Barsalou, Glenberg, Prinz, Damasio and other neo-empiricists have theoretically and experimentally challenged the once dominant view that representations in higher cognitive processes are amodal (eg, Fodor, Pylyshyn). They have renewed a century-old perspective on the mind, according to which representations in perceptual processes and representations in higher cognitive processes are, …
Which, if any, semantic properties would the utterances of a community of language users have, even if we assumed that the language users had no internal semantic states? My answer will come in multiple posts. Note that by ‘semantic properties’ I mean things like reference, truth, aboutness, and usability-in-an-inference. I will ultimately argue, with a couple of caveats, that their expressions would have a full suite of semantic properties.
In this, the first post in the series, I summarize, defend, and clarify the Standard View of the relationship between the semantic properties of internal states and public linguistic expressions. I’d be interested in comments, as these are ideas I’m slowly developing, and injections of criticism at this early juncture would be most welcome.
The EC literature contains two apparently different claims.Human cognitive systems extend into the body and environment.Human cognitive processes extend into the body and environment. Isn’t this second claim the more radical? There are lots of systems in which the identifying process does not pervade the whole of the system, e.g. …
I apologize for the long post. It’s inspired by an email exchange I’ve had with Anna-Mari Rusanen. One recurring theme in philosophy of cognitive science is David Marr’s distinction of computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels (from his book Vision, 1982). Sometimes people assimilate Marr’s computational level to Chomsky’s competence. …
Another group-blog for philosophy of mind has sprung into existence: Brain Pains. Contributors so far are Brad Thompson, Phillippe Chuard, and Robert Howell. Is the blogosphere big enough for Brains and Brain Pains? Of course!
Quick and dirty, short and sweet: Yes. Essentially every single known psychological property is multiply realizable by many, many distinct amino acid sequences.
In Ken Aizawa’s simple (and in my opinion compelling) argument against the extended mind hypothesis applied to consciousness, he assumed that properties and relations of lower-level enties determine those of higher-level entities. In the comments, Adam Arico asked about emergence and Flora Carpenter further elaborated as follows: Higher level states may …
