Gilbert Harman

A proper understanding of intentionality is crucial to the study of a number of topics in cognitive science, including perception, imagery, and consciousness. The term itself, intentionality, can be misleading, in suggesting intentional action, doing something intentionally, with a certain aim or purpose. In cognitive science, the term is used in a different, more technical sense. Intentionality involves reference or aboutness or some similar relation to something having what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called intentional inexistence.

I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do? A moral theory like utilitarianism may be put forward as offering the correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions

The meaning of a symbol is determined by its use, but the canonical way of specifying meaning is in a statement of the form "S means...". To be able to provide such a specification is equivalent to being able to translate the symbol S into one's own terms. A change in usage of terms involves a change of meaning iff the correct translation between earlier usage and later usage takes a term into a different expression. Such translation is holistic, a matter of finding the best mapping. Sameness of meaning is a similarity relation, as is sameness of concept. The meaning of a larger expression is derived from the meaning of its parts iff the translation of the whole is derived from the translation of its parts.

Scott Sehon argues for a complex view about the relation between commonsense psychology and the physical sciences.1 He rejects any sort of Cartesian dualism and believes that the common-sense psychological facts supervene on the physical facts. Nevertheless he asserts that there is an important respect in which common-sense psychology is independent of the physical sciences. Despite supervenience, we are not to expect any sort of reduction of common-sense psychology to physical science, nor are we to expect the physical sciences to conflict with common-sense psychology.

Concepts, not the beliefs employing them, have uses or roles in thought. Most conceptual roles cannot be specified solipsistically, and do not have inner aspects that can be specified solipsistically. (To think otherwise is to confuse function with misfunction.) A theory of truth conditions plays no useful part in any adequate account of conceptual role. Ordinary views about beliefs assign them conceptual structures which figure in explanations of functional relations. Which conceptual structures beliefs have may be relative to an arbitrary choice of "analytical hypothesis" but that does not mean that there is an adequate nonrelative account that dispenses with a system of concepts or language of thought.

Solomon argues that, although recent research in social psychology has important implications for business ethics, it does not undermine an approach that stresses virtue ethics. However, he underestimates the empirical threat to virtue ethics, and his a priori claim that empirical research cannot overturn our ordinary moral psychology is overstated. His appeal to seemingly obvious differences in character traits between people simply illustrates the fundamental attribution error. His suggestion that the Milgram and Darley and Batson experiments have to do with such character traits as obedience and punctuality cannot help to explain the relevant differences in the way people behave in different situations. His appeal to personality theory fails, because, as an intellectual academic discipline, personality theory is in shambles, mainly because it has been concerned with conceptions of personality rather than with what is true about personality. Solomon’s rejection of Doris’s claims about the fragmentation of character is at odds with the received view in social psychology. Finally, he is mistaken to think that rejecting virtue ethics implies rejecting free will and moral responsibility.

In this article, we provide a tutorial overview of some aspects of statistical learning theory, which also goes by other names such as statistical pattern recognition, nonparametric classification and estimation, and supervised learning. We focus on the problem of two-class pattern classification for various reasons. This problem is rich enough to capture many of the interesting aspects that are present in the cases of more than two classes and in the problem of estimation, and many of the results can be extended to these cases. Focusing on two-class pattern classification simplifies our discussion, and yet it is directly applicable to a wide range of practical settings