Scientists often give arguments of the form, “Given what we know about some lower high thing, some higher level thing is not possible.” Perhaps the most famous case of this for cognitive science is the 100-step rule that connectionists have alluded to. (This goes, very roughly: given what we know …
I just re-read Lexical Competence, by Diego Marconi (MIT Press, 1997), a book that deserves to be read more widely than it has been. Here is my spin on it:Lexical competence is competence in understanding words, a component of general semantic competence (competence in understanding language). Marconi reviews arguments to the …
As I mentioned earlier, an issue of Synthese devoted to computational explanation in neuroscience and related topics is about to come out. The articles are now available on the Synthese website. (You can see the abstracts; to see the articles, you or your institution needs to subscribe to the journal.)G. Piccinini, …
Traditionally, many philosophers like to attribute special status to at least some kinds of knowledge that we have of our minds. The purported reliability of introspection is often invoked by those who propose to construct a first-person science–a science based on private evidence delivered through introspection. Even Daniel Dennett, a naturalist …
In the recent thread, the issue of modularity was discussed. Anibal wrote the following: “My humble view is that the brain is a brilliant plastic and distributed machine using one single module to more than one cognitive function and viceversa.”This reminded me of some recent, interesting work along these lines …
Consider the following argument: 1. Eve’s believing that p is realized by having a token of p in her head. 2. Having a token of p in one’s head is realized by some detailed, neural state. So, 3. Eve’s believing that p is realized by some detailed neural state. …
John Sutton @ Macquarie just passed on the following information, which some of you may not know of and to whom it will be of interest: Max Coltheart has written a heavy critique of imaging (Max Coltheart, ‘What has functional neuroimaging told us about the mind (so far)?’, Cortex 42 …
