Kant thought there was a single principle of instrumental rationality, the hypothetical imperative, that connected the pursuit (“willing”) of ends and the pursuit of means. My admittedly impressionistic view of the history of philosophy is that Kant was far from unusual on that point; it is taken for granted that …
Rational Powers in Action defends a theory of instrumental rationality that departs radically from most contemporary treatments of this topic (or so I would like to think, given my penchant for rebellion). In a nutshell, the theory I propose, The Extended Theory of Rationality (or ETR for short) takes intentional action to be the primary category …
Much cognitive processing is unconscious, but some is conscious. By ‘consciousness,’ I mean phenomenal consciousness, conscious experience, what it’s like to be someone, or qualia. The relation between consciousness, computation, and cognition is a very difficult question. The two main traditional views are functionalism and the identity theory. According to …
The received view in the philosophy of cognitive science is that cognition is (largely explained by) a kind of digital computation, and computation requires representation. Therefore, if neurocognitive systems are computational, they manipulate digital representations of some sort. According to this received view, representations are unobservable entities posited by successful …
The modern computational theory of cognition began after Alan Turing (1936) published his mathematical theory of computation in terms of what are now known as Turing machines. Contrary to a popular misconception, however, it wasn’t Turing who turned his machines into a model of cognition. That step was taken by …
In my previous post, I mentioned that mechanistic explanations are functional. What I mean by that is that mechanisms and their component parts have functions and such functions contribute to mechanistic explanation because, by performing their functions, components contribute to the activities of the whole mechanism. The notion of function …
Thanks to Dan Burnston and Nick Byrd for this opportunity to introduce Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition (OUP 2020). This book is the culmination of my main research program over the last 20+ years; it offers a comprehensive foundation for the science of biological cognition. In these posts, I’ll outline …
