Blackwell Publishing, 2003
"Adams (Fred) - Thoughts and Their Contents: Naturalized Semantics"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Aizawa (Kenneth) - Cognitive Architecture: The Structure of Cognitive Representations"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Bickle (John) - Philosophy of Mind and the Neurosciences"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Chalmers (David) - Consciousness and its Place in Nature"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Clark (Andy) - Artificial Intelligence and the Many Faces of Reason"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
Author’s Introduction
- I shall focus this discussion on one small thread in the increasingly complex weave of artificial intelligence1 (Al) and philosophy of mind: the attempt to explain how rational thought is mechanically possible. This is, historically, the crucial place where Al meets philosophy of mind. But it is, I shall argue, a place in flux. For our conceptions of what rational thought and reason are, and of what kinds of mechanism might explain them, are in a state of transition.
- To get a sense of this sea change, I shall compare several visions and approaches, starting with what might be termed the Turing-Fodor conception of mechanical reason, proceeding through connectionism with its skill-based model of reason, then moving to issues arising from robotics, neuroscientific studies of emotion and reason, and work on “ecological rationality.” As we shall see, there is probably both more, and less, to human rationality than originally met the eye.
Author’s Conclusion
- Rationality, we have now seen, involves a whole lot more, and a whole lot less, than originally met the eye. It involves a whole lot more than local, syntax-based inference defined over tractable sets of quasi-sentential encodings. Even Fodor admits this – or at least, he admits that it is not yet obvious how to explain global abductive inference using such resources. It also involves a whole lot more than (as it were) the dispassionate deployment of information in the service of goals. For human reason seems to depend on a delicate interplay in which emotional responses (often unconscious ones) help sift our options and bias our choices in ways that enhance our capacities of fluent, reasoned, rational response. These emotional systems, I have argued, are usefully seen as a kind of wonderfully distilled store of hard-won knowledge concerning a lifetime’s experience of choosing and acting.
- But rationality may also involve significantly less that we tend to think. Perhaps human rationality (and I am taking that as our constant target) is essentially a quick-and-dirty compromise forged in the heat of our ecological surround. Fast and frugal heuristics, geared to making the most of the cheapest cues that allow us to get by, may be as close as nature usually gets to the space of reasons. Work in robotics and connectionism further contributes to this vision of less as more, as features of body and world are exploited to press maximal benefit from basic capacities of on-board, prototype-based reasoning. Even the bugbear of global abductive reason, it was hinted, just might succumb to some wily combination of fast and frugal heuristics and simple syntactic search.
- Where then does this leave the reputedly fundamental question “how is rationality mechanically possible?” It leaves it, I think, at an important crossroads, uncertainly poised between the old and the new. If (as I believe) the research programs described in sections 13.4-13.8 are each tackling important aspects of the problem, then the problem of rationality becomes, precisely, the problem of explaining the production, in social, environmental, and emotional context, of broadly appropriate adaptive response. Rationality (or as much of it as we humans typically enjoy) is what you get when this whole medley of factors are tuned and interanimated in a certain way. Figuring out this complex ecological balancing act just is figuring out how rationality is mechanically possible.
"Clarke (Randolph) - Freedom of the Will"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Griffiths (Paul) - Emotions"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Heil (John) - Mental Causation"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Ludwig (Kirk) - The Mind-Body Problem: An Overview"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
Author’s Abstract
- Understanding the place of thought and feeling in the natural world is central to that general comprehension of nature, as well as that special self-understanding, which are the primary goals of science and philosophy. The general form of the project, which has exercised scientists and philosophers since the ancient world, is given by the question, ‘What is the relation, in general, between mental and physical phenomena?’ There is no settled agreement on the correct answer. This is the single most important gap in our understanding of the natural world. The trouble is that the question presents us with a problem: each possible answer to it has consequences that appear unacceptable. This problem has traditionally gone under the heading ‘The Mind–Body Problem.’ My primary aim in this chapter is to explain in what this traditional mind–body problem consists, what its possible solutions are, and what obstacles lie in the way of a resolution.
- The discussion will develop in two phases. The first phase, sections 1.2–1.4, will be concerned to get clearer about the import of our initial question as a precondition of developing an account of possible responses to it. The second phase, sections 1.5–1.6, explains how a problem arises in our attempts to answer the question we have characterized, and surveys the various solutions that can be and have been offered.
- More specifically, sections 1.2–1.4 are concerned with how to understand the basic elements of our initial question – how we should identify the mental, on the one hand, and the physical, on the other – and with what sorts of relations between them we are concerned. Section 1.2 identifies and explains the two traditional marks of the mental, consciousness and intentionality, and discusses how they are related. Section 1.3 gives an account of how we should understand ‘physical’ in our initial question so as not to foreclose any of the traditional positions on the mind–body problem. Section 1.4 then addresses the third element in our initial question, mapping out the basic sorts of relations that may hold between mental and physical phenomena, and identifying some for special attention.
- Sections 1.5–1.6 are concerned with explaining the source of the difficulty in answering our initial question, and the kinds of solutions that have been offered to it. Section 1.5 explains why our initial question gives rise to a problem, and gives a precise form to the mind–body problem, which is presented as a set of four propositions, each of which, when presented independently, seems compelling, but which are jointly inconsistent. Section 1.6 classifies responses to the mind–body problem on the basis of which of the propositions in our inconsistent set they reject, and provides a brief overview of the main varieties in each category, together with some of the difficulties that arise for each. Section 1.7 is a brief conclusion about the source of our difficulties in understanding the place of mind in the natural world.
Paper Comment
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File1.
"Lycan (William) - The Mind-Body Problem"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Margolis (Eric) & Laurence (Stephen) - Concepts"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Melnyk (Andrew) - Physicalism"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Olson (Eric) - Personal Identity"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
Sections
- The Problems of Personal Identity
- Understanding the Persistence Question
- Accounts of Our Identity Through Time
- The Psycological Approach
- The Fission Problem
- The Problem of the Thinking Animal1
- The Somatic Approach
- Conclusion
Paper Comment
Photocopy filed in "Olson (Eric) - Papers on Identity Boxes: Vol 13 (Olson)".
"Robinson (Howard) - Dualism (Blackwell)"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
Introduction
- Dualism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that mind and body (or mental states and physical states) are of radically different natures. How exactly to express this difference is a matter of controversy, but it is generally taken to center on two properties possessed by the mental that are alien to the physical. One of these is the privacy or subjectivity of states of consciousness, as contrasted to the public availability of physical states. The other is the possession of intentionality or “aboutness” by mental states: physical states stand in spatio-temporal and causal relations to each other, but are not intrinsically about anything. The principle task tor the physicalist is to give an account of these properties in physical or physical-compatible terms. A dualist is someone who thinks that this cannot be done.
- There are normally thought to be two forms of dualism, namely substance dualism and bundle dualism. The former is primarily associated with Descartes and the latter with Hume. An important distinction must be made amongst bundle dualists, however. Some, like Hume, do not believe in either mental or physical substance, treating bodies as just collections of states, properties, or events (depending on how the theory is stated). For others, it is only the mind that is given this treatment: bodies are substantial entities, but minds only collections of states, properties, or events. This constitutes a relative downgrading of the mind and a move toward the attribute theory. According to this theory, mental states are non-physical attributes of a physical substance - the human body or brain. This theory can be regarded as the softest or least reductive form of materialism. It is materialistic because it says that the only substances are material substances. It is also a form of dualism, because it allows the irreducibility of mental states and properties.
- Both substance and bundle dualisms face the same three problems.
- The first problem is to show why we need to be dualists at all – why a materialist account of the mind will not work.
- The second is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution (though quite why is not clear from the text).
- The third problem is to give a satisfactory account of the relationship between the immaterial mind and the material body. Which means, for preference, to explain how they can interact, and, failing this, to render plausible cither epiphenomenalism (the view that the mental is produced by the physical, but has no influence back on the physical) or parallelism (the view that mental and physical realms “march in step,” but without either causally interacting with the other).
- I shall use the excuse of limited space for not dealing with all these issues. Rather, I shall attempt, in Cartesian spirit, to show,
- First, that the thinking subject has to transcend the physical world; and,
- Secondly, that such subjects must be essentially simple. They (that is, we) are more like the immaterial substance in which Descartes believed, than like a Humean bundle of mental events or states.
So I shall be concerned with why we should be dualists, and why dualists of a Cartesian stripe. How to explain the unity of the mind - except by showing it to be essentially simple - and how to explain our relations to our bodies, are not issues I can discuss here.
- In order to accomplish the first of the tasks I have set myself (that is, to show that the thinking subject must transcend the physical world), I shall introduce a form of dualism not so far mentioned, and which is generally neglected in discussions of dualism, namely predicate dualism. That is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. (What this means I shall discuss in the next section.) Few philosophers nowadays either believe in such reduction or think that it is necessary for physicalism. Predicates dualism is only dualism at the level of meaning, and this is generally thought to have no ontological consequences. I shall be arguing that this is a mistake, and that predicate dualism – the failure of reduction – is a threat to physicalism because the irreducibility of the special sciences in general implies that the mind is not an integral part of the physical realm with which those sciences deal.
- This conclusion does not alone force us to adopt any particular form of dualism. Perhaps the mind, though it transcends the physical world about which it constructs the sciences, is no more than a bundle of mental states or properties as Hume thought. Perhaps, that is, predicate dualism forces us to nothing more than property dualism, which may not drive one further away from physicalism than the attribute theory. I shall then attempt to show that this is not so, for property dualism is not adequate to cope with certain respects in which personal identity is demonstrably different from the identity conditions for physical bodies and other complex entities: these constraints on personal identity can be met only by substance dualism of a roughly Cartesian kind.
"Stich (Stephen) & Nichols (Shaun) - Folk Psychology"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Warfield (Ted) - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind: Introduction"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
"Wilson (Robert) - Individualism"
Source: Stich & Warfield - Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, 2003
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