Plants don’t have minds. At least, that’s what most people think. A few years ago, that’s also what I thought. Then, reflecting on the work of Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, I started wondering why it seemed obvious, and whether it should. This led me to write a short book …
GUEST EDITOR Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri – St. Louis INTRODUCTION Cognitive neuroscientists routinely explain cognition in terms of neural computations over neural representations. Yet some critics argue that cognitive neuroscience does not need the notions of neural computation and representations or, worse, that these notions are untenable. Whether or …
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the Phenomenological tradition is a history of the various interpretations and perceived significance of the concept of intentionality. Brought to prominence by Brentano, elaborated by Husserl, employed and modified in various ways by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, intentionality …
A special issue of New Ideas in Psychology on Explaining Representation, edited by Marcin Miłkowski and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski is just out, with contributions by Bill Ramsey, Paweł Gładziejewski, Rob Clowes and Dina Mendonça, Wayne Christensen and John Michael, Witold Hensel, Krystyna Bielecka, Paweł Grabarczyk and myself. Some of the contributions are based on talks …
I will conclude this series of posts by saying something about why I think cognitive phenomenology is significant. The basic idea is that phenomenology in general is connected to epistemology, value theory, and semantics via the notion of awareness, and cognitive phenomenology in particular is connected to these areas via …
To be immersed, I said in the last post, is for there to be something it is like for me to be in a mental state–it is the phenomenology of a first-person stance. Yet the question “What is it like for me to be in a mental state?” and the …
In this post I want to approach the topic of the previous post from a different angle. I raised two questions about the U&C study: whether people believe the comparative ratings (Question 1), and what inference, if any, leads them to their ultimate verdict (Question 2). Either question would be …
