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271Semiotic Systems, Computers, and the Mind: How Cognition Could Be ComputingInternational Journal of Signs and Semiotic Systems 2 (1): 32-71. 2012.In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also argue that, if semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans and computers are s…Read more
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8How minds can be computational systemsJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 10 (4): 403-419. 1998.The proper treatment of computationalism, as the thesis that cognition is computable, is presented and defended. Some arguments of James H. Fetzer against computationalism are examined and found wanting, and his positive theory of minds as semiotic systems is shown to be consistent with computationalism. An objection is raised to an argument of Selmer Bringsjord against one strand of computationalism, namely, that Turing-Test± passing artifacts are persons, it is argued that, whether or not this…Read more
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88CASTANEDA, Hector-Neri (1924–1991)In John R. Shook (ed.), The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960, Thoemmes Press. 2005.H´ector-Neri Casta˜neda-Calder´on (December 13, 1924–September 7, 1991) was born in San Vicente Zacapa, Guatemala. He attended the Normal School for Boys in Guatemala City, later called the Military Normal School for Boys, from which he was expelled for refusing to fight a bully; the dramatic story, worthy of being filmed, is told in the “De Re” section of his autobiography, “Self-Profile” (1986). He then attended a normal school in Costa Rica, followed by studies in philosophy at the University of…Read more
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5Review: Joseph Y. Halpern, Reasoning About Knowledge: An Overview (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 660-661. 1988.
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123Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: A Course OutlineTeaching Philosophy 9 (2): 103-120. 1986.In the Fall of 1983, I offered a junior/senior-level course in Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, in the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Fredonia, after returning there from a year’s leave to study and do research in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) at SUNY Buffalo. Of the 30 students enrolled, most were computerscience majors, about a third had no computer background, and only a handful had studied any philosophy. (I might note that enrollments have subsequently increased …Read more
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1789Philosophy of Computer ScienceTeaching Philosophy 28 (4): 319-341. 2005.There are many branches of philosophy called “the philosophy of X,” where X = disciplines ranging from history to physics. The philosophy of artificial intelligence has a long history, and there are many courses and texts with that title. Surprisingly, the philosophy of computer science is not nearly as well-developed. This article proposes topics that might constitute the philosophy of computer science and describes a course covering those topics, along with suggested readings and assignments.
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85Yes, She Was!: Reply to Ford’s “Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room”Minds and Machines 21 (1): 3-17. 2011.Ford’s Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room claims that my argument in How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape from a Chinese Room fails because Searle and I use the terms ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’ differently, hence are at cross purposes. Ford has misunderstood me; this reply clarifies my theory
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1161Non-Existent Objects and Epistemological OntologyGrazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1): 61-95. 1985.This essay examines the role of non-existent objects in "epistemological ontology" — the study of the entities that make thinking possible. An earlier revision of Meinong's Theory of Objects is reviewed, Meinong's notions of Quasisein and Außersein are discussed, and a theory of Meinongian objects as "combinatorially possible" entities is presented.
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54The Knower's Paradox and Representational Theories of AttitudesJournal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 666. 1988.
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47Review: Ronald Fagin, Moshe Y. Vardi, Knowledge and Implicit Knowledge in a Distributed Environment: Preliminary ReportJournal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 667. 1988.
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1Review: Richmond H. Thomason, Paradoxes and Semantic Representation (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 667-667. 1988.
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6Errata: Meinongian theories and a Russellian paradoxNoûs 13 (1): 125. 1979.List of errata to Rapaport, William J. (1978), "Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox", Noûs 12: 153-180
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113A Triage Theory of Grading: The Good, the Bad, and the MiddlingTeaching Philosophy 34 (4). 2011.This essay presents and defends a triage theory of grading: An item to be graded should get full credit if and only if it is clearly or substantially correct, minimal credit if and only if it is clearly or substantially incorrect, and partial credit if and only if it is neither of the above; no other (intermediate) grades should be given. Details on how to implement this are provided, and further issues in the philosophy of grading (reasons for and against grading, grading on a curve, and the su…Read more
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3Review: Gerhard Lakemeyer, Steps Towards a First-Order Logic of Explicit and Implicit Belief (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 668-668. 1988.
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180Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (SUNY Buffalo) (edited book)Assoc for computational linguistics. 1988.Narrative passages told from a character's perspective convey the character's thoughts and perceptions. We present a discourse process that recognizes characters' thoughts and perceptions in third-person narrative. An effect of perspective on reference In narrative is addressed: references in passages told from the perspective of a character reflect the character's beliefs. An algorithm that uses the results of our discourse process to understand references with respect to an appropriate set of …Read more
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298Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: from Algorithm to CurriculumIn Michael W. Kibby & William J. Rapaport (eds.), Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: from Algorithm to Curriculum. pp. 107-150. 2014.Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we…Read more
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58Review of Joseph Y. Halpern (ed.), Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986 Conference (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 669-670. 1988.
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171Understanding understanding: Syntactic semantics and computational cognitionPhilosophical Perspectives 9 49-88. 1995.John Searle once said: "The Chinese room shows what we knew all along: syntax by itself is not sufficient for semantics. (Does anyone actually deny this point, I mean straight out? Is anyone actually willing to say, straight out, that they think that syntax, in the sense of formal symbols, is really the same as semantic content, in the sense of meanings, thought contents, understanding, etc.?)." I say: "Yes". Stuart C. Shapiro has said: "Does that make any sense? Yes: Everything makes sense. The…Read more
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418Meinong, Defective Objects, and (Psycho-)Logical ParadoxGrazer Philosophische Studien 18 (1): 17-39. 1982.Alexius Meinong developed a notion of defective objects in order to account for various logical and psychological paradoxes. The notion is of historical interest, since it presages recent work on the logical paradoxes by Herzberger and Kripke. But it fails to do the job it was designed for. However, a technique implicit in Meinong's investigation is more successful and can be adapted to resolve a similar paradox discovered by Romane Clark in a revised version of Meinong's Theory of Objects due t…Read more
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516Syntactic semantics: Foundations of computational natural language understandingIn James H. Fetzer (ed.), Aspects of AI, D. 1988.This essay considers what it means to understand natural language and whether a computer running an artificial-intelligence program designed to understand natural language does in fact do so. It is argued that a certain kind of semantics is needed to understand natural language, that this kind of semantics is mere symbol manipulation (i.e., syntax), and that, hence, it is available to AI systems. Recent arguments by Searle and Dretske to the effect that computers cannot understand natural langua…Read more
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42How to pass a Turing test: Syntactic semantics, natural-language understanding, and first-person cognitionJournal of Logic, Language, and Information 9 (4): 467-490. 2000.I advocate a theory of syntactic semantics as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax â a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) â and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of under…Read more
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8This is a draft of the written version of comments on a paper by David Cole, presented orally at the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in New Orleans, 27 April 1990. Following the written comments are 2 appendices: One contains a letter to Cole updating these comments. The other is the handout from the oral presentation
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6Review: Kurt Konolige, What Awareness Isn't: A Sentential View of Implicit and Explicit Belief (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 667-668. 1988.
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18An adverbial meinongian theoryAnalysis 39 (March): 75-81. 1979.A fundamental assumption of Alexius Meinong's 1904 Theory of Objects is the act-content-object analysis of psychological experiences. I suggest that Meinong's theory need not be based on this analysis, but that an adverbial theory might suffice. I then defend the adverbial alternative against an objection raised by Roderick Chisholm, and conclude by presenting an apparently more serious objection based on a paradox discovered by Romane Clark.
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102Quasi‐Indexicals and Knowledge ReportsCognitive Science 21 (1): 63-107. 1997.We present a computational analysis of de re, de dicto, and de se belief and knowledge reports. Our analysis solves a problem first observed by Hector-Neri Castañeda, namely, that the simple rule `(A knows that P) implies P' apparently does not hold if P contains a quasi-indexical. We present a single rule, in the context of a knowledge-representation and reasoning system, that holds for all P, including those containing quasi-indexicals. In so doing, we explore the difference between reasoning …Read more
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106Models and mindsIn Robert C. Cummins (ed.), Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface, Mit Press. pp. 215--259. 1991.Cognitive agents, whether human or computer, that engage in natural-language discourse and that have beliefs about the beliefs of other cognitive agents must be able to represent objects the way they believe them to be and the way they believe others believe them to be. They must be able to represent other cognitive agents both as objects of beliefs and as agents of beliefs. They must be able to represent their own beliefs, and they must be able to represent beliefs as objects of beliefs. These …Read more
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73On cogito propositionsPhilosophical Studies 29 (1): 63-68. 1976.I argue that George Nakhnikian's analysis of the logic of cogito propositions (roughly, Descartes's 'cogito' and 'sum') is incomplete. The incompleteness is rectified by showing that disjunctions of cogito propositions with contingent, non-cogito propositions satisfy conditions of incorrigibility, self-certifyingness, and pragmatic consistency; hence, they belong to the class of propositions with whose help a complete characterization of cogito propositions is made possible.
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7Thought, Language, and Ontology, Essays in Memory of Hector-Neri Castaneda (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1998.The late Hector-Neri Castañeda, the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, and founding editor of Noûs, has deeply influenced current analytic philosophy with diverse contributions, including guise theory, the theory of indicators and quasi-indicators, and the proposition/practition theory. This volume collects 15 papers--for the most part previously unpublished--in ontology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, and related areas by ex-students of Professor Castañeda,…Read more
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115Logical foundations for belief representationCognitive Science 10 (4): 371-422. 1986.This essay presents a philosophical and computational theory of the representation of de re, de dicto, nested, and quasi-indexical belief reports expressed in natural language. The propositional Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) is used for representing and reasoning about these reports. In particular, quasi-indicators (indexical expressions occurring in intentional contexts and representing uses of indicators by another speaker) pose problems for natural-language representation and rea…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Computation, Misc |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
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