Yes! Some people don’t realize this. Someone recently objected to me that since McCulloch and Pitts were studying the brain, they must be offering only a theory of neural activity, on the same level as, say, Hodgkin and Huxley. How can I say that McCulloch and Pitts had a theory of cognition? Although …
In a new paper by Andrea Scarantino and me, we outline the relations between cognition and (different notions of) computation and information processing, as well as the relations between the different notions of computation and information processing. To my knowledge, this has not been done before (except in an earlier, less sophisticated …
In Chap. 6 of his book LOT 2, Jerry Fodor runs an argument for the existence of nonconceptual content based on Sperling’s experiments from the 1960s. Sperling (followed by Fodor) explained his results by postulating the “echoic buffer” or “echoic store”, which is a perceptual system that maintains an image of …
Springer just released a new quarterly journal called ‘Cognitive Computation’, which might be of interest to some of the readers of this blog. The editor, Amir Hussain, summarizes the goal of the journal as follows: “Cognitive Computation specifically aims to publish cutting-edge articles describing original basic and applied work involving …
Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford, OUP, 2008. Some quick observations on Fodor’s new book: 1. As usual, a great book: ambitious, provocative, full of ideas and arguments, and as a bonus, funny (for those who like his humor). 2. He is still a computationalist, language-of-thought …
In a recent post, I criticized some passages from Alva Noe’s book, Out of Our Heads. I’d like to clarify some details. First, it was pointed out to me that my tone was disrespectful. I am truly sorry about that. My comments were only aimed at the quoted claims, not …
My review of recent literature on Computationalism has recently been published in Philosophy Compass. I hope it will help people get up to date as well as push the debate forward. If you are interested in the paper but your library does not subscribe to the journal, feel free to …
