In its pragmatic project, empirical psychology employs metaphors to interpret data and deliver descriptive explanations.[i] Insofar as it is a positivist project, empirical psychology pursues reductive explanations which have the semblance of taking phenomena designated by natural language to be composed of more ‘real’ elements. Reductive descriptions of complex systems …
Yesterday, I gave a general overview of my forthcoming book. Today, I’ll lay out the foundations on which the rest of the book builds: the general and particular elements of perception. Chapter 1 addresses the particular elements of perception, Chapter 2 its general elements. The phenomenon of perceptual particularity …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for running the Brains blog and for inviting me to guest blog this week about my new book The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in …
Corey Maley and I have recently completed paper in which we give a goal-based account of teleological functions. Comments are very welcome. (The above paper builds on another paper by Justin Garson and me that is forthcoming in BJPS. That paper is available upon request.) Abstract: We provide the foundations …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
Justin Garson (here is his old webpage; he is moving to a new job at Hunter College/CUNY) and I have written a paper in which we introduce a novel version of the Biostatistical Theory of functions (primarily due to Christopher Boorse) that accounts for the phenomenon that functions must be performed …
