-
Why there is no symbol grounding problem?In Robert Cummins (ed.), Representations, Targets, and Attitudes, Mit Press. 1996.
-
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
-
38Philosophy 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 ...
-
497Systematicity 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
-
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
-
290Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 105-25. 1995.
-
89What 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.
-
238Meaning 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
-
2Artificial Intelligence and Scientific MethodBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 610-612. 1997.
-
20Following a comparative historical chart, this student text features readings from Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant.
-
35A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Jerry Fodor (review)Philosophy of Science 60 (1): 172-174. 1993.
-
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 ...
-
290The 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
-
160Representations, Targets, and AttitudesMIT Press. 1996."This is an important new Cummins work.
-
54On an Argument for Truth-FunctionalityAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 9 (3). 1972.Quine argued that any context allowing substitution of logical equivalents and coextensive terms is truth functional. We argue that Quine's proof for this claim is flawed.
-
456Inexplicit informationIn Myles Brand & Robert M. Harnish (eds.), The Representation of Knowledge and Belief, University of Arizona Press. 1986.A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.
-
152Conceptual role semantics and the explanatory role of contentPhilosophical Studies 65 (1-2): 103-127. 1992.I've tried to argue that there is more to representational content than CRS can acknowledge. CRS is attractive, I think, because of its rejection of atomism, and because it is a plausible theory of targets. But those are philosopher's concerns. Someone interested in building a person needs to understand representation, because, as AI researchers have urged for some time, good representation is the secret of good performance. I have just gestured in the direction I think a viable theory of repres…Read more
-
31Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanationCognition 73 (3). 1999.It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other ”nearby’ traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity,…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 |