In our forthcoming paper, “Splitting Concepts,” Sam Scott and I argue, among other things, that the notion of concept may need to be split into linguistic representations (responsible for cognition that involves language) and nonlinguistic representations (responsible for the rest of cognition). Roughly, the reason is that linguistic cognition appears …
Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, due July 15, 2006.In my opinion, Boden is one of the best philosophers of AI and cognitive science. (I say it because she is probably less recognized and cited, at least in the U.S., than she …
Last weekend I was at the Central APA in Chicago. Here are some events I attended that may be of interest to philosophers of mind:Henry Jackman, in “Fodor on Concepts and Modes of Presentation,” argued that Fodor’s treatment of the publicity constraint on concepts is available to a certain kind …
A widespread assumption in the literature on concepts is that concepts form a unified, or singular, natural kind, as opposed to a set of different natural kinds. That is, advocates of different accounts disagree on which kind of thing constitutes concepts, but they agree that there is only one such …
David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Norton, 2006.Alan Turing is an iconic figure. He was one of the main founders of the mathematical theory of computability. He proved that first-order logic is undecidable. He was one of the main brains behind the allies’ successful effort to break Nazi …
A. Brook and K. Akins, eds., Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, Cambridge, CUP, 2005.A collection of articles by a group of good philosophers of neuroscience, on a wide range of topics (theory in neuroscience, representation, “visuomotor transformation,” color, consciousness). Should be of interest to most philosophers …
How do you choose wisely? Do you try to figure it all out at once, by consciously considering the pros and cons of every aspect of every option, or do you relax and patiently wait for the decision to pop into your head, already made by your unconscious mind? There …
