Record 7 of 32 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: Mental Misrepresentation.

AU: MALONEY ,-J-Christopher

SO: Philosophy-of-Science. 1990; 445-458.

AB: An account of the contents of the propositional attitudes is fundamental to the success of the cognitive sciences if, as seems correct, the cognitive sciences do presuppose propositional attitudes. Fodor has recently pointed the way towards a naturalistic explication of mental content in his Psychosemantics (1987). Fodor 's theory is a version of the causal theory of meaning and thus inherits many of its virtues, including its intrinsic plausibility. Nevertheless, the proposal may suffer from two deficiencies: (1) It seems not to provide an adequate explanation of misrepresentation. (2) It may also fail, as a species of empiricism, to provide a correct explication of the content of observational concepts and those nonobservational concepts whose meaning is to be traced to their causal connections with observational concepts.

DE: COGNITIVE-SCIENCE; MENTAL-PROCESS; PROPOSITIONAL-ATTITUDES; SCIENCE-

PS: FODOR ,-J

LA: ENGLISH

DT: JOURNAL-ARTICLE

Record 2 of 8 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: "The Transparency of Mental Content" in Philosophical Perspectives, 8: Logic and Language, 1994, Tomberlin , James

AU: Boghossian ,-Paul

PB: Ridgeview : Atascadero , 1994

AB: I argue that the idea that our thoughts are "transparent" to us -- that we can know facts about the sameness and difference of their contents a priori -- is an extremely important aspect of our conceptions of rationality and psychological explanation. And I argue that many contemporary theories abandon this idea without explaining how we can afford to do so.

DE: CONTENT-; MEANING-; MENTAL-

LA: English

DT: Contribution

AN: 0246899

Record 7 of 26 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: Fodor 's Theory of Content: Problems and Objections

AU: Seager ,-William

SO: Philosophy-of-Science. 1993; 60(2): 262-277.

AB: Jerry Fodor has recently proposed a new entry into the list of information based approaches to semantic content aimed at explicatingthe general notion of representation for both mental states and linguistic tokens. The basic idea is that a token "means" what causes its production. The burden of the theory is to select the proper cause from the sea of causal influences which aid in generating any token while at the same time avoiding the absurdity ofeverything 's being literally meaningful (since everything has a cause). I argue that a detailed examination of the theory reveals that neither burden can be successfully shouldered.

DE: CONTENT-; EPISTEMOLOGY-; LANGUAGE-; MENTAL-STATES; SEMANTICS-

Record 17 of 29 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: Universal Biology

AU: Sterelny ,-Kim

SO: British-Journal-for-the-Philosophy-of-Science. 1997; 48(4): 587-601.

AB: This paper is a critical notice of two collections on "artificial life," Langton's "Artificial Life: An Overview" (MIT Press) and Boden 's "The Philosophy of Artificial Life" ( OUP ). In brief, I argue that the "strong program" in artificial life--the idea that evolutionary and ecological computational models actually instantiate life--is intrinsically implausible, ill-defended, and uninteresting. The interest of these models in no way depends on the claim that they manifest rather than simply represent biological processes. I also argue that the so-called "n-1" problem for actual biology--the problem of distinguishing between lawlike and historically contingent features of life on earth given that we have a sample size of one--is overstated. I argue that the main interest of these models is in expanding our space of possible explanations especially for problematic phenomena (Kauffman's work is important here) and in exploring the problems of emergence, as complex phenomena emerge from the interaction of simple components. In this connection I discuss in some detail "situated agents" and the idea that intelligent action does not require world representations.

DE: ARTIFICIAL-; BIOLOGY-; LIFE-; SCIENCE-

PS: BODEN ,-M; LANGDON ,-C

LA: English

DT: Journal-Article

AN: 0281345

Record 20 of 29 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: "Basic Minds" in AI, Connectionism and Philosophical Psychology, 1995, Tomberlin , James E (ed)

AU: Sterelny ,-Kim

PB: Ridgeview : Atascadero , 1995

AB: This paper has three main aims. First, it explains the distinction between organisms that merely respond to their environment and those whose behaviour is determined by their representations of that environment. The paper defends the idea that multiply ways of tracking a feature of the environment is the crucial difference between merely reactive organisms and those that represent their world. Second, within the class of representational systems, the paper explores the differences between subintentional organisms and intentional agents. Third, the paper uses the distinction between intentional and subintentional systems to analyse an important contemporary debate in the cognitive ethology literature, the "social intelligence hypothesis" and the associated idea that the higher primates represent not just their physical environment but also their social partners' representations of that environment; i.e., they have thoughts about thoughts. The paper argues that in the debate on this metarepresentational hypothesis, plausible intermediate positions have been overlooked.

Record 28 of 29 in The Philosopher's Index (1940-2001/12)

TI: Evolutionary Explanations of Human Behaviour

AU: Sterelny ,-Kim

SO: Australasian-Journal-of-Philosophy. 1992; 70(2): 156-173.

AB: This article discusses the problems of and prospects for human sociobiology . Following an example illustrating the unconvincing nature of human sociobiology (by contrast to other animals), I discuss the explanation of its lack of success. Human sociobiology does not fail because of the difficulties of exploiting animal data or those of collecting human data; nor from the importance of learning or culture to humans. The taxonomic problem of discovering ethological natural kinds is serious but not insuperable. Nor is theproblem of explaining essentially social phenomena by a theory that applies first and foremost to individual organisms. The central cause of the failures of sociobiology is its implicitly behaviourist theory of mind. The paper concludes by considering ways in which evolutionary considerations could be incorporated within psychology.

DE: BEHAVIOR-; EVOLUTION-; GENETICS-; HUMAN-; SCIENCE-

LA: English

DT: Journal-Article