John-Michael Kuczynski

Contemporary philosophy and theoretical psychology are dominated by an acceptance of content-externalism: the view that the contents of one's mental states are constitutively, as opposed to causally, dependent on facts about the external world. In the present work, it is shown that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between semantics and pre-semantics---between, on the one hand, the literal meanings of expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must exploit in order to ascertain their literal meanings. It is further shown that, given the falsity of content-externalism, the falsity of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) follows. It is also shown that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as "computation," "syntax," "algorithm," and "formal truth." Novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms are put forth. These analyses yield clear, intuition-friendly, and extensionally correct answers to the questions "what are propositions?, "what is it for a proposition to be true?", and "what are the logical and psychological differences between conceptual (propositional) and non-conceptual (non-propositional) content?" Naively taking literal meaning to be in lockstep with cognitive content, Burge, Salmon, Falvey, and other semantic externalists have wrongly taken Kripke's correct semantic views to justify drastic and otherwise contraindicated revisions of commonsense. (Salmon: What is non-existent exists; at a given time, one can rationally accept a proposition and its negation. Burge: Somebody who is having a thought may be psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who is thinking nothing. Falvey: somebody who rightly believes himself to be thinking about water is psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who wrongly thinks himself to be doing so and who, indeed, isn't thinking about anything.) Given a few truisms concerning the differences between thought-borne and sentence-borne information, the data is easily modeled without conceding any legitimacy to any one of these rationality-dismantling atrocities. (It thus turns out, ironically, that no one has done more to undermine Kripke's correct semantic points than Kripke's own followers!)

This paper puts forth two reasons to hold that at least some mental entities are not physical entities. First argument: Some mental entities (namely, pains and other qualia) cannot possibly differ from how they seem to be, and since this cannot possibly be true of any non-mental entity, it follows that some mental entities are not physical. Second argument: It is necessarily on theoretical grounds, as opposed to strictly experiential grounds, that mental entities are identified with physical entities. Water is legitimately believed to consist of microparticles of a certain kind because there is independent reason to believe that entities relevantly similar to such particles, supposing them to exist, are relevantly similar to water, so far as the latter can be directly observed. It is not, nor could it possibly be, on the basis of some directly observed concomitance between molecule-activity and water-activity that we believe the former to constitute the latter. It obviously isn't on the basis of any directly observed concomitance between brain-activity and mental-activity that the former is believed to mediate the latter. At the same time, there cannot possibly be any other legitimate basis for that belief. The reason for this is that nothing relevantly similar to mental activity can possibly be observed to accompany anything relevantly similar to brain activity. And the reason for the latter fact is that, even if brain-activity and mental-activity occur in the same physical space, they occur in different data-spaces: when you experience a pain, it is not given to you as occurring in the same spatial manifold as the falling of a stone or any other physical event. In general, mental events, whether or not they in fact have spatial coordinates, cannot possibly be observed (experienced) as having such coordinates, and for this reason they cannot be observed as having the same coordinates as brain-events. Thus, there can be no reason to grant the existence of the concomitances whose existence is needed to legitimate the bridge principles on the basis of which the mental could legitimately be identified with the physical. Note on the second argument: This argument doesn't show that the mental is non-physical; it shows only that there cannot possibly be any justification for the belief that the mental to be physical or, at any rate, that, if there is such a justification, it isn't comparable to the justification for the belief that water consists of molecules.

Intended for philosophically minded psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers, this book identifies the ways that psychology has hobbled itself by adhering too strictly to empiricism, this being the doctrine that all knowledge is observation-based. In the first part of this two-part work, it is shown that empiricism is false. In the second part, the psychology-relevant consequences of this fact are identified. Five of these are of special importance. First, whereas some psychopathologies (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder) corrupt the activity mediated by one’s psychological architecture, others (e.g. sociopathy) corrupt that architecture itself. Second, the basic tenets of psychoanalysis are coherent. Third, all propositional attitudes are beliefs. Fourth, selves are minds that self-evaluate. Fifth, it is by giving our thoughts a perceptible form that we enable ourselves to evaluate them, and it is by expressing ourselves in language and art that we give our thoughts a perceptible form.

What are laws, and do they necessarily have any basis in morality? The present work argues that laws are governmental assurances of protections of rights and that the concepts of law and legal obligation must therefore be understood in moral terms. There are, of course, many immoral laws. But once certain basic truths are taken into account – in particular, that moral principles have a “dimension of weight”, to use an expression of Ronald Dworkin’s, and also that principled relations are not always expressed by perfect statistical concomitances – the existence of iniquitous laws poses no significant threat to a moralistic analysis of law. Special attention is paid to the debate between Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart. Dworkin’s over-all position is argued to be correct, but issue is taken with his argument for that position. Hart’s analysis is found to be vitiated by an impoverished conception of morality and also of the nature of government. Our analysis of law enables us to answer three questions that, at this juncture of history, are of special importance: Are there international laws? If not, could such laws exist? And if they could exist, would their existence necessarily be desirable? The answers to these questions are, respectively: “no”, “yes”, and “no.” Our analysis of law enables us to hold onto the presumption that so-called legal interpretation is a principled endeavor and that some legal interpretations are truer to existing laws than others. At the same time, it accommodates the obvious fact that the sense in which a physicist interprets meter-readings, or in which a physician interprets a patient’s symptoms, is different from the sense in which judges interpret the law. So our analysis of law enables us to avoid the extreme views that have thus far dominated debates concerning the nature of legal interpretation. On the one hand, it becomes possible to avoid the cynical view (held by the so-called “legal realists”) that legal interpretation is mere legislation and that no legal interpretation is more correct than any other. On the other hand, it becomes possible to avoid Blackstone’s view (rightly descried by Austin as a “childish fiction”) that judges merely discover, and do not create, the law.

Sense-perceptions do not have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are presentations, not representations. Linguistic expressions do have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are representations, not presentations. It is viciously regressive to suppose that information-bearing mental entities are categorically in the nature of representations, as opposed to presentations, and it is therefore incoherent to suppose that thought is mediated by expressions or, therefore, by linguistic entities. Attempts to neutralize this criticism inevitably overextend the concept of what it is to be a linguistic symbol, the result being that such attempts eviscerate the very position that it is their purpose to defend. Also, it is inherent in the nature of such attempts that they assume the truth of the view that for a given mental entity to bear this as opposed to that information is for that entity to have this as opposed to that causal role. This view is demonstrably false, dooming to failure the just-mentioned attempts to defend the contention that thought is in all cases mediated by linguistic symbols

A rigorous examination of the assumptions underlying empirical inquiry, with special attention being paid to: *Causation *The relationship between the causal order and the spatiotemporal order *Probability (specifically, the distinction between statistical probability and explanatory probability) *Causation in relation to determinism *Different kinds of determinism *Causation in relation to prediction *Factors limiting the scope and accuracy of prediction *Data-modeling vs. truth-identification (the convergence of the two in psychology, the divergence of the two in the physical sciences) *Interdisciplinary reduction *The distinctive nature of psychology *Substantive but under-examined empirical questions within the discipline of psychology relating to the different kinds of psychopathy and to the distinction between psychopathy and non-psychopathic (in some cases counter-psychopathic) criminality *The concept of a datum *The distinction between data and truths and, more generally, between non-propositional and propositional content *The linguistic basis of discursive thought and scientific procedure The last chapter of the present work contains definitions of every philosophy-specific term occurring in the book, along with an analysis of the corresponding concept.

Wittgenstein and Brandom both say that knowledge of a language constitutes one's ability to think. Further, they say that a language is an essentially public entity: so to know a language, and to be able to think, consist in one's being embedded in a public practice of some kind. Wittgenstein provides two famous arguments for this: his "private-language" and "rule-following" arguments. Brandom develops these arguments. In this paper, I argue that the Wittgenstein-Brandom view strips anyone of the ability to mean anything by anything. Indeed, it strips anyone of the ability to think at all; the Wittgenstein-Brandom view is really just a version of Pavlov's stimulus-response psychology, and shares all its deficiencies. The rule-following argument is shown to be nothing more than a failure to register the fact that, in certain contexts, epistemic operators can be given either wide or narrow scope with respect to other operators. The private-language argument is shown to be based on a failure to distin-guish the conditions that are causally necessary for language from those that are constitutive of it. Brandom's argument involves a massive over-extension of the concept of a "linguistic community". The result is that his view becomes trivial: anything that can speak or think is by definition a member of a linguistic community; so Brandom's "demonstration" that only encultured beings can think turns out to be an artifact of his definitions.

One cannot have the concept of a red object without having the concept of an extended object. But the word "red" doesn't contain the word "extended." In general, our concepts are interconnected in ways in which the corresponding words are not interconnected. This is not an accidental fact about the English language or about any other language: it is inherent in what a language is that the cognitive abilities corresponding to a person's abilities to use words cannot possibly be reflected in semantic relations holding among those words. This fact in its turn is a consequence of the fact that expressions are, whereas concepts are not, digital structures, for which reason the ways in which cognitive abilities interact cannot possibly bear any significant resemblance to the ways in which expressions interact. Consequently, there is no truth to the contention that our thought-processes are identical with, or bear any resemblance to, the digital computations that mediate computer-activity.

In this briskly written volume, a case is made that a value is a belief as to how one live one's life if one's psychological architecture is to retain its integrity, and a case is thereby made that intention is an operationalized value. This analysis makes it possible to distinguish between minds that do and minds that do not host selves. (Selves are minds that have values; minds that are not selves do not.) The relationship between weakness of the will and self-deception is made clear, and it is explained how it is that one can knowingly act in self-destructive ways.

This book clearly explains what an infinite number is, how infinite numbers differ from finite numbers, and how infinite numbers differ from one another. The concept of recursivity is concisely but thoroughly covered, as are the concepts of cardinal and ordinal number. All of Cantor's key proofs are clearly stated, including his epoch-making diagonal proof, whereby he proved that that there are more reals than rationals and, more generally, that there are infinitely large, non-recursive classes. In the final section, Kurt Gödel's celebrated Incompleteness Theorem is shown to be equivalent with a number of the various different theorems proved in this short but profound work.