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21Dreyfus, HL, 3% Dreyfus, SE, 396In Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. 1993.
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Why there is no symbol grounding problem?In Robert Cummins (ed.), Representations, Targets, and Attitudes, Mit Press. 1996.
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393"How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanationIn Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation, Mit Press. 2000.In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion
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38Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface (edited book)MIT Press. 1991.Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...
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497Systematicity and the Cognition of Structured DomainsJournal of Philosophy 98 (4). 2001.The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the thoug…Read more
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383The Lot of the Casual Theory of Mental ContentJournal of Philosophy 94 (10): 535. 1997.The thesis of this paper is that the causal theory of mental content (hereafter CT) is incompatible with an elementary fact of perceptual psychology, namely, that the detection of distal properties generally requires the mediation of a “theory.” I shall call this fact the nontransducibility of distal properties (hereafter NTDP). The argument proceeds in two stages. The burden of stage one is that, taken together, CT and the language of thought hypothesis (hereafter LOT) are incompatible with NTD…Read more
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291Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 105-25. 1995.
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92What Systematicity Isn’tJournal of Philosophical Research 30 405-408. 2005.In “On Begging the Systematicity Question,” Wayne Davis criticizes the suggestion of Cummins et al. that the alleged systematicity of thought is not as obvious as is sometimes supposed, and hence not reliable evidence for the language of thought hypothesis. We offer a brief reply.
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243Meaning and Mental RepresentationMIT Press. 1989.Looks at accounts by Locke, Fodor, Dretske, and Millikan concerning the nature of mental representation, and discusses connectionism and representation
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2Artificial Intelligence and Scientific MethodBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 610-612. 1997.
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20Following a comparative historical chart, this student text features readings from Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant.
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35A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Jerry Fodor (review)Philosophy of Science 60 (1): 172-174. 1993.
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44Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface (edited book)MIT Press. 1991.Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...
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291The Nature of Psychological ExplanationMIT Press. 1983.In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelli…Read more
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161Representations, Targets, and AttitudesMIT Press. 1996."This is an important new Cummins work.
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8Mind in Science: A History of Explanations in Psychology and Physics. Richard L. GregoryIsis 73 (3): 441-441. 1982.
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105Meaning and Content in Cognitive ScienceIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 365-382. 2012.What are the prospects for a cognitive science of meaning? As stated, we think this question is ill posed, for it invites the conflation of several importantly different semantic concepts. In this paper, we want to distinguish the sort of meaning that is an explanandum for cognitive science—something we are going to call meaning—from the sort of meaning that is an explanans in cognitive science—something we are not going to call meaning at all, but rather content. What we are going to call …Read more
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60Analysis and subsumption in the behaviorism of HullPhilosophy of Science 50 (March): 96-111. 1983.The background hypothesis of this essay is that psychological phenomena are typically explained, not by subsuming them under psychological laws, but by functional analysis. Causal subsumption is an appropriate strategy for explaining changes of state, but not for explaining capacities, and it is capacities that are the central explananda of psychology. The contrast between functional analysis and causal subsumption is illustrated, and the background hypothesis supported, by a critical reassessme…Read more
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71Two troublesome claims about qualities in Locke's essayPhilosophical Review 84 (3): 401-418. 1975.In book two, Chapter eight of the essay, Locke claims that primary qualities, Unlike secondary qualities, Are really in objects and are resemblances of our ideas. The idioms of containment and of resemblance are explained as formulations of what jonathan bennett calls the analytic thesis and the causal thesis. It is argued that locke was concerned to distinguish primary qualities from what he calls secondary qualities because he thought the latter were not really qualities at all but mere powers…Read more
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507States, causes, and the law of inertiaPhilosophical Studies 29 (1). 1976.I argue that Galileo regarded unaccelerated motion as requiring cause to sustain in. In an inclined plane experiment, the cause ceases when the incline ceases. When the incline ceases, what ceases is acceleration, not motion. Hence, unaccelerated motion requires no cause to sustain it.
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |