14TH CONGRESS OF LOGIC, METHODOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE NANCY, JULY 19-26, 2011

I know that most folks get their conference CFPs, etc. from other sources, but this one seems to me a) to be flying a little low on the radar and b) to be pretty cool.  I went to one of these a long time ago in Florence, which was both …

A New Account of the Systematicity of Thought

In other Aizawa-relevant news, Steven Philips and Williams Wilson have a new theory of the systematicity of thought based on category theory. With their publication, they have joined an elite group of academics who have referred to my book, The Systematicity Arguments.  (Fodor mentions it in LOT 2   and …

SEP Article on Computation in Physical Systems

My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Computation in Physical Systems has just been published.  As some of you know, it discusses three main topics:  (i) what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation, (ii) whether every physical system implements computations, and (iii) which functions are physically computable. The …

Haugeland on Representational Genera

In a review of John Haugeland’s Having Thought, Dan Dennett called Haugeland’s essay “Representational Genera” a “stunning piece” and a “display of philosophical move-making of the highest order” (Journal of Philosophy, December 1998).  I, too, admire this piece by Haugeland, but it seems to have gotten little attention (the piece …

Feedback Control without Information Processing

While working on a paper on neural computation, the following question came up:  can you exert feedback control without processing information? The kind of case I have in mind is that of relatively simple feedback control devices that use one or two physical variable(s) to affect another.  For instance, Watt …

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