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13Cross domain inference and problem embeddingIn Robert Cummins & John L. Pollock (eds.), Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface, Mit Press. 1991.I.1. Two reasons for studying inference. Inference is studied for two distinct reasons: for its bearing on justification and for its bearing on learning. By and large, philosophy has focused on the role of inference in justification, leaving its role in learning to psychology and artificial intelligence. This difference of role leads to a difference of conception. An inference based theory of learning does not require a conception of inference according to which a good inference is one that just…Read more
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8Cognitive evolutionary psychology without representational nativismJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 15 (2): 143-159. 2003.A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) ‘quasi-independent’ from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have no distinctive consequences for fitness if effecting those variations required widespread changes in other unrelated traits and cap…Read more
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7The role of representation in connectionist explanation of cognitive capacitiesIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. M. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 91--114. 1991.
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8The mind of the matter: Comments on Paul ChurchlandPhilosophy of Science Association 1984 791-798. 1984.
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21Dreyfus, HL, 3% Dreyfus, SE, 396In Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. 1993.
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Why there is no symbol grounding problem?In Robert Cummins (ed.), Representations, Targets, and Attitudes, Mit Press. 1996.
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2"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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9Philosophy 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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15Systematicity 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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383The 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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17Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 105-25. 1995.
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92What 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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15Meaning 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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21Following 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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6Philosophy 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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20The 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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1Inexplicit representationIn Myles Brand (ed.), The Representation Of Knowledge And Belief, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1986.
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7Intention, meaning and truth-conditionsPhilosophical Studies 35 (4). 1979.In this paper, I sketch a revision of jonathan bennett's "meaning-Nominalist strategy" for explaining the conventional meanings of utterance-Types. Bennett's strategy does not explain sentence-Meaning by appeal to sub-Sentential meanings, And hence cannot hope to yield a theory that assigns a meaning to every sentence. I revise the strategy to make it applicable to predication and identification. The meaning-Convention for a term can then be used to fix its satisfaction conditions. Adapting a fa…Read more
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 |