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While the notion of the mind as information-processor--a kind of computational system--is widely accepted, many scientists and philosophers have assumed that this account of cognition shows that the mind's operations are characterizable independent of their relationship to the external world. Existential Cognition challenges the internalist view of mind, arguing that intelligence, thought, and action cannot be understood in isolation, but only in interaction with the outside world. Arguing that the mind is essentially embedded in the external world, Ron McClamrock provides (...) a schema that allows cognitive scientists to address such long-standing problems in artificial intelligence as the "frame" problem and the issue of "bounded" rationality. Extending this schema to cover progress in other studies of behavior, including language, vision, and action, McClamrock reinterprets the importance of the organism/environment distinction. McClamrock also considers the broader philosophical question of the place of mind in the world, particularly with regard to questions of intentionality, subjectivity, and phenomenology. With implications for philosophy, cognitive and computer science, AI, and psychology, this book synthesizes state-of-the-art work in philosophy and cognitive science on how the mind interacts with the world to produce thoughts, ideas, and actions. (shrink)

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Is it wrong to bring children who will have serious diseases and disabilities into the world? In particular, is it unfair to them? The notion that existence itself can be an injury is the basis for a recent new tort known as "wrongful life" (Steinbock, 1986). This paper considers Feinberg's theory of harm as the basis for a claim of wrongful life, and concludes that rarely can the stringent conditions imposed by his analysis be met. Another basis for maintaining that (...) it is morally wrong to have children under extremely adverse conditions is suggested: a principle of parental responsibility. We also argue that having children under such conditions may be unfair to the children, even if they have not been (in Feinberg's sense) harmed. Finally, we consider when conditions are sufficiently awful that having children might be viewed as incompatible with being a good parent and unfair to the child. (shrink)

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A recording or performance of a song is a cover if there is an earlier, canonical recording of the song. It can seem intuitive to think that properly appreciating a cover requires considering it in relation to the original, or at least that doing so will yield a deeper appreciation. This intuition is supported by some philosophical accounts of covers. And it is complicated by the possibility of hearing in, whereby one hears elements of the original version in the cover. (...) We argue that it can nevertheless be just as legitimate to consider a cover version on its own as it is to consider it in relation to the earlier recording that it is covering. In some cases, these two modes of appreciation will offer distinct rewards. In other cases, one mode will be substantially more rewarding than the other. The details matter, especially in complicated cases like covers of covers, but neither mode is privileged in principle. (shrink)

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The issue of methodological solipsism in the philosophy of mind and psychology has received enormous attention and discussion in the decade since the appearance Jerry Fodor's "Methodological Solipsism" [Fodor 1980]. But most of this discussion has focused on the consideration of the now infamous "Twin Earth" type examples and the problems they present for Fodor's notion of "narrow content". I think there is deeper and more general moral to be found in this issue, particularly in light of Fodor's more recent (...) defense of his view in Psychosemantics [Fodor 1987]. Underlying this discussion are questions about the nature and plausibility of the claim that scientific explanation should observe a constraint of methodological individualism . My goal in what follows is to bring out this more general problem in Fodor's "internalist" account of the mental. (shrink)

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Cummins (1982) argues that etiological considerations are not onlyinsufficient butirrelevant for the determination offunction. I argue that his claim of irrelevance rests on a misrepresentation of the use of functions in evolutionary explanations. I go on to suggest how accepting anetiological constraint on functional analysis might help resolve some problems involving the use of functional explanations.

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In The Levels of Selection (Brandon, 1984), Robert Brandon provides a suggestive but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to use the probabilistic notion ofscreening off in providing a schema for dealing with an aspect of the units of selection question in the philosophy of biology. I characterize that failure, and suggest a revision and expansion of Brandon's account which addresses its key shortcoming.

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One approach to science treats science as a cognitive accomplishment of individuals and defines a scientific community as an aggregate of individual inquirers. Another treats science as a fundamentally collective endeavor and defines a scientist as a member of a scientific community. Distributed cognition has been offered as a framework that could be used to reconcile these two approaches. Adam Toon has recently asked if the cognitive and the social can be friends at last. He answers that they probably cannot, (...) posing objections to the would-be rapprochement. We clarify both the animosity and the tonic proposed to resolve it, ultimately arguing that worries raised by Toon and others are uncompelling. (shrink)

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The suggestion that cognition is holistic has become a prominent criticism of optimism about the prospects for cognitive science. This paper argues that the standard motivation for this holism, that of epistemological holism, does not justify this pessimism. An illustration is given of how the effects of epistemological holism on perception are compatible with the view that perceptual processes are highly modular. A suggestion for generalizing this idea to conceptual cognitive processing is made, and an account of the holists' failure (...) is offered. (shrink)

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...the problem of...how cognition...is possible at all...can never be answered on the basis of a prior knowledge of the transcendent [i.e. the external, spatio-temporal, empirical]...no matter whence the knowledge or the judgments are borrowed, not even if they are taken from the exact sciences.... It will not do to draw conclusions from existences of which one knows but which one cannot "see". "Seeing" does not lend itself to demonstration or deduction. [Husserl 1964a, pp. 2-3].

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Jaegwon Kim has recently argued that the widespread assumption of the multiple realizability of higher-level kinds -- and in particular, psychological kinds -- conflicts with some fundamental constraints on both materialistic metaphysics and scientific taxonomy. Kim concludes that the multiple realizability of psychological kinds would leave them "disqualified as proper scientific kinds" (Kim 1992: 18), and that search for a scientific psychology should focus instead on more reductive or type- materialist possibilities. If correct, this would strikingly undermine a widespread assumption (...) in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But it's not. (shrink)

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The idea that we have direct and infallible knowledge of appearances is still deeply entrenched; and even scholars who reject this idea often still presume that our normal awareness of the shape and size of objects includes awareness of something like the shape and size of the image it projects onto the retina. I show here how these ideas are undermined by some new empirical evidence regarding these features, as well as by some observations concerning the phenomenology of size, the (...) familiar moon illusion, and the persistence of illusions more generally. These considerations further suggest a path for dealing with the phenomenology of appearance more broadly. (shrink)

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WAIT A MINUTE, I have to turn off the TV. My son watched a half hour of "Salmon: A Dangerous Journey" on The Discovery Channel and 20 minutes of PBS's "Reading Rainbow" earlier today; I need to make sure he doesn't watch more than 10 minutes of "Sesame Street" now, lest he be put at risk for aggression in later years.

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Marr (for whom the boundary of the visual module the cognitive impenetrability of the systems of.

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Ideally, psychological and phenomenological studies of visual experience should be mutually informative. In that spirit, this article outlines parts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of visual experience as a kind of independently active opaque bodily synthesis, and uses those views to (a) help ground and extend Alva Noë's rejection of the “snapshot” theory of visual experience in favor of a more enactive view of visual content, (b) critique a failing of Noë's account, and (c) show how the assumptions underlying more (...) internalist and Cartesian views of visual experience can illegitimately creep in even when they are being carefully criticized. (shrink)

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Almost before the mourning, the search for the explanation begins. When a public disaster like Saturday's space shuttle crash takes place, it's our natural impulse to find out why - an impulse motivated largely by a desire to avoid such tragedies in the future and to learn from our mistakes. Was it tiles damaged at takeoff? The wrong angle at rollover? A fuel leak? Insufficient funding?

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the _algorithmic_, and the _implementational_; Zenon Pylyshyn (1984) calls them the _semantic_, the _syntactic_, and the _physical_; and textbooks in cognitive psychology sometimes call them the levels of _content_, _form_, and _medium_ (e.g. Glass, Holyoak, and Santa 1979).

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