Various arguments in contemporary philosophical work on consciousness boil down to alleged conceptual connections between ‘conscious’ and ‘conscious of’. To wit, some philosophers hold as pre-theoretically obvious what we can call “The Transparency Thesis”: When one has a conscious experience all that one is conscious of is what the experience …
It is possible to take two opposite lines on the origin of the modern computer. (There should also be a place for Babbage in this story, but I will set that aside.) One line says that Turing invented the computer in his 1936 mathematical paper. After that, it was just …
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? …
Today, an email exchange with Michael Rescorla made me wonder about the received view among philosophers of cognitive science. In the 1980s, the received view used to be something like the language of thought hypothesis, or at least some symbols-and-rules framework of which the language of thought hypothesis was the …
Dan Weiskopf, “Atomism, Pluralism, and Conceptual Content,” unpublished ms.In this interesting paper, Weiskopf defends an original theory of concepts, which may be called pluralistic localism. The main components of the view are as follows:“(Localism) Concepts have constituent structure(Dual Content) Concepts have both referential and cognitive content(Indiv*) Concepts are individuated by …
I’ve recently completed a short scientific biography of Allen Newell, for the forthcoming new volumes of Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Newell (d. 1992) is one of the giants of computer science and cognitive science. His work still amply repays its study. He was a champion of so called classical, or symbolic, …
I am getting ready for my Fall graduate seminar at Pitt–Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. The class is a survey of the main issues in the current philosophy of cognitive science (broadly conceived). To my own surprise, it has become clear that the class I will teach will …
