A foreign student emailed me the following questions.(1) According to Jerry Fodor, does intentionality reduce to the reference of mental symbols plus the relation between the subject and the symbols? (2) Under this theory, what happens to Gricean “communicative intentionality”? As far as I can tell the answer to (1) …
In a recent post, I noticed that the debate over representationalism about consciousness is often conducted by discussing putative counterexamples, i.e., experiences that some philosophers find to be intuitively different even though according to some representationalist theories, they have the same representational content. These examples are usually met by representationalists who …
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It is possible to take two opposite lines on the origin of the modern computer. (There should also be a place for Babbage in this story, but I will set that aside.) One line says that Turing invented the computer in his 1936 mathematical paper. After that, it was just …
Today, an email exchange with Michael Rescorla made me wonder about the received view among philosophers of cognitive science. In the 1980s, the received view used to be something like the language of thought hypothesis, or at least some symbols-and-rules framework of which the language of thought hypothesis was the …
Dan Weiskopf, “Atomism, Pluralism, and Conceptual Content,” unpublished ms.In this interesting paper, Weiskopf defends an original theory of concepts, which may be called pluralistic localism. The main components of the view are as follows:“(Localism) Concepts have constituent structure(Dual Content) Concepts have both referential and cognitive content(Indiv*) Concepts are individuated by …
I’ve recently completed a short scientific biography of Allen Newell, for the forthcoming new volumes of Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Newell (d. 1992) is one of the giants of computer science and cognitive science. His work still amply repays its study. He was a champion of so called classical, or symbolic, …
