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Old Directions, New MindsIn D. Bakhurst and P. Fairfield (ed.), Education and Conversation: Exploring Oakeshott’s Metaphor. 2016.
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241Why Dreyfus’ Frame Problem Argument Cannot Justify Anti-Representational AIIn S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (ed.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2009.Hubert Dreyfus has argued recently that the frame problem, discussion of which has fallen out of favour in the AI community, is still a deal breaker for the majority of AI projects, despite the fact that the logical version of it has been solved. (Shanahan 1997, Thielscher 1998). Dreyfus thinks that the frame problem will disappear only once we abandon the Cartesian foundations from which it stems and adopt, instead, a thoroughly Heideggerian model of cognition, in particular one that does not a…Read more
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149On Computable Numbers, Non-Universality, and the Genuine Power of ParallelismInternational Journal of Unconventional Computing 11 (3-4): 283-297. 2015.We present a simple example that disproves the universality principle. Unlike previous counter-examples to computational universality, it does not rely on extraneous phenomena, such as the availability of input variables that are time varying, computational complexity that changes with time or order of execution, physical variables that interact with each other, uncertain deadlines, or mathematical conditions among the variables that must be obeyed throughout the computation. In the most basic c…Read more
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121Representation: Problems and SolutionsIn D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2015.The current orthodoxy in cognitive science, what I describe as a commitment to deep representationalism, faces intractable problems. If we take these objections seriously, and I will argue that we should, there are two possible responses: 1. We are mistaken that representation is the locus of our cognitive capacities — we manage to be the successful cognitive agents in some other, non-representational, way; or, 2. Our representational capacities do give us critical cognitive advantages, but they…Read more
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105Dissolving the Grounding Problem: How the Pen is Mightier than the SwordIn R. Catrambone & S. Ohlsson (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, . 2017.The computational metaphor for mind is still the central guiding idea in cognitive science despite many insightful and well-founded rejections of it. There is good reason for its staying power: when we are at our cognitive best, we reason about our world with our concepts. But the challengers are right, I argue, in insisting that no reductive account of that capacity is forthcoming. Here I describe an externalist account that grounds representations in organism-level engagement with its environm…Read more
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165Machine learning systems (MLS) that model low-level processes are the cornerstones of current AI systems. These ‘indirect’ learners are good at classifying kinds that are distinguished solely by their manifest physical properties. But the more a kind is a function of spatio-temporally extended properties — words, situation-types, social norms — the less likely an MLS will be able to track it. Systems that can interact with objects at the individual level, on the other hand, and that can sustain …Read more
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152Accepting the Povinelli-Henley challengeAnimal Behavior and Cognition 9 (2): 239-256. 2022.In the recent twenty-year retrospective issue of Animal Behavior and Cognition, Povinelli and Henley (2020) argue that a host of comparative studies into “complex cognition” suffer, fatally, from a theoretical confusion. To rectify the problem, they issue the following challenge: alongside specifications of the higher-order capacity to be tested, provide hypotheses of the mechanism(s) necessary to implement it. They spearhead this effort with a discussion of how the Relational Reinterpretation H…Read more
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129How Reductive Analyses of Content are Confused and How to Fix Them: A Critique of Varitel SemanticsJournal of Mind and Behavior 42 (2): 109-138. 2021.The “problem of intentionality” from the vantage point of a representational understanding of mind is explaining what thoughts and beliefs are and how they guide behaviour. From an anti-representationalist perspective, on the other hand, on which cognition itself is taken to be a kind of action, intentionality is a capacity to engage in behaviour that is meaningfully directed toward or about some situation. That these are not in fact competing insights is obscured by the representational/anti-re…Read more
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129Learning How to Represent: An Associationist AccountJournal of Mind and Behavior 40 (2): 121-14. 2019.The paper develops a positive account of the representational capacity of cognitive systems: simple, associationist learning mechanisms and an architecture that supports bootstrapping are sufficient conditions for symbol tool use. In terms of the debates within the philosophy of mind, this paper offers a plausibility account of representation externalism, an alternative to the reductive, computational/representational models of intentionality that still play a leading role in the field. Although…Read more
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86Dress Rehearsals, Previews, and Encores: A New Account of Mental RepresentationTheoria 80 (1): 84-97. 2013.One of the central debates in cognitive science is the dispute over the role of representation in cognition: on computational/representational accounts, representations are theoretically central; on dynamic systems approaches in which cognition is investigated as a particular sort of physical process, representations play either no role, or, at best, a derivative one. But these two perspectives lead to a deeply unsatisfying theoretical divide: accounts situated in the representational camp are p…Read more
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88Thinking without global generalisations: A cognitive defence of moral particularismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 51 (4). 2008.In their article entitled “Ethical Particularism and Patterns”, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith (JPS henceforth) argue that moral particularism is a cognitively implausible theory since it appears to entail the view that one might have a skill that is not grounded in an ability to recognise and represent natural patterns in the world. This charge echoes the complaints of computational theorists of cognition against their embodied cognition counterparts, namely that, theories of c…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |