic Theory

This article further explains and develops a recent, comprehensive semantic naturalization theory, namely the interactive indexing (II) theory as described in my 2008 Minds and Machines article Semantic Naturalization via Interactive Perceptual Causality (Vol. 18, pp. 527–546). Folk views postulate a concrete intentional relation between cognitive states and the worldly states they are about. The II theory eliminates any such concrete intentionality, replacing it with purely causal relations based on the interactive theory of perception. But intentionality is preserved via purely abstract propositions about the world that index, or correlate with, appropriate cognitive states. Further reasons as to why intentionality must be abstract are provided, along with more details of an II-style account of representation, language use and propositional attitudes. All cognitive representation is explained in terms of classification or sorting dispositions indexed by appropriate propositions. The theory is also related to Fodor’s representational theory of mind, with some surprisingly close parallels being found in spite of the purely dispositional basis of the II theory. In particular, Fodor’s insistence that thinking about an item cannot be reduced to sorting dispositions is supported via a novel two-level account of cognition—upper level propositional attitudes involve significant intermediate processing of a broadly normative epistemic kind prior to the formation of sorting dispositions. To conclude, the weak intentional realism of the II theory—which makes intentional descriptions of the world dispensable—is related to Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’ view, and distinguished from strong (indispensable) intentional realist views. II-style dispositions are also defended

Fodor's frame problem and relevance theory - Response

Chiappe & Kukla argue that relevance theory fails to solve the frame problem as defined by Fodor. They are right. They are wrong, however, to take Fodor's frame problem too seriously. Fodor's concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that relevance theory helps address them

Mental states and psychological explanation.

Pei Kong-ngai.Thesis submitted in: September 2002.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves i-vi).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter One: --- IntroductionChapter 1. --- Intentional States and Folk Psychology --- p.1Chapter 2. --- "Eliminativism, Externalism, and Individualism" --- p.5Chapter 3. --- Overview of The Thesis --- p.8Chapter Chapter Two: --- Mental States and ExternalismChapter 1. --- The Distinction between Intrinsic and Relational Properties --- p.11Chapter 2. --- Supervenience --- p.14Chapter 3. --- Externalism --- p.18Chapter 4. --- The Classical Arguments for Semantic Externalism: The Twin Earth Thought Experiments --- p.19Chapter 5. --- From Semantic Externalism to Mental Content Externalism --- p.23Chapter 6. --- Externalism and Physicalism --- p.26Chapter 7. --- The Common Concept Strategy Objection to Externalism --- p.28Chapter Chapter Three: --- Stich's Argument for Individualism: The Argument from BelowChapter 1. --- Stich's Argument for Individualism --- p.34Chapter 2. --- Narrow and Wide Behaviour --- p.37Chapter 3. --- Refining the Argument --- p.39Chapter 4. --- Is Replacement Argument Successful in establishing Individualism? --- p.44Chapter 5. --- Fodor's Argument for Premise 2*: Narrow Behaviour and Crazy Causal Mechanisms --- p.46Chapter 6. --- Causal vs. Non-Causal (Constitutive) Causal Powers --- p.51Chapter 7. --- Conclusion: Stich's Unsuccessful Argument from Below --- p.53Chapter Chapter Four: --- Fodor's Argument for Individualism: The Argument from Abo --- p.veChapter 1. --- Fodor's Explanan Argument --- p.56Chapter 2. --- A Response to Individualism: Rendering Intentional States Individualistic --- p.65Chapter 2.1 --- Fodor's Account of Narrow Content --- p.69Chapter 2.2 --- Criticisms of Fodor's Account of Narrow Content --- p.71Chapter 3. --- Examining Global Individualism: Fodor's A Priori Argument --- p.74Chapter 3.1 --- Counterexamples to Global Individualism --- p.76Chapter 3.2 --- Can Global Individualism be Reconciled with Relational Taxonomies? --- p.81Chapter 3.3 --- Two Senses of Causal Relevance of External Conditions --- p.83Chapter 3.4 --- The Failure of The Argument from Above --- p.89Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion --- p.91Bibliography --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.v

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