David Helman

In the philosophy of mind, the controversy between realists and antirealists often concerns the logical form of sentences embedded in attitude reports. Antirealists believe that such sentences refer to psychological states; realists believe that they refer to situations or states of the world. In this essay, it is shown how these two modes of semantic representation are associated with different approaches to the computational modeling of cognitive processes. I put forward a normative account of methodology in artificial intelligence that reconciles realism and antirealism, and suggest that my account sheds light on the problem of representing the logical form of attitude reports

The preceding theory represents, I believe, a large improvement over conceptual graph theories of analogy. In particular, it is possible for analogical reasoning to be flexible or ‘creative’ on this approach, an aspect of analogy that is not accounted for in conceptual graph theories. I also believe that searching by constraint violations is a more reasonable way to organize memory search than to look for properties of conceptual hierarchies. Proof of this last point, however, awaits an more detailed classification of the constraints that figure in analogical reasoning

Various critiques of philosophy have focused on the failure of its practitioners to come to any sort of consensus. The thesis attempts to account for this phenomenon in recent philosophy of language by seeing Kripke, Quine, Austin, and Wittgenstein as taking as their data different aspects and descriptional levels of our linguistic practices. On this view, Kripke has made a positive philosophical contribution by finding localized structures in certain semantic areas . His essentialism, while defensible, primarily shows us the lack of content in realist-antirealist controversies