Natika Newton

This paper looks at a central issue with embodiment theories in cognition: the role, if any, they provide for mental representation. Thelen and Smith hold that the concept of representations is either vacuous or misapplied in such systems. Others maintain a place for representations , but are imprecise about their nature and role. It is difficult to understand what those could be if representations are understood in the same sense as that used by computationalists: fixed or long-lasting neural structures that represent the sensory stimuli that caused them , or whose “meaning” is fixed innately or in early development for particular functions . The paper proposes a distinctions between, on the one hand, neural patterns, traces of sensory activation that while not in themselves representations are available for representational activity, and on the other the act of representing, which is what gives representational content to neural patterns

  Sydney Shoemaker argues that introspection, unlike perception, provides no identification information about the self, and that knowledge of one''s mental states should be conceived as arising in a direct and unmediated fashion from one''s being in those states. I argue that while one does not identify aself as the subject of one''s states, one does frequently identify and misidentify thestates, in ways analogous to the identification of objects in perception, and that in discourse about one''s mental states the self plays the role of external reality in discourse about physical objects. Discourse about any sort of entity or property can be viewed as involving a domain or frame of reference which constrains what can be said about the entities; this view is related to Johnson-Laird''s theory of mental models. On my approach evidence, including sensory evidence, may be involved in decisions about one''s mental states. I conclude that while Shoemaker may well be right about different roles for sense impressions in introspection and perception, the exact differences and their significance remain to be established

Nicholas Maxwell takes on the ambitious project of explaining, both epistemologically and metaphysically, the physical universe and human existence within it. His vision is appealing; he unites the physical and the personal by means of the concepts of aim and value, which he sees as the keys to explaining traditional physical puzzles. Given the current popularity of theories of goal-oriented dynamical systems in biology and cognitive science, this approach is timely. But a large vision requires firm and nuanced arguments to support it. Here Maxwell's work is weakest; his arguments for contingent mind-body identity and for free will, on which his larger theory depends, are inadequate. The book is valuable both for its comprehensive view of the human condition and its mysteries, and for its demonstration of the difficulties in making such a view coherent.

John Searle has argued that one can imagine embodying a machine running any computer program without understanding the symbols, and hence that purely computational processes do not yield understanding. The disagreement this argument has generated stems, I hold, from ambiguity in talk of 'understanding'. The concept is analysed as a relation between subjects and symbols having two components: a formal and an intentional. The central question, then becomes whether a machine could possess the intentional component with or without the formal component. I argue that the intentional state of a symbol's being meaningful to a subject is a functionally definable relation between the symbol and certain past and present states of the subject, and that a machine could bear this relation to a symbol. I sketch a machine which could be said to possess, in primitive form, the intentional component of understanding. Even if the machine, in lacking consciousness, lacks full understanding, it contributes to a theory of understanding and constitutes a counterexample to the Chinese Room argument.