I’ve just finished a paper corresponding more or less to my 2005 Eastern APA talk on the Physical Church-Turing thesis. The topic is a bit far from the concerns of mainstream philosophers of mind, but still relevant. It’s about what can be physically computed, which is relevant to what can …
Oron Shagrir informed me that three of the lectures from the recent Workshop on the Origins and Nature of Computation that took place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have been posted online, courtesy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.Martin Davis, “The Church-Turing Thesis: Consensus and Opposition“Saul Kripke, “From Church’s Thesis to …
I just stumbled on a letter by Pat Churchland and Dan Dennett on cronyism and insularity at J Phil and Phil Review, recently posted by Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports. It is followed by interesting comments by a large number of people. Reading the thread sheds light on both the …
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. …
