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1 Mind & Body
Introduction
Erwin Schrödinger
Geist und Materie (Zürich 1989): from chapter 3:
Objektivierung [html]
Cartesian Dualism
René Descartes
Mind and body: René Descartes to William James (by Robert
H. Wozniak) [html]
René Descartes
Körper und Geist [html]
Behaviourism
Noam Chomsky
A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior [html]
Alex Byrne
Behaviourism [html]
Identity Theory
Steven Schneider
Identity theory [html]
J. J. C. Smart
The Identity Theory of Mind [html]
Functionalism
Ned Block
Functionalism [html]
Hilary Putnam
The nature of mental states (in German: Die Natur mentaler Zustände
[pdf, 115 KB])
Eliminativism
Stephen Stich & Ian Ravenscroft
What is Folk Psychology? [70 KB, pdf]
2 Concepts
Gottlob Frege
Über Begriff und Gegenstand [30 KB, pdf]
Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung [50 KB, pdf]
Sinn und Bedeutung [50 KB,
pdf]
Lloyd K. Komatsu
Recent Views of Conceptual Structure [500 KB, pdf]
Reinhard Blutner
Prototypen und kognitive Semantik [900 KB, pdf]
Ruth Garrett Millikan
A Common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real
kinds: more Mama, more milk, and more mouse [150 KB, pdf]
"A Common Structure for Concepts of Individuals, Stuffs,
and Real Kinds: More Mama, More Milk and More Mouse Concepts, taken as
items that the psyche "acquires", are highly theoretical entities. There
is no way to study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial
preliminary assumptions about their nature. One aim of this paper is
to show how, throughout the changing variety of competing theories of
concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty
years, the implicit theoretical assumption of descriptionism has never
seriously been challenged. I present a nondescriptionist theory of the
nature of the most basic concepts that we possess, concepts of what I will
call "substances," following Aristotle. "
Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore
The red herring and the pet fish: why concepts still can't be prototypes
[60 KB, pdf]
3 Meaning
Franz von Kutschera (1993)
Sprachphilosophie. Wilhelm Beck Verlag München.
Chapter 2.1.6: Der Wahrheitsbegriff der realistischen
Semantik [120 KB, pdf]
Hilary Putnam
Referenz und Wahrheit [html]
The meaning of 'meaning' [3
MB, pdf]
Peter Gärdenfors
The Emergence of Meaning [90KB,
pdf]
Putnam (1975, 1988)
and Burge (1979) claim that a conceptualistic approach to semantics,
mentalism as they call it, is doomed to fail. Putnam's main reason
for this malediction is summarized by the slogan "meanings ain't in
the head." For example, he claims that he cannot distinguish oaks from
elms, but he knows that the meaning of the words 'oak' and 'elm' are
different. The constructions presented in Gärdenfors' article suggest
that, in one sense, Putnam and Burge are right: The social meaning of
a locution
is not determined
by the mental conceptual structure of a single individual. But Putnam
also claims that, as a consequence of this, meanings must be determined
by reference to the external world. It is argued that this claim is wrong.
Meanings are not in the head of a single individual, but they emerge
from the conceptual schemes in the heads of the language users together
with the semantic power structure.
Karl Otto Erdmann
Die Bedeutung des Wortes [html]]
John Locke
Von den Wörtern [html]
- Über die Wörter und die
Sprache im Allgemeinen
- Über die Bedeutung der Wörter
- Über allgemeine Ausdrücke
4 Representations & Content
Ruth Millikan
Teleological Theories of Mental Content [70 KB, pdf]
"Teleological theories of mental content always
rest on prior theories of the relation of a true mental representation
to what it represents. They add to this an account of falsity or emptiness
in thought."
Mark Rouland
Teleosemantics [html]
"The core idea of the teleofunctional account
of representation is that the mechanisms responsible for mental representation
are evolutionary products also. As such, they will have (direct) relational
proper functions. The idea, then, is that the representational capacities
of a given cognitive mechanism are specified in terms of the environmental
objects or features that are incorporated into that mechanism's (direct)
relational proper function."
Chris Eliasmith
How neurons mean: a neurocomputational theory of representational
content (2000) [500KB, pdf]
"Questions concerning the nature of representation
and what representations are about have been a staple of Western philosophy
since Aristotle. Recently, these same questions have begun to concern
neuroscientists, who have developed new techniques and theories for
understanding how the locus of neurobiological representation, the brain,
operates. My dissertation draws on philosophy and neuroscience to develop
a novel theory of representational content."
Michael Tye
Externalism and Memory [html]
Michael Tye
Inverted earth, swapman, and representationism
[html]
5 Consciousness
Erwin
Schrödinger
Geist und Materie (Zürich 1989)
- from chapter 1: Die physikalischen Grundlagen des Bewußtseins
[html]
- from chapter 3: Objektivierung [html]
Benjamin Libet
Do we have free will? [650KB, pdf]
Libet
takes an experimental approach to this question. This article is a good example
for what can be called "Experimental Philosophy"
David M. Eagleman & Alex O. Holcombe
Causality and the Perception of Time [50KB, pdf]
"Does
our perception of when an event occurs depend on whether we caused it? A
recent study suggests that when we perceive our actions to cause an event,
it seems to occur earlier than if we did not cause it."
David J. Chalmers
First-Person Methods in the Science of Consciousness [html]
In this paper Chalmers argued that the
task of a science of consciousness is to connect third-person data
about brain and behavior to first-person data about conscious experience,
and he discusses the difficult question of how we might investigate
and represent first-person data. This paper was written for a Tucson
online workshop on emotion and consciousness, and appeared in the Fall
1999 Consciousness Bulletin from the Center for Consciousness Studies.
Thomas Nagel
What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review 4:435-50, 1974
[html]
David J. Chalmers
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness [70KB, pdf]
This paper gives a nontechnical overview of
the problems of consciousness and Chalmer's approach to them. In
it C. distinguishes between the easy problems and the hard problem
of consciousness, and argues that the hard problem eludes conventional
methods of explanation. C. argues that we need a new form of nonreductive
explanation, and make some moves toward a detailed nonreductive theory.
This paper, based on a talk C. gave at the 1994 Tucson conference on
consciousness, appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness
Studies in 1995, and also in the 1996 collection Toward a Science of
Consciousness, edited by Hameroff, Kaszniak, and Scott (MIT Press,
1996).
David J. Chalmers
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness [html]
After "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"
was published, about 25 articles commenting on it or on other aspects
of the "hard problem" appeared in JCS (links to some of these papers
are contained in the article). Chalmer's reply appeared in JCS vol.
4, pp. 3-46, 1997. All the papers and C.'s reply have been collected
in the book, Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (edited by Jonathan
Shear), published by MIT Press in July 1997.
David J. Chalmers
The Puzzle of Conscious Experience [html]
This paper appeared in Scientific American
in December 1995. It is essentially an even less technical version
of the first article above, with some pretty pictures.
Patricia S. Churchland
Self-Representation in Nervous Systems [70KB, pdf]
"The brain’s earliest self-representational capacities
arose as evolution found neural network solutions for coordinating
and regulating inner-body signals, thereby improving behavioral
strategies. Additional flexibility in organizing coherent behavioral
options emerges from neural models that represent some of the brain’s
inner states as states of its body, while representing other signals
as perceptions of the external world. Brains manipulate inner models
to predict the distinct consequences in the external world of distinct
behavioral options. The self thus turns out to be identifiable not
with a nonphysical soul, but rather with a set of representational capacities
of the physical brain."
Joseph Levine
Materialism and Qualia: The
Explanatory Gap [800KB, pdf]
Basic article coining the expression "explanatory gap".
Michael Tye
Phenomenal Consciousness: the Explanatory Gap as Cognitive Illusion [html]
"Phenomenal concepts are very special concepts
in some ways like indexical concepts. But they are not one and the
same as indexical concepts. A failure to appreciate the special and
a priori irreducible character of phenomenal concepts misleads us into
thinking that there is a deep and puzzling explanatory gap for phenomenal
consciousness. But this is an illusion. There is no such gap. Those who
see in the alleged gap a reason for supposing that phenomenal qualities
are special qualities, different in kind from anything physical or functional
are doubly mistaken."
Michael Tye
Knowing What It Is Like: the Ability Hypothesis and the Knowledge
Argument [html]
"The Ability Hypothesis says that knowing what
an experience is like just is the possession of these abilities to
remember, imagine, and recognize. . . . It isn’t knowing-that. It’s knowing-how.
Tye argues that the Ability Hypothesis is wrong. He also propose an
alternative hybrid account of knowing what it is like that ties it
conceptually both to knowing-that and to knowing-how."
Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker
Conceptual analysis, Dualism and the Explanatory Gap [html]
The paper discusses physicalism and reductive
explanation in the context of putative explicit verbal analyses in microphysical
terms of such ordinary concepts as life, haircut and water. It expresses
skepticism about whether such concepts are a priori analyzable in microphysical
terms (or whether there are microphysical sufficient conditions for their
application). In the last part it is pointed out that the two-dimensional
apparatus (Kaplan) does not in any way help to isolate an a priori conceptual
component of content, but merely presupposes that there is such a thing.
6 The Computational Mind
Alan Turing
Computing machinery
and intelligence [html]
The classical proposal of how to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' (also called the Turing test)
Ayse
Pinar Syigin et al.
Turing test - 50 years later [pdf]
The whole story of the Turing test
Marvin Minsky
Why people think computers can't [txt]
"Just as Evolution changed man's view of Life,
Al will change mind's view of Mind. As we find more ways to make machines
behave more sensibly, we'll also learn more about our mental processes.
In its course, we will find new ways to think about "thinking" and about
"feeling". Our view of them will change from opaque mysteries to
complex yet still comprehensible webs of ways to represent and use ideas.
Then those ideas, in turn, will lead to new machines, and those,
in turn, will give us new ideas. No one can tell where that will lead and
only one thing's sure right now: there's something wrong with any
claim to know, today, of any basic differences between the minds of men
and those of possible machines."
John R. Searle
Minds, Brains, and Programs [html]
John Searle's (1980) thought
experiment is one of the best known and widely credited counters to
claims of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., to claims that computers
do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle's
original presentation, the argument is based on two truths: brains
cause minds, and syntax doesn't suffice for semantics. Its target,
Searle dubs "strong AI": "according to strong AI," according to Searle,
"the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the
appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that
computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand
and have other cognitive states" . Searle contrasts "strong AI" to "weak
AI". According to weak AI, according to Searle, computers just simulate
thought, their seeming understanding isn't real (just as-if) understanding,
their seeming calculation as-if calculation, etc.; nevertheless, computer
simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and
other things).
John R. Searle
Is the Brain a Digital Computer? [html]
In this aricle that
appeared a decade after "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Searle argues
that the sense of information processing that is used in cognitive
science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete
biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information"
in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific
to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of
information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational
models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting
a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.
Larry Hauser
The Chinese Room Argument (The Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy)
This article gives a concise introduction
into the Chinese Room Thought Experiment and debates several replies
and Searle's rejoinders.
Stevan Harnad
Minds, Machines and Searle [html]
"Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has
shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations
have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt
to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological
and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated
some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue turns
out to be an empirical question about the scope and limits of the
purely symbolic (computational) model of the mind. Nonsymbolic modeling
turns out to be immune to the Chinese Room Argument. The issues discussed
include the Total Turing Test, modularity, neural modeling, robotics,
causality and the symbol-grounding problem."
7 Symbolism & Connectionism
Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis
[170KB, pdf]
Tim van Gelder and Lars Niklasson
Classicalism and Cognitive Architecture [30KB, pdf]
Jordan B. Pollack
Recursive Distributed Representations [120KB, pdf]
Stephen Stich & Ian Ravenscroft
What is Folk Psychology? [70KB,
pdf]
8 Language & Experience
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)
Über Denken und Sprechen
[html]
Excursus: Colour
Philosophical Issues
Alex Byrne
Color Realism and Color Science[html]
"The article is in three main parts. The first part
explains the problem of color realism and makes some useful distinctions.
These distinctions are then used to expose various confusions that often
prevent people from seeing that the issues are genuine and difficult, and
that the problem of color realism ought to be of interest to anyone working
in the field of color science. The second part explains the various leading
answers to the problem of color realism, and (briefly) argues that all of
them except physicalism have serious difficulties or are unmotivated. The
third part explains and motivates our own view, that colors are types of
reflectances, and defends it against objections made in the recent literature
that are often taken as fatal."
Alex Byrne
Yes, Virgina, Lemmons are Yellow [22KB, pdf]
Discussing Stroud’s The Quest for Reality. Useful
supplement to the first article of Byrne.
Jonathan Cohen
A Guided Tour of Color [html]
Important essay discussing the advantages and disadvantages
of various theories considered in the philosophical literature on
color
Jonathan Cohen
Color, a functionalist proposal [260KB, pdf]
This article explains a view called color functionalism,
assesses that view in terms of the contrast between primary and secondary
qualities, and then contrast color functionalism against other, more traditional,
views about color. It is concluded that color functionalism is a plausible
alternative to traditional proposals about the nature of color.
Methodological Issues
B.A.C. Saunders & J. van Brakel
Are there non-trivial constraints on colour categorization? [html]
"In this target article [Behavioral and Brain Sciences
20 (2),167-228, 1997] the following hypotheses
are discussed: (1) colour is autonomous: a perceptuo-linguistic and behavioural
universal; (2) it is completely described by three independent attributes:
hue, brightness and saturation; (3) phenomenologically and psychophysically
there are four unique hues: red, green, blue, yellow; (4) the unique hues
are underpinned by two opponent psychophysical and/or neuronal channels:
red/green, blue/yellow."
Paul Kay & Brent Berlin
Science ≠ Imperialism: A response to B. A. C. Saunders and J. van Brakel's
"Are there non-trivial constraints on colour categorization?"
[74KB, pdf]
Berlin's and Kay's response
Paul Kay
Methodological Issues in Cross-Language Color Naming [74KB, pdf]
"The universals and evolution (UE) model
in cross-language color naming research, stemming from Berlin and Kay (1969)
and most recently embodied in Kay and Maffi (1999) has been criticized on
the grounds, among others, (1) that many languages contain words which express
both color and non-color properties, (2) that in many languages words which
express color properties do not form a coherent morpho-syntactic class, and
(3) that the purported findings of this tradition of research are artifacts
of a biased method of investigation. Each of these charges is answered."
Evolutionary Issues
Paul Kay & Luisa Maffi
Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons [96KB,
pdf]
Introduces a universals and evolution
(UE) model in cross-language color naming research, crucially making use
of optimal partitions.
Mike Dowman
A Bayesian Approach To Colour Term Semantics [550KB, pdf]
New approach to the nature of basic colour terms in
terms of a Bayesian computational model which is able to learn the meanings
of basic colour terms from positive examples.
Varia
Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Tractatus logico-philosophicus [html]
Peter Kampits
Der Wiener Kreis [html]
Rudolf Carnap
Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie [150
KB, pdf]
Werner Heisenberg
Diskussionen über die Sprache [html]
Werner Heisenberg
Sprache und Wirklichkeit in der modernen Physik [html]
Werner Heisenberg
Die Kopenhager Deutung der Quantentheorie [html]
Werner Heisenberg
Philosophie und Quantentheorie [html]
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Von der Sprache [html]