Robert J. Matthews

Classicists and connectionists alike claim to be able to explain systematicity. The proposed classicist explanation, I argue, is little more than a promissory note, one that classicists have no idea how to redeem. Smolensky's (1995) proposed connectionist explanation fares little better: it is not vulnerable to recent classicist objections, but it nonetheless fails, particularly if one requires, as some classicists do, that explanations of systematicity take the form of a‘functional analysis’. Nonetheless, there are, I argue, reasons for cautious optimism about the prospects of a connectionist explanation.

The “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches have been thought to exhaust the possibilities for doing cognitive neuroscience. We argue that neither approach is likely to succeed in providing a theory that enables us to understand how cognition is achieved in biological creatures like ourselves. We consider a promising third way of doing cognitive neuroscience, what might be called the “neural dynamic systems” approach, that construes cognitive neuroscience as an autonomous explanatory endeavor, aiming to characterize in its own terms the states and processes responsible for brain-based cognition. We sketch the basic motivation for the approach, describe a particular version of the approach, so-called ‘Dynamic Causal Modeling’ (DCM), and consider a concrete example of DCM. This third way, we argue, has the potential to avoid the problems that afflict the other two approaches.

Propositional relationalists about the attitudes claim to find support for their view in what they assume to be the dyadic relational logical form of the predicates by which we canonically attribute propositional attitudes. In this paper I argue that the considerations that they adduce in support of this assumption, specifically for the assumption that the that-clauses that figure in these predicates are singular terms, are suspect on linguistic grounds. Propositional relationalism may nonetheless be true, but the logical form of attitude predicates provides no grounds for thinking this to be so.

Abstract: In this brief commentary, I focus on two issues, first on Moltmann’s proposed Davidsonian event semantics for transitive verb attitude predicates, and second on the import of what she calls ‘the underspecification of content’ for the proper semantic interpretation of that-clauses. With respect to the first of these issues, I question the empirical justification of her proposed semantics, suggesting that she needs a syntactic rationale for her semantics. With respect to the second issue, I question whether, as she claims, the that-clauses in transitive verb attitude predicates specify (or even partially specify) the truth or satisfaction conditions for the attributed attitudes.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of philosophers, notably Churchland, Field, Stalnaker, Dennett, and Davidson, began to argue that propositional attitude predicates (such as believes that it’s sunny outside) are a species of measure predicate, analogous in important ways to numerical predicates by which we attribute physical magnitudes (such as mass, length, and temperature). Other philosophers, including myself, have subsequently developed the idea in greater detail. In this paper I sketch the general outlines of measurement‐theoretic accounts of propositional attitudes, explaining in the briefest terms the basic idea of such accounts, why some have thought such accounts plausible, how these accounts might go, what their implications might be both for our conception of propositional attitudes and for their role in cognitive scientific theorizing, and where the potential problems with such accounts might lie.

This paper defends the commonsense conception of linguistic competence according to which linguistic competence involves propositional knowledge of language. More specifically, the paper defends three propositions challenged by Devitt in his Ignorance af Language. First, Chomskian linguists were right to embrace this commonsense conception of linguistic cornpetence. Second, the grammars that these linguists propose make a substantive claim about the computational processes that are presumed to constitute a speaker’s linguistic competence. Third, Chomskian linguistics is indeed a subfield of psychology, in the business of characterizing the linguistic competence of speakers.

Putnam and Searle famously argue against computational theories of mind on the skeptical ground that there is no fact of the matter as to what mathematical function a physical system is computing: both conclude (albeit for somewhat different reasons) that virtually any physical object computes every computable function, implements every program or automaton. There has been considerable discussion of Putnam's and Searle's arguments, though as yet there is little consensus as to what, if anything, is wrong with these arguments. In the present paper we show that an analogous line of reasoning can be raised against the numerical measurement (i.e., numerical representation) of physical magnitudes, and we argue that this result is a reductio ad absurdum of the challenge to computational skepticism. We then use this reductio to get clearer about both (i) what's wrong with Putnam's and Searle's arguments against computationalism, and (ii) what can be learned about both computational implementation and numerical measurement from the shortcomings of both sorts of skeptical argument.