We are pleased to have David Pereplyotchik (Kent State University) blogging this week on his book Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and its Place in the Mind (Springer, 2017).
To view his posts on a single page, click here.
Category: books
4. Conceptual Emergence and Neural Networks
Conceptual emergence occurs when, in order to understand or effectively represent some phenomenon, a different representational apparatus must be introduced at the current working level. Such changes in representation are common in the sciences but it has usually been considered in connection with changes in synchronic representations. Here, I’ll consider …
3. Two Types of Fundamentality
Today’s entry addresses a type of argument that will be familiar to most of you, the argument that all higher level natural facts in our world logically supervene on the fundamental physical facts.[1] Consider a very simple world, which we can call Checkers World. It behaves exactly like a game …
2. The Origin of the Universe Argument
Yesterday we saw, via an example from social psychology, that diachronic approaches to emergence can avoid some of the major problems of synchronic approaches. That motivating example is not wholly convincing as an example of transformational emergence. Here is what I believe is a more robustly ontological example. The Standard …
1. Transformational Emergence
I thank the editors of the Brains Blog for extending this invitation, despite the fact that I am not an expert in neuroscience and related areas of philosophy. This week I am going to present a friendly challenge to the readers by arguing that the emphasis on synchronic approaches to …
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We are grateful to Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia) for blogging this week on his book Emergence, new from Oxford University Press. To view all his posts on a single page, click here.
5. Cultural inclusive fitness?
The scale of human cooperation If you start with the assumption that biological altruism evolves because the benefits fall on genetic relatives, the scale of human social organization is puzzling. We cooperate with huge numbers of individuals who are not genetic kin—large-scale modern societies depend on it. Not all of …