Modeling has come to occupy a central place in philosophy of science. In recent decades, an enormous amount has been written on the practices of model construction, how models represent their targets, how models relate to simulations and theories, and how models are validated and verified.
The following analysis was submitted by Brains reader Bruce Mayo, a retired computational linguist with some background in philosophy, in response to Kristina’s much-discussed post. Enjoy! Now that some of the dust has settled around Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos, it might be time to sort out the …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
The following six theses characterize what I will call Fodorian Philosophy of Psychology (FPP, for short): There are psychological laws Psychological laws are required for psychological explanations Predicates used to express scientific laws pick out genuine properties Genuine properties are properties that ground causal relations Psychological properties are functional properties …
