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391"How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanationIn Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation, Mit Press. 2000.In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion
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37Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface (edited book)MIT Press. 1991.Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...
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494Systematicity and the Cognition of Structured DomainsJournal of Philosophy 98 (4). 2001.The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the thoug…Read more
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379The Lot of the Casual Theory of Mental ContentJournal of Philosophy 94 (10): 535. 1997.The thesis of this paper is that the causal theory of mental content (hereafter CT) is incompatible with an elementary fact of perceptual psychology, namely, that the detection of distal properties generally requires the mediation of a “theory.” I shall call this fact the nontransducibility of distal properties (hereafter NTDP). The argument proceeds in two stages. The burden of stage one is that, taken together, CT and the language of thought hypothesis (hereafter LOT) are incompatible with NTD…Read more
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288Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 105-25. 1995.
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88What Systematicity Isn’tJournal of Philosophical Research 30 405-408. 2005.In “On Begging the Systematicity Question,” Wayne Davis criticizes the suggestion of Cummins et al. that the alleged systematicity of thought is not as obvious as is sometimes supposed, and hence not reliable evidence for the language of thought hypothesis. We offer a brief reply.
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236Meaning and Mental RepresentationMIT Press. 1989.Looks at accounts by Locke, Fodor, Dretske, and Millikan concerning the nature of mental representation, and discusses connectionism and representation
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2Artificial Intelligence and Scientific MethodBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 610-612. 1997.
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20Following a comparative historical chart, this student text features readings from Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant.
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35A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Jerry Fodor (review)Philosophy of Science 60 (1): 172-174. 1993.
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44Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface (edited book)MIT Press. 1991.Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...
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288The Nature of Psychological ExplanationMIT Press. 1983.In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelli…Read more
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159Representations, Targets, and AttitudesMIT Press. 1996."This is an important new Cummins work.
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603Explanation and SubsumptionPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978. 1978.The thesis that subsumption is sufficient for explanation is dying out, but the thesis that it is necessary is alive and well. It is difficult to attack this thesis: non-subsumptive counter-examples are declared incomplete, or mere promissory notes. No theory, it is thought, can be explanatory unless it resorts to subsumption at some point. In this paper I attack this thesis by describing a theory that (1) would explain every event it could describe, (2) does not explain by subsumption, and (3) …Read more
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270Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2002.But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.
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37The Philosophical Problem of Truth-OfCanadian Journal of Philosophy 5 (1). 1975.There is a certain view abroad in the land concerning the philosophical problems raised by Tarskian semantics. This view has it that a Tarskian theory of truth in a language accomplishes nothing of interest beyond the definition of truth in terms of satisfaction, and, further, that what is missing — the only thing that would yield a solution to the philosophical problem of truth when added to Tarskian semantics — is a reduction of satisfaction to a non-semantic relation. It seems to me that this…Read more
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338Neo-teleologyIn Andre Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press. 2002.Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its functi…Read more
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30The language faculty and the interpretation of linguisticsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 18-19. 1980.
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52Haugeland on representation and intentionalityIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Philosophy of Mental Representation, Oxford University Press. 2002.Haugeland doesn’t have what I would call a theory of mental representation. Indeed, it isn’t clear that he believes there is such a thing. But he does have a theory of intentionality and a correlative theory of objectivity, and it is this material that I will be discussing in what follows. It will facilitate the discussion that follows to have at hand some distinctions and accompanying terminology I introduced in Representations, Targets and Attitudes (Cummins, 1996; RTA hereafter). Couching the…Read more
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70Connectionism, computation, and cognitionIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 60--73. 1991.
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |