Bernard Kobes

Dualist themes in Burge's philosophy of mind are gathered and articulated. Burge's anti-individualism yields an argument against token-identity theory; his reflections on mental causation have a dualist flavor; and he doubts that the relation of mental events to neural events is one of composition or constitution. This chapter argues that compositional materialism about representational mental events would be false just in case a ‘mathematical archangel’, starting from a base of fundamental material facts, could not discern as causally salient the neural event underlying a representational event prior to identifying the representational mental event as such and its causal relations. Burge's doubts about neural composition of the mental could thus be empirically confirmed.

Is the specific intentional character of a thought entirely fixed by states of the thinker's body and brain? Is it entirely fixed by what he can see of his own thought with his mind's eye? A study of the sciences of thought suggests not. ;Individualism, the view that a person's intentional mental states are fixed by his physical, functional, and phenomenal states, is implicit in most modern and contemporary philosophical accounts of the mind, from Descartes to Jerry Fodor. But Putnam, Burge, and others have argued that a person's normal environment has a broadly conceptual bearing on the nature of his thought. If the natural or social surroundings of imagined replicas differ in certain ways, their obliquely specifiable thought contents contents will also differ. ;I discuss the claim, made by Stich, Dennett, and Fodor, that if we are to have a science of thought, the states it attributes must supervene on physical states of the subject's body. The burden of the dissertation is that each of several quite respectable cognitive-scientific theories attributes mental states whose non-individualistic character is deeply rooted in the theory's methodology and structure. This is argued in detail with respect to three pieces of work in cognitive psychology: Marr's computational theory of vision, Winograd's artificial intelligence program SHRDLU, and the account of object concepts as structured by similarity to a prototype. ;Each theory, I argue, uses intentional language broadly continuous with ordinary mentalistic description, and is therefore prima facie non-individualistic. Moreover, each theory presupposes a substantial conception of the success or failure of mental states, and aims at explaining how this success or failure comes about. This requires typing psychological states by reference to "externally imposed" norms of proper application, hence by reference to the actual natures of things in the world that subjects normally interact with. The argument involves excursions into such questions as whether psychological processes are syntactic, and whether our object concepts have "fuzzy" extensions

The field of metacognition, richly sampled in the book under review, is recognized as an important and growing branch of psychology. However, the field stands in need of a general theory that (1) provides a unified framework for understanding the variety of metacognitive processes, (2) articulates the relation between metacognition and consciousness, and (3) tells us something about the form of meta-level representations and their relations to object-level representations. It is argued that the higher-order thought theory of consciousness supplies us with the rudiments of a theory that meets these desiderata and integrates the principal findings reported in this collection

To say that S's belief or action is rational is to say, according to Foley, that from a certain belief perspective it appears to satisfy certain of S's goals. This approach is firmly teleological in character, and does not take "rules" or "virtues" of rationality to be fundamental. Precisely which belief perspective, and which of S's goals, are relevant here? We should acknowledge many notions of rationality, says Foley, depending on how we fix these parameters. We might take all of S's goals to be relevant, or perhaps only S's desire to have accurate and comprehensive beliefs. And we might take as relevant the belief perspective of experts in S's community, or that of an objectively knowledgeable observer, or that of S alone were S to be deeply reflective.

According to a model of inter-theoretic relations advocated by Patricia S. Churchland, psychology will need to revise its theories so as to fit them for "smooth reduction" to the neurosciences, and this will lead to the elimination of reference to intentional contents from psychology. It is argued that this model is ambiguous; on one reading it is empirically implausible, on the other its methodology is confused. The connectionist program NETtalk, far from exemplifying the model as Churchland claims, suggests a theoretical rationale for employing relations to intentional contents in psychology