A foreign student emailed me the following questions.(1) According to Jerry Fodor, does intentionality reduce to the reference of mental symbols plus the relation between the subject and the symbols? (2) Under this theory, what happens to Gricean “communicative intentionality”? As far as I can tell the answer to (1) …
Have I got this right that the principal reasons people have had for rejecting representations is the stuff from dynamical systems theory and mobile robotics? DS don’t have to have representations and neither do mobile robots. But, why not say that if they don’t have representations, they aren’t thinking either? …
It is sometimes noticed that Wilfrid Sellars’s work in the 1950s is the origin of functional role semantics, contains the language of thought hypothesis, and has a lot in common with functionalism generally. So, it is natural to speculate the Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, when they formulated functionalism in …
Curtis Brown, “Computation, Representation, and Teleology,” presented at E-CAP 2006, June 2006.I just found the online (long) abstract of Brown’s talk. Brown defends two necessary conditions for computation: it must operate on representations (semantic condition) and it must have the function to calculate (teleological condition). I agree with Brown that …
When Bill Lycan visited the NEH Seminar in Mind and Metaphysics last week, he said the problem of intentionality is much harder than the problem of consciousness, because there are four terrible problems facing psychosemantics that no one even talks about:1. Abstract concepts2. Metaphors (according to Lycan, “nearly every thought …
Swampman is a (imaginary) physical duplicate of Donald Davidson created by a freak accident by a lighning bolt hitting a swamp. Questions: do swampman’s parts (e.g., the parts shaped like a heart, liver, brain, etc.) have functions? Does swampman have intentional states? Does he have qualia? These questions have been …
