Mark Sprevak

Kripke (1982, Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) presents a rule-following paradox in terms of what we meant by our past use of “plus”, but the same paradox can be applied to any other term in natural language. Many responses to the paradox concentrate on fixing determinate meaning for “plus”, or for a small class of other natural language terms. This raises a problem: how can these particular responses be generalised to the whole of natural language? In this paper, I propose a solution. I argue that if natural language is computable in a sense defined below, and the Church–Turing thesis is accepted, then this auxiliary problem can be solved

In contrast to many areas of contemporary philosophy, something like a carnival atmosphere surrounds Searle’s Chinese room argument. Not many recent philosophical arguments have exerted such a pull on the popular imagination, or have produced such strong reactions. People from a wide range of fields have expressed their views on the argument. The argument has appeared in Scientific American, television shows, newspapers, and popular science books. Preston and Bishop’s recent volume of essays reflects this interdisciplinary atmosphere. The volume includes essays from computer science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, sociology, science studies, physics, mathematics, and philosophy. There are two sides to this interdisciplinary mix. On the one hand, it makes for interesting and fun reading for anyone interested in the Chinese room argument, but on the other, it raises the threat that the Chinese room argument might be left in some kind of interdisciplinary no man’s land. The Chinese room argument (CRA) is an argument against the possibility of Strong artificial intelligence (Strong AI). The thesis of Strong AI is that running a program is sufficient for, or constitutive of, understanding: it is merely in virtue of running a 1 particular program that a system understands. Searle appreciates that understanding is a complex notion, and so he has a particular form of understanding in mind: the understanding of simple stories. It seems intuitively obvious that when I read a simple story in English, I understand that story. One could say that somewhere in my head there is understanding going on. However, if I read a simple story written in Chinese (a language I do not speak), then there is no understanding going on. What makes the difference between these two cases? The advocate of Strong AI says that the difference..

Andy Clark and David Chalmers claim that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head.1 Call this the “hypothesis of extended cognition” (HEC). HEC has been strongly criticised by Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa and Robert Rupert.2 In this paper I argue for two claims. First, HEC is a harder target than Rupert, Adams and Aizawa have supposed. A widely-held view about the nature of the mind, functionalism—a view to which Rupert, Adams and Aizawa appear to subscribe— entails HEC. Either HEC is true, or functionalism is false. The relationship between functionalism and HEC goes beyond support for the relatively uncontroversial claim that it is logically or nomologically possible for cognition to extend (the “can” part of HEC); functionalism entails that cognitive processes do extend in the actual world. Second, I argue that the version of HEC entailed by functionalism is more radical than the version that Clark and Chalmers suggest. I argue that it is so radical as to form a counterexample to functionalism. If functionalism is modified to prevent these consequences, then HEC falls victim to Rupert, Adams and Aizawa’s original criticism. An advocate of HEC has two choices: (1) accept functionalism and radical HEC; (2) give up HEC entirely. Clark and Chalmers’ intermediate position of a modest form of HEC is unsustainable. The argument of this paper, although initially appearing to support Clark and Chalmers, ultimately argues against their position. The price of HEC is rampant expansion of the mind into the world, and the implausibility of such expansion is indicative of deep-seated problems with functionalism. The argument of this paper consequently speaks to wider issues than just the status of HEC. The reasons for..