On Wednesday I attended the inaugural session of the Graduate Center’s philosophy colloquium. The speaker was Joe Levine and he wanted to examine two of the arguments for the phenomenology of thought as given by people like David Pitt and Charles Siewert and argue that they were not up to the …
By Jim Virtel The latest issue of BBS includes a précis of Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts —the book that boldly argues that the term “concept” should be eliminated from psychology. The fourth tenet of Machery’s Heterogeneity Hypothesis (HH) proposes that prototypes, exemplars, and theories —three types of concept —are …
By Brandon Towl Some readers of Brains will be familiar with Kim’s causal exclusion argument. Roughly, the argument goes: 1) Every physical effect has a sufficient cause that is a physical cause. 2) Mental states (properties) are causes. 3) Mental states (properties) are realized by physical states (properties). 4) Mental …
By Jim Virtel On Friday April 30th and Saturday May 1st, the PNP Program at Washington University in St. Louis held a Concept Learning Workshop. Philosophers Richard Samuels, Daniel Weiskopf, and David Danks and psychologists Lance Rips, Lori Markson, and Susan Carey presented some of their recent, interesting work on …
By Jim Virtel My fellow UMSLytes Eric Wiland and John Brunero are hosting the first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) from May 23-25. Information on registration, accomodations, the program lineup, and places to visit in St. Louis can be found here.
By Brandon Towl Today, I spent a little time thinking about introspection and the various ways that it can be used as evidence (a topic that our own Gualtiero Piccinini has written about, though I also had in mind the kind of “polling” that Hurlburt and Schwitzgeibel do). I began …
By Jim Virtel Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages: welcome to the 107th Philosophers’ Carnival! Come inside to see our amazing attractions: Our main tent contains posts concerning: Philosophy of Mind! – Gary Williams argues that empiricists don’t have to accept Berkeley’s conclusion that sense-data are private at …
