In my final post, I want to consider a very compelling objection. The objection can be pitched abstractly enough to undermine – seemingly – what I have claimed so far this week. The response to the objection is contained in the final Chapter of Talking About, called ‘Good Cases, Bad …
Ignacy Jan Paderewski was famous both as pianist and the Prime Minister of Poland. Thus, it is easy to imagine that someone is familiar with him in both roles but mistakenly thinks that there are two people involved, not one. It is easy because being both a famous pianist and …
Is it really possible to believe something while lacking the capacity to represent that belief? Intuitively, one could only believe that colonialism is the product of white supremacism if one can somehow represent this very belief in language or thought. But this intuitive idea is highly misleading. Or so I …
What does reference consist in? In virtue of what does a speaker refer to one object rather than another by uttering something on a given occasion? Well, I think the answer to this question is both more complicated and more straightforward than many theorists appear to assume. Straightforward because it …
When I went to graduate school in the 1990s, the mainstream assumptions were that (1) computation properly so called is digital and its limits are defined by classical computability theory, and (2) the debate in cognitive science was between “classical” (LOT) digital computation and “nonclassical” (connectionist in the narrow sense) …
Hello everyone! This is my first post here as an associate editor of The Brains Blog. As someone from East Asia, one of my tasks is to reach out people working in and events happening in this area. I will try out several things in this coming year. If there …
(Caveat: for the sake of exposition, at times I articulate past views in slightly anachronistic terms; I do my best to capture the gist of what Alan Turing and others meant in terms that contemporary readers should find perspicuous.) The computational theory of cognition says that cognition is largely explained …
