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 …
Jaegwon Kim is a prolific and influential writer on the topic of higher-vs.-lower level properties and mental causation. Many of his arguments may be seen as raising the following dilemma: either higher level properties reduce to lower level ones (i.e., their causal powers are identical to the causal powers of …
By Brit Brogaard. It’s called Lemmings (the term was coined by Weatherson: Language-Epistemology-Metaphysics-Mind-ings). Knowing Brit, I expect her blog to be good.
This week, Bill Lycan is visiting the NEH Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. The main purpose of his visit is to discuss representationalism about qualia.(According to representationalism, as Lycan formulates it, qualia are represented features of what is represented by a phenomenal experience (e.g., the redness of a tomato quale …
The theme underlying the current NEH Seminar in Mind and Metaphysics is that there is a deficit of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy of mind and a deficit of ontological seriousness in contemporary metaphysics. According to John Heil, who is the seminar organizer and director, much of the talk of counterfactuals, …
In a previous post, I expressed scepticism about a recent argument by Gillett and Rives to the effect that determinable properties don’t exist: only determinate properties do. Yesterday, we discussed Gillett and Rives’ paper in the NEH Summer Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. Curiously, John Heil (who probably doesn’t read …
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 …
