Robert Cummins

I've tried to argue that there is more to representational content than CRS can acknowledge. CRS is attractive, I think, because of its rejection of atomism, and because it is a plausible theory of targets. But those are philosopher's concerns. Someone interested in building a person needs to understand representation, because, as AI researchers have urged for some time, good representation is the secret of good performance. I have just gestured in the direction I think a viable theory of representation must take. I hope, however, to have created some advance sympathy for the gesture by distinguishing the problem of representation from the problem of targets on the one hand, and from the problem truth-conditions for the attitudes on the other

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other ”nearby’ traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show that rather weak assumptions about innateness and modularity are consistent with evolutionary explanations of cognitive capacities. Evolutionary pressures can affect the degree to which the development of a capacity is canalized by biasing acquisition/learning in ways that favor development of concepts and capacities that proved adaptive to an organism’s ancestors.

It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemology is that normative assessment is constrained by capacities: you cannot require someone to do something they cannot or, as it is usually put, ought implies can. This much we take to be uncontroversial. We argue that differences in architectures, goals and resources imply substantial differences in capacity, and that some of these differences are ineliminable. It follows that some differences in goals and architectural and computational resources matter at the normative level: they constrain what principles of normative epistemology can be used to describe and prescribe their behavior. As a result, we can expect there to be important epistemic differences between the way brains, individuals, and science work.

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show that rather weak assumptions about innateness and modularity are consistent with evolutionary explanations of cognitive capacities. Evolutionary pressures can affect the degree to which the development of a capacity is canalized by biasing acquisition/ learning in ways that favor development of concepts and capacities that proved adaptive to an organism's ancestors. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

The purpose of this paper is to set forth a sense in which programs can and do explain behavior, and to distinguish from this a number of senses in which they do not. Once we are tolerably clear concerning the sort of explanatory strategy being employed, two rather interesting facts emerge; (1) though it is true that programs are "internally represented," this fact has no explanatory interest beyond the mere fact that the program is executed; (2) programs which are couched in information processing terms may have an explanatory interest for a given range of behavior which is independent of physiological explanations of the same range of behavior

In this paper, I sketch a revision of jonathan bennett's "meaning-Nominalist strategy" for explaining the conventional meanings of utterance-Types. Bennett's strategy does not explain sentence-Meaning by appeal to sub-Sentential meanings, And hence cannot hope to yield a theory that assigns a meaning to every sentence. I revise the strategy to make it applicable to predication and identification. The meaning-Convention for a term can then be used to fix its satisfaction conditions. Adapting a familiar trick of tarski's, We can then determine an infinity of conventional meanings from a finite number of meaning-Conventions

This paper considers two ways functions figure into scientific explanations: (i) via laws?events are causally explained by subsuming those events under functional laws; and (ii) via designs?capacities are explained by specifying the functional design of a system. We argue that a proper understanding of how functions figure into design explanations of capacities makes it clear why such functions are ill-suited to figure into functional-cum-causal law explanations of events, as those explanations are typically understood. We further argue that a proper understanding of how functions enter into design explanations of capacities enables us to show why two prominent objections to functionalism in the philosophy mind?the argument from metaphysically necessary effects (Bennett, 2007; Rupert, 2006) and causal exclusion (Kim, 1993, 1998; Malcolm, 1968)?are misguided when interpreted as posing a threat to functional explanation in science across the board. If those arguments pose a threat at all, they pose it to instances of (i); however, a great number of the functional explanations we find in psychology?and the sciences generally?are instances of (ii)

As a procedure, reflective equilibrium is simply a familiar kind of standard scientific method with a new name. A theory is constructed to account for a set of observations. Recalcitrant data may be rejected as noise or explained away as the effects of interference of some sort. Recalcitrant data that cannot be plausibly dismissed force emendations in theory. What counts as a plausible dismissal depends, among other things, on the going theory, as well as on background theory and on knowledge that may be relevant to under-standing the experimental design that is generating the observations, including knowledge of the apparatus and observation conditions. This sort of mutual adjustment between theory and data is a familiar feature of scientific practice. Whatever authority RE seems to have comes, I think, from a tacit or explicit recognition that it has the same form as this familiar sort of scientific inference. One way to see the rationale underlying this procedure in science is to focus on prediction. Think of prediction as a matter of projecting what is known onto uncharted territory. To do this, you need a vehicle—a theory—that captures some invariant or pattern in what is known so that you can project it onto the unknown. How convincing the projection is depends on two factors: how sure one is of the observational base, and how sure one is that the theory gets the invariants right. The two factors are not independent, of course. One's confidence in the observational base will be affected by how persuasively the theory identifies and dismisses noise; one's confidence in the theory, on the other hand, will depend on one's confidence in the observations it takes seriously. Prediction is important as a test of theory precisely because verified predictions seem to show that the theory has correctly captured the general in the particular, that it has got the drift of the observational evidence in which our confidence is ultimately grounded.