books — The Brains Blog

Is there a single concept of well-being?

Anna Alexandrova December 4, 2017 December 4, 2017 Anna Alexandrova: A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being / Ethics / Psychology

My interest in what is now called the science of well-being dates back to my graduate school days at UC San Diego. Sometime in the mid-aughts I came across a debate between psychologists who advanced ‘hedonic profile’ measures of happiness and those who favoured life satisfaction questionnaires. The former argued …

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John Schwenkler December 4, 2017 December 12, 2017 books

We are grateful to Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) for blogging this week on A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. To view all her posts on a single page, please click here.

2. Psychological and Computational Models of Sentence Processing

David Pereplyotchik December 3, 2017 December 3, 2017 AI / computation AI / David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax / metaphysics of mind / Models, AI, Robotics / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science

Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let’s now address those questions. When people talk about “the psychological reality of syntax”, there are (at least) two importantly different types …

1. The Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology of Linguistics

David Pereplyotchik December 1, 2017 December 1, 2017 analytical philosophy / David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax / Epistemology / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science

There are, broadly speaking, three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory—cognitivism (e.g., Chomsky 1995, 2000), platonism (e.g., Katz 1981, 2000), and nominalism (e.g., Devitt 2006, 2008). Platonism is the view that the subject matter of linguistics is an uncountable set of abstracta—entities that are located outside …

Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and Its Place in the Mind (Intro)

David Pereplyotchik November 28, 2017 November 28, 2017 David Pereplotchik: Psychosyntax

In his groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Noam Chomsky first made explicit what is now arguably the dominant view concerning the aims and objects of linguistic inquiry. Rather than studying the sounds and inscriptions that we produce and comprehend, or the social conventions that govern linguistic usage, Chomsky …

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John Schwenkler November 27, 2017 December 4, 2017 books

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.

4. Conceptual Emergence and Neural Networks

Paul Humphreys November 16, 2017 November 16, 2017 AI / Neuroscience / Paul Humphreys: Emergence / Philosophy of Science

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 …