Josefa Toribio

There is a compelling idea in the air. Both contemporary philosophers of mind and philosophers of language are engaged in developing theories of content that are naturalistic. The stand has been taken: semantic properties are not part of the primitive ontological furniture of the world. If we want to vindicate those properties as real, we will have to show that it is possible to unpack them into some other –primitive– set of properties. It is taken for granted that there is no alternative way of avoiding circularity in explaining the semantic properties of mental or linguistic representations. The following quote from Fodor's Psychosemantics is probably the locus classicus for this trend: "I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep. It's hard to see, in the face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." The naturalistic project seems thus to be deeply rooted in the search for a non-circular, explanatory account of intentional categories. Although, in principle, one should not take naturalism in regard to some realm as committing one to any sort of reductive explanation of that realm, in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, naturalism and reductionism como easily upon a meeting point. The reason is that explanatory, non-circular answers are taken to be reductionist. If this is correct, we would have to conclude that naturalism entails reductionism or, even more strongly, that naturalism is constitutively dependent upon the defense of a reductionist thesis. In this case, we would have to admit that there cannot be a non-reductionist naturalistic theory of content. The main aim of this paper is to cast some light on the issue of what naturalism means regarding a theory of content. It is a matter of a some urgency to find out exactly what it takes for a theory of content to be naturalistic. Until we do so, we cannot properly evaluate the existing theories. I will center my discussion of this topic on the question of whether naturalistic theories of content ought to be reductionist theories. The claim I want to defend is that, despite the current trend regarding the relations between naturalism and reductionism, the former is not constitutively dependent upon the latter. I will argue that, in fact, the strong requirements of a reductionist thesis are the very reason the project of naturalization seems to be doomed. However, I will try to show that once we have weakened those requirements, non-reductionist answers are certainly acceptable, in the sense of being informative, non-circular, and above all, explanatory. I propose a safe[r] characterization of naturalism that seems to better fit our theoretical views about content, and to turn the whole project into a more promising enterprise.

It is sometimes said that humans are unlike other animals in at least one crucial respect. We do not simply form beliefs, desires and other mental states, but are capable of caring about our mental states in a distinctive way. We can care about the justification of our beliefs, and about the desirability of our desires. This kind of observation is usually made in discussions of free will and moral responsibility. But it has profound consequences, or so I shall argue, for our conception of the very nature of beliefs and other mental states. Suitably developed, it allows us to draw a line between two distinct ways in which a creature may possess a belief, represent a scene, and fall into error. The first way (which I shall call the 'mindless' way) involves little more than an encoding of information in some way designed to guide appropriate response. This is the common heritage of humans, and many other animals. The second way (which I shall call the 'mindful' way) requires that the creature be capable in addition of a special kind of second-order reflection, and (importantly) be expert at detecting the kinds of situation in which such reflection is called for. The differences between these two ways of 'believing that P' are sufficiently deep and significant to warrant (or so I claim) our treating them as two distinct classes of mental states. For it is only courtesy of the second layer of complexity, I shall argue, that it becomes proper to hold someone accountable for their beliefs or other mental states, and it is this fact of (something like) accountability that in turn raises the most significant challenge for philosophical attempts to give naturalized accounts of meaning, belief, and mentality

We continuously form perceptual beliefs about the world based on how things appear to us in our perceptual experiences. I see that the ripe tomato in front of me is red and I form the belief that this tomato is red based on my seeing it, i.e. based on my veridical perceptual experience of this red tomato. Perceptual experiences and beliefs are representational mental states. Both are defined not by what they are, i.e. their physical properties, but by what they are about, what they represent, by their content. The content of both perceptual experiences and beliefs is specified by how the world must be for them to represent things correctly; it is specified by stating the conditions under which they would be true

In this paper I approach the debate over non-human animals’ concepts from a metaphilosophical perspective. I compare exemplars of a full-fledged and an austere view of concepts and concept possession. A deflationist response to these views main- tains that the austere and the full-fledged theorist each makes claims that are true when they, respectively, assert and deny ‘nonhuman animals have concepts’. I will argue that the deflationist response is misplaced, using an analogy with the debate over the putative non-conceptual content of perceptual experience. The argument turns on the type of intentional explanation that the austere view on concept posses- sion can support. For the deflationist response to be sustainable, adherents of the aus- tere view would need to have substantially weaker commitments to the explanatory power of their account of concepts and concept possession than, in fact, they do.

This paper examines the relationship between cognitive impenetrability and perceptual nonconceptualism. I argue against the view, recently defended by Raftopoulos, that the (alleged) cognitive impenetrability of early vision is a necessary and sufficient condition for states of early vision and their content to be nonconceptual. I show that that view, here dubbed ‘the mutually entailing thesis’, admits two different standard interpretations depending on how we understand the property of being nonconceptual—corresponding to the distinction between the state and the content views of perceptual nonconceptualism. I first argue for the falsity of the state-nonconceptualist reading of the mutually entailing thesis, on the grounds that it mistakenly takes being nonconceptual to be a causal instead of a constitutive relationship. The content-nonconceptualist understanding of the thesis, I then argue, is disproved by plausible views regarding the content of experience. The mutually entailing thesis could only be true, I conclude, on a non-standard, causal interpretation of the notion of nonconceptual content. Yet, on that reading, the thesis would either be trivially true or would entirely fail to engage with the contemporary literature on perceptual nonconceptualism. Some potential relationships between the causal reading of the mutually entailing thesis and psychological research in this area are also briefly discussed.

I raise some doubts about the plausibility of Stanley and Williamson's view that all knowledge-how is just a species of propositional knowledge. By tackling the question of what is involved in entertaining a proposition, I try to show that Stanley and Williamson's position leads to an uncomfortable dilemma. Depending on how we understand the notion of contemplating a proposition, either intuitively central cases of knowing-how cannot be thus classified or we lose our grip on the very idea of propositional knowledge, which then fails to demarcate any clear class of cases. I conclude with a brief discussion of the nature and role of knowledge-how, and its relation to the important, but less explored, notion of expertise.

Summarizes and illuminates two decades of research Gathering important papers by both philosophers and scientists, this collection illuminates the central themes that have arisen during the last two decades of work on the conceptual foundations of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Each volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that places the coverage in a broader perspective and links it with material in the companion volumes. The collection is of interest in many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, biology, information science, psychology, neuroscience, iconography, and philosophy. Examines initial efforts and the latest controversies The topics covered range from the bedrock assumptions of the computational approach to understanding the mind, to the more recent debates concerning cognitive architectures, all the way to the latest developments in robotics, artificial life, and dynamical systems theory. The collection first examines the lineageof major research programs, beginning with the basic idea of machine intelligence itself, then focuses on specific aspects of thought and intelligence, highlighting the much-discussed issue of consciousness, the equally important, but less densely researched issue of emotional response, and the more traditionally philosophical topic of language and meaning. Provides a gamut of perspectives The editors have included several articles that challenge crucial elements of the familiar research program of cognitive science, as well as important writings whose previous circulation has been limited. Within each volume the papers are organized to reflect a variety of research programs and issues. The substantive introductions that accompany each volume further organize the material and provide readers with a working sense of the issues and the connection between articles.

Left brain‐right brain differences: inquiries, evidence, and new approaches, James F. Iaccino. Hillsdale, NH: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. ISBN 0–8058–1340–3Artificial intelligence: a philosophical introduction, Jack Copeland Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 ISBN 0–631–18384–1Shadows of the mind, Roger Penrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 019–8539789Raw feeling: a philosophical account of the essence of consciousness, R. Kirk. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–824081–3Vision: variations on some Berkeleian themes‘, Robert Schwartz Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 ISBN 1–55786–220–6Physicalism, Jeffrey Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–824980–2Constructing the subject: historical origins of psychological research, Kurt Danziger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–521–46785–3 Language in the world: a philosophical enquiry, Max J. Cresswell. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–521–44562–0.

According to so-called “thin” views about the content of experience, we can only visually experience low-level features such as colour, shape, texture or motion. According to so-called “rich” views, we can also visually experience some high-level properties, such as being a pine tree or being threatening. One of the standard objections against rich views is that high-level properties can only be represented at the level of judgment. In this paper, I first challenge this objection by relying on some recent studies in social vision. Secondly, I tackle a different but related issue, namely, the idea that, if the content of experience is rich, then perception is cognitively penetrable. Against this thesis, I argue that the very same criteria that help us vindicate the truly sensory nature of our rich experiences speak against their being cognitively penetrable.

In a recent paper, Paul Coates defends a sophisticated dispositional account which allegedly resolves the sceptical paradox developed by Kripke in his monograph on Wittgenstein's treatment of following a rule (Kripke, 1982). Coates' account appeals to a notion of 'homeostasis', unpacked as a subject's second-order disposition to maintain a consistent pattern of extended first-order dispositions regarding her linguistic behavior. This kind of account, Coates contends, provides a naturalistic model for the normativity of intentional properties and thus resolves Kripke's sceptical paradox. In this paper I argue that Coates' second-order dispositional account cannot solve the sceptic's problems regarding meaning and normativity. My main contention is that in order for second-order dispositions to be able to effectively regulate the coordinated responses constitutive of first-order dispositions, those first order dispositions must be independently identifiable. Yet that's precisely what Kripke's sceptical argument calls into question. I shall also argue, in a more positive fashion, that Coates' own appeal to practical breakdowns may suggest a different —and more effective— response to the sceptic's concern

The paper has a negative and a positive side. The negative side argues that the classical notions of narrow and wide content are not suitable for the purposes of psychological explanation. The positive side shows how to characterize an alternative notion of content that is suitable for those purposes. This account is supported by a way of conceptualizing computation that is constitutively dependent upon properties external to the system and empirical research in developmental psychology. My main contention is that an adequate computational explanation of the behavior involved in cognitive activities should invoke a concept of content that can capture the intimate dynamical relationship between the inner and the outer. The notion of content thus reaches out to include the set of skills, abilities and know-hows that an agent deploys in a constantly variable environment. The assumption underlying my attempt to characterize this ecological notion of content is that cognition is better understood when treated as embedded cognition and that the idea of cognitive significance ought to be cashed out in non-individualistic and pragmatic terms.

O'Regan and Noe present a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive defense of a position whose broad outline we absolutely and unreservedly endorse. They are right, it seems to us, to stress the intimacy of conscious content and embodied action, and to counter the idea of a Grand Illusion with the image of an agent genuinely in touch, via active exploration, with the rich and varied visual scene. This is an enormously impressive achievement, and we hope that the comments that follow will be taken in a spirit of constructive questioning. Overall, we have two main reservations.

One common factor underlying the set of disciplines clustered together under the label of Cognitive Science is a computational model of the mind. Cognitive capacities are to be treated as information-processing operations and to be characterized in computational terms. Computational processes are defined, in turn, in terms of operations on representations. For a few years, one of the most important debates in Cognitive Science has been whether the class of mechanisms to which cognizers belong and to which the computational modelling project of cognitive processes refers is best represented by classical or connectionist approaches. In either a classical or connectionist fashion though, the cognitive scientific style has remained computational all the way through.

Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content. Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to capture the representational properties of perceptual experiences, the representational states of pre-linguistic children and non-human animals, the states of subpersonal visual information-processing systems, and the subdoxastic states involved in tacit knowledge of the grammar of a language. Nonconceptual content is also invoked in the explanation of concept possession, concept acquisition, sensorimotor behaviour, and in the analysis of the notion of self-consciousness. The notion of nonconceptual content plays an important role in many discussions about the relationships between perception and thought.

Let’s consider the following paradox (Fodor [1989], Jackson and Petit [1988] [1992], Drestke [1988], Block [1991], Lepore and Loewer [1987], Lewis [1986], Segal and Sober [1991]): i) The intentional content of a thought (or any other intentional state) is causally relevant to its behavioural (and other) effects. ii) Intentional content is nothing but the meaning of internal representations. But, iii) Internal processors are only sensitive to the syntactic structures of internal representations, not their meanings. Therefore it seems that if we want to defend the idea -absolutely plausible from an intuitive point of view- that mental / intentional states are causally responsible for behavioural outputs and we want to do it on the physicalist basis of any scientific methodology, we will have to give up the conviction that such intentional states qua intentional, i. e. as having a particular meaning, are the ones causally responsible for our behaviour. The path that takes us to mental epiphenomenalism is clear: 1) the causal powers of any event are completely determined by its physical properties; 2) although intentional properties supervene on physical properties, they can’t be identified with them; 3) intentional properties, as intentional, are not causally responsible for behaviour, because they don’t take part in the causal powers of the states to which they belong, i. e., intentional properties are epiphenomenal. Let’s consider now a different yet parallel position to the one just described. There is an important debate in cognitive science about whether the class of mechanisms to which we belong and which the computational modelling project of cognitive processes refers to is best represented by classical or connectionist approaches (McClelland, Rumelhart et. al [1986], Smolensky [1987] [1988], Fodor and Pylyshyn [1988], Pinker and Prince [1988], Clark [1989], Ramsey, Stich and Rumelhart [1991], Clark and Karmiloff-Smith [forthcoming]).In classical, serial processing models, information is encoded in terms of rules that have a linguistic character. In connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models, the causal relationships among the units that constitute the system determine how the information is processes by the network, although these units don’t have a direct semantic interpretation. But, for both, classical and connectionist models, all the computations can be explained without any reference to the content of the processed information, i.e., in both cases the properties that seem to be responsible for the system’s behaviour are ultimately physical properties nor intentional ones. This situation mirrors thus, within cognitive science, the philosophical discussion concerning the causal efficacy of semantic properties. Now, if in this debate we opt for the classical paradigm, there is a way of finding a solution to the computational version of the epiphenomenalism paradox. This solution is based mainly on the notion of supervenience or, more precisely, on the notion of mereological supervenience (Kim [1984] [1988])1 . The idea of intentional properties supervening on physical properties makes sense within the classical context because there exists an easily isolable supervenience base comprising the syntactic items in the socalled language of thought. But, what happens if we opt for the connectionist paradigm?. The situation here doesn’t seem to favour the use of the same supervenience strategy. For it has been argued (Ramsey, Stich and Garon [1991]) that beliefs, desires, and other mental states are nor, in the connectionist paradigm, individuable as weight or activation states of the system. This is because information is encoded by the network in distributed and superpositional representations, i.e., there are no straightforwardly isolable vehicles at the physical level that can be identified as the articulated supervenience base on which the semantic properties supervene2 . If this is true, then the connectionist not only loses the battle against epiphenomenalism but more drastically, seems to offer a standing invitation to eliminativism, since talk of beliefs and desires, etc. now seems to be floating free of any acceptable scientific underpinning, i.e., she has lost the necessary theoretical apparatus for supporting the intuitive idea that propositional attitudes -beliefs, desires and any mental states with semantic content- are physically realized. This second line of argumentation doesn’t take us to a paradox but to a dilemma: either we accept eliminativism, if connectionist hypothesis are correct or we defend the causal efficacy of mental states with semantic content by showing that, after all, connectionist networks are not plausible cognitive models (Davies [1991]). From my point of view, however, both lines of argumentation need to be revised. The aim of this paper is to find an account of the causal efficacy of content that avoids the aforementioned epiphenomenalist objections and that doesn’t require the discovery of inner symbols in the computational modelling of such contentful mental states. In short, the aim is to find a meeting point where a philosophical story about content and cause and the connectionist computational model can be brought together (Cfr. Clark [1989]).

Connectionism and classicism, it generally appears, have at least this much in common: both place some notion of internal representation at the heart of a scientific study of mind. In recent years, however, a much more radical view has gained increasing popularity. This view calls into question the commitment to internal representation itself. More strikingly still, this new wave of anti-representationalism is rooted not in armchair theorizing but in practical attempts to model and understand intelligent, adaptive behavior. In this paper we first present, and then critically assess, a variety of recent anti-representationalist treatments. We suggest that so far, at least, the sceptical rhetoric outpaces both evidence and argument. Some probable causes of this premature scepticism are isolated. Nonetheless, the anti-representationalist challenge is shown to be both important and progressive insofar as it forces us to see beyond the bare representational/non-representational dichotomy and to recognize instead a rich continuum of degrees and types of representationality.

"Consciousness", it is widely agreed, does not name any single cognitive phenomenon. But nor is the gathering of distinct phenomena under that single label an accident. What seems to unify the range of cognitive goods in this "variety store" is the central yet elusive notion of the availability of some content or feeling in subjective experience. The paper begins by building a rough taxonomy of the various ways different approaches have tried to give an account of this central target. Among these approaches there are two to which special attention is paid. According to the first, our very cognitive constitution makes the issue of subjective experience scientifically intractable . According to the second , the philosophical worries about the subjectivity of experience are solved once consciousness is analyzed as the result of a long process of evolution that turns the flexible architecture of the brain into a virtual sequential machine. It is my contention that noconceptual argument of the first kind can establish the impossibility of one day achieving a scientific understanding of the property of being conscious. It is also my contention that a better understanding of the underlying neurophysiological and computational mechanisms is needed if Dennett′s theory is to resolve, rather than side-step, those problems related to the subjective phenomenology of consciousness. In short, I aim to show that there is no cause to regard a scientific theory of subjective experience to be in principle unobtainable. But that, contra Dennett, the form of such a scientific understanding is not yet clear

In this paper I attempt to develop a notion of responsibility (semantic responsibility) that is to the notion of belief what epistemic responsibility is to the notion of justification. 'Being semantically responsible' is shown to involve the fulfilment of cognitive duties which allow the agent to engage in the kind of reason-laden discourses which render her beliefs appropriately sensitive to correction. The concept of semantic responsibility suggests that the notion of belief found in contemporary philosophical debates about content implicitly encompasses radically different classes of beliefs. In what follows I make those different types explicit, and sketch some implications for naturalisation projects in semantics and for accounts of the (putative) non-conceptual content of perceptual experiences