Philosophy Carnival 34
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Author: Gualtiero Piccinini
Turing, von Neumann, and the Computer
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 …
What Is the Received View?
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 …
Pluralistic Localism about Concepts
Dan Weiskopf, “Atomism, Pluralism, and Conceptual Content,” unpublished ms.In this interesting paper, Weiskopf defends an original theory of concepts, which may be called pluralistic localism.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 …
Good Old Fashioned–and Insighful–Cognitive Science
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, …
Computational Explanation in Neuroscience
As many of you know, the journal Synthese devotes one issue per year to the philosophy of neuroscience. If you work in this area, you should definitely consider submitting articles to John Bickle, who is in charge of the yearly issue in question. This year, most of the yearly Synthese …
How to Split Concepts
As some of you know from previous posts, Sam Scott and I have written a paper on Splitting Concepts, forthcoming in Philosophy of Science. When it comes out, our paper will be followed by a response by Edouard Machery, entitled How to Split Concepts (posted with his permission). He did a …