The Brains Blog — Philosophy of Mind

Symposium on Gross and Flombaum, “Does Perceptual Consciousness Overflow Cognitive Access? The Challenge from Probabilistic, Hierarchical Processes”

It’s a pleasure to launch our latest Mind & Language symposium on Steven Gross and Jonathan Flombaum’s “Does Perceptual Consciousness Overflow Cognitive Access? The Challenge from Probabilistic, Hierarchical Processes” from the journal’s June 2017 issue. Our commentators include Jacob Beck (York), Nico Orlandi writing with Aaron Franklin (UC Santa Cruz), and Ian Phillips (Oxford). How are the neural …

6. Descriptive names

Imogen Dickie April 26, 2017 July 12, 2024 Cognition / Content / Imogen Dickie: Fixing Reference / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind

Consider the following example: Case 1: ‘Tremulous Hand’ ‘Tremulous Hand’ is used to refer to the otherwise unidentified author of around 50,000 Thirteenth Century glosses in manuscripts. Palaeographical analysis provides strong evidence that these glosses are the work of a single person with distinctive (tremulous and left-leaning) handwriting. All that …

In Memoriam: Hubert Dreyfus

John Schwenkler April 24, 2017 April 24, 2017 Academia / AI / Phenomenology / Philosophy of Mind

Hubert L. Dreyfus, for nearly 50 years a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, died this past Saturday.

As many will know, Dreyfus was an early critic of artificial intelligence and an influential interpreter of Martin Heidegger and other phenomenologists. More recently he challenged John McDowell’s conceptualist accounts of perception and action with arguments that drew on his reading of Merleau-Ponty and longstanding interests in the phenomenology of skill. He will be sorely missed.

For more on Bert’s life, his teaching, and what made his approach to philosophy so revolutionary, here is a lengthy obituary by his student Sean Dorrance Kelly.

4. ‘This’

Imogen Dickie April 23, 2017 April 23, 2017 Content / Imogen Dickie: Fixing Reference / Philosophy of Mind

A ‘perceptual demonstrative’ thought is a thought of the kind standardly made available by a perceptual link with an ordinary thing, and standardly expressed using ‘this’ or ‘that’ – for example, when you look at a grapefruit on the table in front of you and think the thought you would …

1. The Theory of Reference is Retro-chic

Imogen Dickie April 17, 2017 April 17, 2017 Concepts / Content / Epistemology / Imogen Dickie: Fixing Reference / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind

Remember the causo-descriptivist wars? If your education was anything like mine, at some point you were walked across the old battlefield and shown some of the main sights: early naïve descriptivism about proper names; its cluster theoretic successor; Kripke’s attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity; his causal inheritance picture; …

The Autonomy of Psychology and Beyond

Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro March 17, 2017 March 17, 2017 Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science / Polger and Shapiro: The Multiple Realization Book

In The Multiple Realization Book we articulate an account of multiple realization that is based on the idea that the “job description” for multiple realization is to be incompatible with brain-based theories of the mind and therefore to strongly favor functionalist and other realization-based theories. Multiple realization is supposed to …

Evidence and Modality

Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro March 16, 2017 March 10, 2017 Philosophy of Mind / Philosophy of Science / Polger and Shapiro: The Multiple Realization Book

In our last post of the week we will discuss some of the broader implications of our view of multiple realization. But first we want to put the arguments in The Multiple Realization Book into the context of our earlier individual and joint work, in part to make clear the …