•  161
    Aside from brute force, there are several philosophically respectable ways of eliminating the mental. In recent years the most popular elimination strategy has been directed against our common sense or folk psychological understanding of the mental. The strategy goes by the name of eliminative materialism (or eliminativism, in short). The motivation behind this strategy seems to be the following. If common sense psychology can be construed as the principled theory of the mental, whose vocabulary…Read more
  •  149
    Mind, content and information
    Synthese 70 (February): 205-227. 1987.
    What is it that one thinks or believes when one thinks or believes something? A mental formula? A sentence in some natural language? Its truth conditions? Or perhaps an abstract proposition? The current story of content is fairly ecumenical. It says that a number of aspects, some mental, other semantic, go into our understanding of content. Yet the current story is incomplete. It leaves out a very important aspect of content, one which I call incremental information. It is information in a speci…Read more
  •  144
    ``Cognition and Epistemic Closure"
    American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1): 55--63. 1985.
    JUSTIFICATION and knowledge are thought to be closed under known implication..1 This widely shared assumption is embodied in the following principles of epistemic closure
  •  142
    Inside loops: Developmental premises of self-ascriptions
    Synthese 159 (2): 235-252. 2007.
    Self-ascriptions of thoughts and attitudes depend on a sense of the intentionality of one’s own mental states, which develops later than, and independently of, the sense of the intentionality of the thoughts and attitudes of others. This sense of the self-intentionality of one’s own mental states grows initially out of executive developments that enable one to simulate one’s own actions and perceptions, as genuine off-line thoughts, and to regulate such simulations
  •  138
    Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 1991.
    The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical t…Read more
  •  123
    What do we need concepts for?
    Mind and Language 4 (1-2): 17-23. 1989.
    If we are serious about concepts, we must begin by addressing two questions: What are concepts for, what is their job? And what means are available in an organism for concepts to do their job? One is a question of raison d'.
  •  122
    The architectural nonchalance of commonsense psychology
    Mind and Language 8 (2): 189-205. 1993.
    Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information …Read more
  •  120
    Pretending as imaginative rehearsal for cultural conformity
    Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (1-2): 191-213. 2005.
    Pretend play and pretense develop in distinct phases of childhood as ontogenetically adaptive responses to pressures specific to those phases, and may have evolved in different periods of human ancestry. These are pressures to assimilate cultural artifacts, norms, roles, and behavioral scripts. The playful and creative elements in both forms of pretending are dictated by the variable, open-ended, and evolving nature and function of the cultural tasks they handle. The resulting creativity of the a…Read more
  •  117
    Does semantics run the psyche?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49 (June): 687-700. 1989.
    If there is a dogma in the contemporary philosophy of the cognitive mind, it must be the notion that cognition is semantic causation or, differently put, that it is semantics that runs the psyche. This is what the notion of psychosemantics and (often) intentionality are all about. Another dogma, less widespread than the first but almost equally potent, is that common sense psychology is the implicit theory of psychosemantics. The two dogmas are jointly encapsulated in the following axiom. Mental…Read more
  •  110
    Interpreting Minds
    MIT Press. 1997.
    In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.
  •  110
      Communication by shared meaning, themastery of word semantics,metarepresentation and metamentation aremental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense ofintentionality or reference. The latteris developed by a naive psychology or interpretation – acompetence dedicated to representingintentional relations between conspecifics and the world. Theidea that interpretation builds new mentalabilities around a sense of reference is based on three linesof analysis – conceptual, psychological andevo…Read more
  •  99
    Information and semantic cognition: An ontological account
    Mind and Language 3 (2): 81-122. 1988.
    Information is the fuel of cognition. At its most basic level, information is a matter of structures interacting under laws. The notion of information thus reflects the (relational) fact that a structure is created by the impact of another structure. The impacted structure is an encoding, in some concrete form, of the interaction with the impacting structure. Information is, essentially, the structural trace in some system of an interaction with another system; it is also, as a consequence, the …Read more
  •  91
    Our perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and memories have objects. They are about or of things and properties around us. I perceive her, have beliefs about her, think of her and have memories of her. How are we to construe this aboutness (or ofness) of our cognitive states?' There are four major choices on the philosophical market. There is an interaction approach which says that the object of cognition is fixed by and understood in terms of what cognizers physically and sensorily interact with - or,…Read more
  •  67
    Many philosophers and a few psychologists think that we understand our own minds before we understand those of others. Most developmental psychologists think that children understand their own minds at about the same time they understand other minds, by using the same cognitive abilities. I disagree with both views. I think that children understand other minds before they understand their own. Their self-understanding depends on some cognitive abilities that develop later than, and independently…Read more
  •  63
    A distinguished wise man, Emil Cioran, with whom I share a country of birth and the thought that follows, said once that the two most interesting things in life are gossip and metaphysics. I can hardly think of a more self evident and enjoyable truth, if wisely construed. This volume combines the two pleasures, for it is an exercise in the metaphysics of wise gossip, of how we make sense of each other, and how, as a result we interpret, explain, rationalize and evaluate our representations and a…Read more
  •  49
    Belief: Form, Content, and Function (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 1986.
    Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, …Read more
  •  48
    Roderick M. Chisholm (edited book)
    Reidel. 1986.
    The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc. ) about what is going on, who's who, and who does what in contemporary philosophy and logic. PROFILES is designed to present the research activity and the results of already outstanding personalities and schools and of newly emerging ones in the various fields of philosophy and logic. There are many Fest…Read more
  •  45
    An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.
  •  41
    More theory and evolution, please!
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (6): 1140-1141. 2001.
    Heyes's (1998) skepticism about theory of mind (ToM) in nonhuman primates exploits the idea of a strong and unified theory of mind in humans based on an unanalyzed category of mental state. It also exploits narrow debates about crucial observations and experiments while neglecting wider evolutionary trends. I argue against both exploitations.
  •  41
    Discussion: The pragmatic psyche
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1): 157-158. 1993.
  •  37
    L'Histoire des Sciences Cognitives
    In Lucien Sfez (ed.), Dictionnaire critique de la communication, Puf. pp. 870-878. 1993.
    In spite of of its name, cognitive science is not yet a fully coherent and integrated science but rather a fairly loose coalition of largely independent disciplines, some descriptive and empirical (cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology), some speculative and foundational (philosophy), others both speculative and applied (artificial intelligence). What brought these disciplines together and still sustains their interdisciplinary cooperation is the dedication to e…Read more
  •  37
    The Pragmatic Psyche
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1): 157-158. 1993.
  •  33
    Introduction
    Synthese 159 (2): 149-150. 2007.
  •  32
    Book reviews (review)
    Synthese 28 (2): 271-277. 1974.
  •  30
    Common Sense Naturalized
    In Radu J. Bogdan & Radu Bogdan (eds.), Mind and Common Sense, Cambridge University Press. pp. 161-206. 1991.
    Almost everybody believes, but nobody has conclusively shown, that common sense psychology is a descriptive body of knowledge about the mind, the way physics is about elementary particles or medicine about bodily conditions. Of course, common sense psychology helps itself to many notions about the mind. This does not show that common sense psychology is about the mind. Physics also helps itself to plenty of mathematical notions, without being about mathematical entities and relations. Employment…Read more
  •  30
    Local Induction (edited book)
    Reidel. 1976.
    The local justification of beliefs and hypotheses has recently become a major concern for epistemologists and philosophers of induction. As such, the problem of local justification is not entirely new. Most pragmatists had addressed themselves to it, and so did, to some extent, many classical inductivists in the Bacon-Whewell-Mill tradition. In the last few decades, however, the use of logic and semantics, probability calculus, statistical methods, and decision-theoretic concepts in the reconstr…Read more
  •  29
    Logic, language, and probability (edited book)
    D. Reidel Pub. Co.. 1973.
    AN INTENSIONAL INTERPRETATION OF TRUTH-VALUES* 1. Introduction In a profound and seminal paper of 1956 'Begrundung einer strengen Implikation', JSL), ...