koglist

koglist@maillist.ttk.hu

4 participants
5929 discussions

The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950)

by Stevan Harnad

Harnad, Stevan (2004) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence. To appear in: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) The Turing Test Sourcebook: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Kluwer. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/turing.html ________________________________________________________________________ The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence. Stevan Harnad "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Turing (1950) starts on this equivocation. We know now that what he will go on to consider is not whether or not machines can think, but whether or not machines can do what thinkers like us can do -- and if so, how. Doing is performance capacity, empirically observable. Thinking (or cognition) is an internal state, its correlates empirically observable as neural activity (if we only knew which neural activity corresponds to thinking!) and its associated quality introspectively observable as our own mental state when we are thinking. Turing's proposal will turn out to have nothing to do with either observing neural states or introspecting mental states, but only with generating performance capacity (intelligence?) indistinguishable from that of thinkers like us. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/turing.html

22 years, 12 months

Science & Consciousness Review: Book review - the Ayahuasca

by Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

Science & Consciousness Review (www.sci-con.org) has released new articles and reviews: _______________________ BOOK REVIEW Science and the Ayahuasca A book review of Benny Shanon's "The antipodes of mind" - by Bernard J. Baars And lastly, before leaving the village, I drank one cup alone. I was sitting on a balcony overlooking a garden. As the brew was having its effect, I started to sing. What poured out of my mouth was a biblical text --- the beginning of the book of Genesis. I chanted, in Hebrew, the creation of the world. And as I did so, the world was being created in front of my eyes: there was water, and then land surfaced, and trees came out of the earth and flowered, and then the world was populated with birds. I stopped there, before the creation of animals. Full text: http://www.sci-con.org/reviews/20030601.html _______________________ LATEST HEADLINES - New books from the MIT Press on consciousness related issues: - Animal Consciousness as a Test Case of Cognitive Science - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Volume 2, 1, 2003 - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Vol. 15, Issue 4 - May 2003 See NEWS IN BRIEF at: http://sci-con.org/more_news.html _______________________ PREVIOUS ARTICLES Workshops and seminars: * Crick and Koch's Framework for Consciousness http://www.sci-con.org/ww_framework.html * What the IDA model says about the LR situation http://www.sci-con.org/WW_IDAmodel.html Visit our archives at: http://sci-con.org/archive.html _______________________ NEW ADDRESS Science & Consciousness Review can now be found at www.sci-con.org. Soon, we will launch new features and forums for the scientific study of consciousness. Please update your links and preferences. _______________________ SEND YOUR CONTRIBUTION For students, teachers, scientists, and all other fans of consciousness... Send your news summaries to us. See more at: http://sci-con.org/author_instructions.html ___________________ Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy -- Neuropsychologist -- www.ramsoy.dk ramsoy(a)tiscali.dk Managing Editor Science & Consciousness Review www.sci-con.org Administrator Nordic Network for Consciousness Studies www.psy.au.dk/phd/nncs

23 years

Gurven/Behavioral ecology of human food transfers: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article, "To Give and to Give Not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers" by Michael Gurven http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Gurven-06282002/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= To Give and to Give Not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers Michael Gurven UC-Santa Barbara ABSTRACT: The transfer of food among group members is an ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This paper attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models-kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This paper also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior. KEYWORDS: behavioral ecology, costly signaling, cooperation, food sharing, foragers, reciprocal altruism http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Gurven-06282002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Barbara Finlay Editor Jeffrey Gray Editor Paul Bloom Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

23 years

Gurven/Behavioral ecology of human food transfers: BBS Call for Commentators

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article, "To Give and to Give Not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers" by Michael Gurven http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Gurven-06282002/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= To Give and to Give Not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers Michael Gurven UC-Santa Barbara ABSTRACT: The transfer of food among group members is an ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This paper attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models-kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This paper also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior. KEYWORDS: behavioral ecology, costly signaling, cooperation, food sharing, foragers, reciprocal altruism http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Gurven-06282002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Barbara Finlay Editor Jeffrey Gray Editor Paul Bloom Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

23 years

Categorization and Abstraction

by Stevan Harnad

Summary of paper presented at conference on: "Access to the Abstract." University of Southern Denmark Odense, 30-31 May 2003 Full text: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/concrete.html There is no Concrete -- by Stevan Harnad Université du Québec à Montreal Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos. Summary: We are accustomed to thinking that a primrose is "concrete" and a prime number is "abstract," that "roundness" is more abstract than "round," and that "property" is more abstract than "roundness." In reality, the relation between "abstract" and "concrete" is more like the (non)relation between "abstract" and "concave," "concrete" being a sensory term [about what something feels like] and "abstract" being a functional term (about what the sensorimotor system is doing with its input in order to produce its output): Feelings and things are correlated, but otherwise incommensurable. Everything that any sensorimotor system such as ourselves manages to categorize successfully is based on abstracting sensorimotor "affordances" (invariant features). The rest is merely a question of what inputs we can and do categorize, and what we must abstract from the particulars of each sensorimotor interaction in order to be able to categorize them correctly. To categorize, in other words, is to abstract. And not to categorize is merely to experience. Borges's Funes the Memorious, with his infinite, infallible rote memory, is a fictional hint at what it would be like not to be able to categorize, not to be able to selectively forget and ignore most of our input by abstracting only its reliably recurrent invariants. But a sensorimotor system like Funes would not really be viable, for if something along those lines did exist, it could not categorize recurrent objects, events or states, hence it could have no language, private or public, and could at most only feel, not function adaptively (hence survive). Luria's "S" in "The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a real-life approximation whose difficulties in conceptualizing were directly proportional to his difficulties in selectively forgetting and ignoring. Watanabe's "Ugly Duckling Theorem" shows how, if we did not selectively weight some properties more heavily than others, everything would be equally (and infinitely and indifferently) similar to everything else. Miller's "Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two" shows that there are (and must be) limitations on our capacity to process and remember information, both in our capacity to discriminate relatively (detect sameness/difference, degree-of-similarity) and in our capacity to discriminate absolutely (identify, categorize, name), The phenomenon of categorical perception shows how selective feature-detection puts a Whorfian "warp" on our feelings of similarity in the service of categorization, compressing within-category similarities and expanding between-category differences by abstracting and selectively filtering inputs through their invariant features, thereby allowing us to sort and name things reliably. Language does allow us to acquire categories indirectly through symbolic description ("hearsay," definition) instead of just through direct sensorimotor trial-and-error experience, but to do so, all the categories named and used in the description must be recursively grounded in direct sensorimotor invariants. Language is largely a way to ground new categories by recombining already grounded ones, often by making their implicit invariant features into explicit categories too. If prime numbers differ from primroses, it is hence only in the degree to which they happen to be indirect, explicit, language-mediated categories. Like everything else, they are recursively grounded in sensorimotor invariants. The democracy of things is that, for sensorimotor systems like ourselves, all things are just absolute discriminables: they number among those categories that our sensorimotor interactions can potentially afford, no more, no less. A primrose affords dicotyledonousness as reliably (if not as surely) as a numerosity of 6 (e.g., 6 primroses) affords factoring (whereas 7 does not). ---------------------------------------------------------------- Come to the UQÀM Summer Institute on Categorisation June 30 - July 11 2003 in Montreal http://www.unites.uqam.ca/sccog/liens/program.html

23 years

Debrecen r�szletes

by L�szl� Nemes

Nemes László Debreceni Egyetem Orvos- és Egészségtudományi Centrum Magatartástudományi Intézet _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

23 years

Ross & Spurrett/What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician: A Defense Manual for Cognitive and Behavioral Scientists by Don Ross and David Spurrett http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ross-12192002/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician: A Defense Manual for Cognitive and Behavioral Scientists Don Ross University of Cape Town David Spurrett University of Natal ABSTRACT: A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and, that to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism. We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical scepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical) then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not chose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naive and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics. KEYWORDS: Mental Causation, Functionalism, Reductionism, Metaphysics, Explanation. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ross-12192002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Shimon Edelman Associate Editor Barbara Finlay Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

23 years

Ross & Spurrett/What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician

by Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician: A Defense Manual for Cognitive and Behavioral Scientists by Don Ross and David Spurrett http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ross-12192002/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician: A Defense Manual for Cognitive and Behavioral Scientists Don Ross University of Cape Town David Spurrett University of Natal ABSTRACT: A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and, that to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism. We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical scepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical) then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not chose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naive and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics. KEYWORDS: Mental Causation, Functionalism, Reductionism, Metaphysics, Explanation. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ross-12192002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Shimon Edelman Associate Editor Barbara Finlay Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

23 years

public lecture invitation

by Krisztina Biber

The Philosophy Department cordially invites you to a public lecture by Cheryl Misak (Professor of Philosophy, VP Academic, University of Toronto at Mississauga) Thursday, 12. June, 5.00 PM - Zrinyi 14/room 412 'Pragmatism and Deflationism' C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, argued that we should turn our backs on the correspondence theory of truth because it rests on an unhappy and bloated metaphysics. We must embrace, rather, a deflated and naturalist view of truth on which a true belief is a belief which would forever stand up to inquiry. Contemporary deflationists, however, think of Peirce as a misguided opponent. They object to his thought that truth is a property; that is, they think that he hasn't deflated truth enough. I shall argue that the dispute between the classical deflationist and the Peircean deflationist is not as significant as it first seems and suggest that the classical deflationist should follow Peirce in saying something general about what truth is. Kriszta Biber Department Coordinator Philosophy Department Tel: 36-1-327-3806 Fax: 36-1-327-3072 E-mail: biberk(a)ceu.hu

23 years

by Zsu

Keresek az érzelmi inteligenciáról anyagot SOS! Köszi!

23 years

Jump to page:

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

koglist