A foreign student emailed me the following questions.(1) According to Jerry Fodor, does intentionality reduce to the reference of mental symbols plus the relation between the subject and the symbols? (2) Under this theory, what happens to Gricean “communicative intentionality”? As far as I can tell the answer to (1) …
In a recent post, I noticed that the debate over representationalism about consciousness is often conducted by discussing putative counterexamples, i.e., experiences that some philosophers find to be intuitively different even though according to some representationalist theories, they have the same representational content. These examples are usually met by representationalists who …
This is the kind of question that might appear in the extended mind literature. Here is a quick and dirty kind of empirical argument. (Maybe this kind of argument has already been considered somewhere. If so, I’d be glad to hear.) Suppose that the properties and relations of lower-level entities …
Here.
I have been recently looking at the literature on the embodied and situated mind (mostly for the graduate seminar I will be teaching in Fall). I have been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of articles and books in this area. So, if you had to name 4 or 5 articles …
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 …
