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Philosophy of Mind A–Z Marina Rakova

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Philosophy of Mind A–Z

Marina RakovaEpistemology A–Z introduces undergraduate and post-graduate students in philosophy (and epistemology in particular) to the main problems and positions in epistemology. It shows where these problems and positions connect and wherethey part, thereby providing a valuable resource both for following connectionsbetween ideas and for appreciating the place of key figures and concepts in the subject.

The book includes entries on some of the most important historical and contemporary contributors to the field.And all the entries are cross-referenced so that each item is placed within the context of the wider debate, resulting in amulti-layered treatment of all of the main epistemological positions and figures.

Martijn Blaauw is Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at theUniversity of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published various papers in internationaljournals, and is the guest-editor of a special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studienon contextualism.

Duncan Pritchard is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, Scotland.His publications include Epistemic Luck (Oxford University Press, 2005), Moral andEpistemic Virtues (co-edited with M. S. Brady, Blackwell 2003), and Williamson onKnowledge (co-edited with P. Greenough, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh

Edinburgh University Press22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

www.eup.ed.ac.uk

ISBN 0 7486 2094 X

Martijn Blaauw and Duncan Pritchard

barcode

Edinb ur gh

Martijn

Bl aauw

&D

u nc anPritchard

PHILOSOPHY A–Z SERIESGENERAL EDITOR: OLIVER LEAMAN

These thorough, authoritative yet concise alphabetical guides introduce the central concepts of the various branches of philosophy.Written by established philosophers, they cover both traditional and contemporary terminology.

Features

• Dedicated coverage of particular topics within philosophy• Coverage of key terms and major figures• Cross-references to related terms.

Epistemology A–Z

Epistemology

A–Z

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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND A–Z

i

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Volumes available in the Philosophy A–Z Series

Christian Philosophy A–Z, Daniel J. Hill andRandal D. Rauser

Epistemology A–Z, Martijn Blaauw and Duncan PritchardEthics A–Z, Jonathan A. JacobsIndian Philosophy A–Z, Christopher BartleyJewish Philosophy A–Z, Aaron W. HughesPhilosophy of Religion A–Z, Patrick Quinn

Forthcoming volumes

Aesthetics A–Z, Fran GuterChinese Philosophy A–Z, Bo MouFeminist Philosophy A–Z, Nancy McHughIslamic Philosophy A–Z, Peter GroffPhilosophical Logic A–Z, J. C. BeallPhilosophy of Language A–Z, Alessandra TanesiniPhilosophy of Science A–Z, Stathis PsillosPolitical Philosophy A–Z, Jon Pike

ii

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Philosophy of Mind A–Z

Marina Rakova

Edinburgh University Press

iii

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In memory of Galina Alexeevna Makashova,teacher and friend

C© Marina Rakova, 2006

Edinburgh University Press Ltd22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabonby TechBooks, India, and printed and

bound in Great Britain by

A CIP record for this book isavailable from the British Library

ISBN-10 0 7486 2215 2 (hardback)ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2215 3 (hardback)

ISBN-10 0 7486 2095 8 (paperback)ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2095 1 (paperback)

The right of Marina Rakovato be identified as author of this workhas been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface viIntroduction viiiAcknowledgements xi

Philosophy of Mind A–Z 1

Bibliography 195

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Series Editor’s Preface

The philosophy of mind is one of those areas of philosophythat has a close connection with science. The precise natureof that connection is unclear, though, and we tend to thinkthat abstract issues in philosophy are independent of scien-tific developments and discoveries. Yet the progress that takesplace in the understanding of the nature of the mind on ascientific level clearly has an impact on the philosophical dis-cussion, not in the sense of coming down on one rather than onanother side of an argument, but because science continues toframe the arguments in different ways. The familiar problemssuch as how the body and the mind are connected, and whatis meant by consciousness, for example, are often now artic-ulated in terms of contemporary scientific understandings ofthe mind and action. The very modern issue of how far we cantalk of machines thinking is a good example of how the natureof the mind and what it means to be a thinking thing resonatesthrough the centuries to become particularly acute in an agethat is familiar with artificial intelligence. Almost all the majorphilosophers had something, usually a great deal, to say on thephilosophy of mind, and their positions have been briefly butaccurately outlined in this book. Philosophy of mind has to-day become one of the most difficult areas of philosophy witha technical vocabulary of its own, perhaps due to its links with

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii

the science of the mind, and Marina Rakova has done us alla service in providing a clear and comprehensive guide to theterminology.

Oliver Leaman

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Introduction

In one form or another, philosophy of mind has always been amajor area of philosophical inquiry, although it is only in thelast century, when the so-called mind–body problem began tobe tackled head on, that it achieved the spectacular promi-nence it continues to enjoy today. This special placement ofphilosophy of mind in our intellectual endeavours is not sur-prising: there invariably comes a point when understandingthe nature of the outer reality requires turning an inquiringeye to the nature of the mind. One could argue that this trendmarks all the major periods in the history of philosophy, butit will be sufficient to note how much it has resurfaced in re-cent years. Other disciplines within philosophy, such as epis-temology, metaphysics or ethics, are becoming more and moreclosely concerned with mental properties, and scientific pub-lications no longer shun the problem of consciousness or thatof the evolution of mentality as of merely speculative interest.

This makes it all the more difficult to outline the exactprovince of the philosophy of mind and select only those en-tries for inclusion in a dictionary that properly belong to it. Myapproach was to reflect in as much detail as possible the mainissues occupying today the community of mind and cognitionresearchers and provide the historical background essential forunderstanding them (like the unwaning influence of Descarteson modern thought or the present relevance of the medievalproblem of universals). However, I also judged it necessaryto go beyond what may be seen as properly philosophical

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INTRODUCTION ix

problem areas and include in this dictionary some crucial em-pirical terms and issues of which anyone interested in the phi-losophy of mind should be aware (such as the landmarks ofvision research, scientific explanations of consciousness or dis-cussions surrounding the neuron doctrine).

Overall, what I wanted to produce was the kind of dic-tionary that I would myself have enjoyed having at my sidewhen first making inroads into the philosophy of mind. ThusI have included here some high-currency phrases which oneinvariably comes across in the literature but which are oftenleft unexplained to the puzzlement of readers new to the area(for example, ‘Cartesian theatre’ or ‘exaptation’). However, Ithought it would be wrong to merely provide their definitionswithout placing them into the broad contexts where they maketheir appearance, which is why entries for such terms refer thereader for their explanation to other articles (for the examplesgiven these are, respectively, ‘self, the’ and ‘evolution’).

I also placed special emphasis on explaining the ambiguitypresent in some important and frequent terms (for example,‘representationalism’, ‘property dualism’ or even ‘functional-ism’). There is an opinion that such ambiguity is endemic tophilosophy. Be that as it may, it is certainly baffling to someonewho is new to the philosophy of mind. All such considerationsadded up to form the main principle behind the choice of en-tries for this dictionary: to help the student or any interestedlayperson to get a quick grasp of some unfamiliar territory andbecome ‘unbaffled’. Finally, as regards the structuring of theentries themselves, I made a special point of not only provid-ing their precise definitions and answering the question ‘whatit is’ but of also answering the question ‘why it matters’, whichis one of the first questions an inquisitive person asks whenconfronted with a new problem area.

I realise only too well that some readers are bound to ques-tion my choice of entries, either doubting the appropriate-ness of some of them in a philosophy of mind dictionary or

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x INTRODUCTION

lamenting the absence of their favourite thinkers. Making thefinal decision on what potential entries can be omitted, giventhe space limitations, was in itself a task of soul-tearing pro-portions, but that decision had to be made. I have stated heresome of the criteria that determined the ultimate selection ofentries for this dictionary and I hope that the reader will findthis volume helpful and easy to use.

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Acknowledgements

I most sincerely wish to thank:

The Series Editor, Oliver Leaman, for getting me involved inthis complicated but ultimately rewarding project. He cameup with the brilliant idea of producing these very timely andhandy philosophy guides, and I hope he will be pleased withwhat he is going to get.

The two anonymous reviewers for Edinburgh University Presswhose comments were most useful in making me recall thatphilosophy of mind is not confined to those particular areasof it that I am interested in myself. Unfortunately it provedimpossible to squeeze all their suggestions into this slim book.

Members of psyche-D e-mail discussion list (especiallyAndrew Brook, Steven Lehar, Eric Dietrich and MitchGunzler) for their clarifications and debates which migratedinto this volume in disguise. Michael Beaney, Elena Sviridovaand Natalia Dobreytina also helped me with various bits andpieces.

Andrew Brook, Timothy Williamson and James R. Hurfordfor kindly reading some of my entries for me and letting meknow whenever something struck them as strange, impreciseor downright wrong. And, of course, their comments in them-selves were a pleasure to read.

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xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Everyone else whose ideas I might have stolen without ex-plicitly acknowledging the fact. I would certainly have doneso if I had had another ten thousand words of elbow roomto manoeuvre in. As a model of a reader-friendly dictionary Iused Simon Blackburn’s The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy(Oxford University Press, 1996).

All the students I have ever taught and who have taught methat things have to be both clear and informative, and thatthis is the only way.

Andrew M. Tune for reducing my teaching load a little whileI was writing this.

Carol Macdonald from Edinburgh University Press for deli-cately taking control over my poor time management skillsand getting this volume into production, and Peter Williamsfor kindly attending to my last minute whims and making surethey find their way into the final version of the text.

My father Boris Rakov and my brother Dmitry Rakov fortheir emotional and technical support.

My partner Denis Gladkov, my dearest and strictest critic, whonever failed to let me know if something was unclear to him. Ifhe had not been around for me to lean on his shoulder, whichhe patiently bore, I would never have completed this book.Now that it is over, I hope he will be able to get some life.

And of course we both thank our cat Kosha for providingme with inspiration. Cats are very philosophical animals. Itis a pity, though, that they do not think much of our, that ishumans’, kind of minds.

Marina Rakova

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Philosophy of Mind A–Z

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A

Abduction: the notion introduced by Peirce to classify syllo-gisms of the type: (1) As are Bs; (2) Cs are Bs; (3) therefore,Cs are As. Although this form of reasoning is formallyfallacious, Peirce viewed it as pertaining to scientific dis-covery. Abductive reasoning is also characteristic of oureveryday reasoning as inference to the best explanationon the basis of limited evidence. Being non-algorithmic,which is not easily formalisable through the applicationof a set of rules, sensitive to context and one’s overallknowledge, it presents problems for the computationaltheory of mind.

Ability Hypothesis see Knowledge-how

Absent Qualia: an argument against functionalism originatedby Ned Block. If there can be a system identical to humansin functional organisation but lacking subjective experi-ence, then the nature of qualia is not functional. TheChina-body system (‘Chinese nation’, ‘Chinese gym’),where a billion people send radio commands to each otherand an artificial body realising your functional organisa-tion, is one such example. A possible response is that

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4 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND A–Z

it is logically impossible for a state without phenomenalcharacter to be functionally identical to a state possessingsuch character (they will differ with respect to phenome-nal beliefs they give rise to).

Access Consciousness (a-consciousness): a kind of conscious-ness distinguished by Ned Block from phenomenalconsciousness (p-consciousness) or experience. A repre-sentation is a-conscious if it is available for free use inreasoning and rational control of behaviour (includingverbal reports). The distinction is motivated by the needto accommodate consciousness within the computationaltheory of mind. Thus, a-consciousness is a functionalor information-processing correlate of p-consciousness(which requires a biological solution). To show that theyare distinct kinds Block considers cases where they comeapart. P-consciousness without a-consciousness is presentwhen, for example, involved in a conversation you keepraising your voice without realising that you do so be-cause of some loud noise outside: you are p-conscious,but not a-conscious of the noise. And an example ofa-consciousness without p-consciousness would be ob-tained if blindsight subjects could prompt themselves toidentify objects presented to them. A-consciousness with-out p-consciousness is characteristic of zombies, and toavoid their possibility Block admits that a-consciousnessmust be parasitic on p-consciousness. Block’s approach,shared by several philosophers, is called the bifurcatedview: it considers phenomenal states as functional butalso defends realism about qualia.

Further reading: Block (1995a)

Accidental Property (contingent property): a property whichan individual or kind could have failed to have without

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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND A–Z 5

ceasing to be what it essentially is (for example, ‘being astudent’).

Acquaintance see Russell, Bertrand

Action: that which an agent does rather than a mere physicalrearrangement of one’s body parts. Actions are carriedout with certain intentions, and this links the notions ofaction and agency to those of rationality and intentional-ity. According to the causal theory of action, associatedwith Hume but already found in Aristotle, intentional ac-tion needs desire to provide goals and belief as a meansof potentially achieving them. However, there arises theproblem of mental causation (reasons and causes): itseems that as we act for reasons, action must be explainedin terms of reasons, which is not a kind of causal expla-nation. This approach, characteristic of Wittgensteineantheories of action such as Anscombe’s, was questionedby Davidson who argued that reasons must have physi-cal bases, and thus be efficacious in causing action (forotherwise one should not think of them as reasons atall). But if one holds that an action must be explainedin terms of its immediate cause, one may miss importantgeneralisations. This is the idea of basic action: althoughone phones one’s parents by dialling their number anddoes that by hitting buttons on the telephone and so on,all the subsequent descriptions seem inadequate to ex-plain one’s action (the problem of action individuation).A similar point was made by Christopher Peacocke andTimothy Williamson against those versions of internalismwhich view actions as bodily movements caused by inter-nal states individuated without reference to the agent’s en-vironment. Intentional states guiding even such simple ac-tions as crossing a road cannot be factorised into internal

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and external components because many actions involvedeliberation (are not instantaneous) and require constantfeedback from the environment. The notion of action wasalso recently employed to question the classical notion ofmental representation (see embedded cognition).

Further reading: Davidson (1980); Mele (1997)

Adaptation: a characteristic of an organism which arosethrough evolution by natural selection.

Adaptationism (Neo-Darwinism): the view that natural se-lection is the main driving force of evolution. However,the term is often reserved for the controversial view thatmost characteristics of organisms are adaptations that en-hance organisms’ survival and can be explained in termsof genes’ tendency to proliferation. For this reason, adap-tationist explanations are sometimes pejoratively labelled‘just so stories’ and ‘the Panglossian paradigm’, evok-ing, respectively, Rudyard Kipling’s children’s stories andVoltaire’s Dr Pangloss (Candide) who believed that oursis the best of all possible worlds. Adaptationism is par-ticularly controversial as an explanation of the evolutionof human cognition in that it commits the teleologicalfallacy of holding that every psychological feature is anoptimal solution to some design problem posed by anorganism’s environment, and tends to assume step-by-step continuity between features of increasing complex-ity (evolutionary psychology). The teleological theory ofcontent explores the role of natural selection in establish-ing representational content of intentional states (beliefs,desires). Dennett, who holds that the intentional stanceapplies to organisms only when they reach a certain levelof complexity, argues that all intentionality can be derivedfrom the intentionality of natural selection (the notion of‘selection for’). But this view is problematic because it

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imbues natural selection with sensitivity to intensionaldistinctions and the capacity to be directed toward non-existent entities, which cannot be properties of naturalselection understood as a purely physical phenomenon.

Further reading: Dennett (1995)

Adverbialism: a theory of perception (primarily vision) whichappeared in the mid-1940s as a reaction against the sense-datum theory. It holds that there are only modificationsof our experience which, to avoid the error of reification(positing sense-data), should be described with the help ofadverbial modifiers, saying, for example, that one is ap-peared to green-squarely instead of saying that one seesa green square. However, such descriptions are problem-atic for more complex visual scenes, and the nature ofmodified states cannot be understood without referenceto objects of experience. Today, adverbialism is popularamong proponents of subjectivism about colour becauseit allows one to say that mental colours are identical withor supervenient on neural states while avoiding commit-ment to mental objects. Adverbial analyses are also ap-plied to propositional attitudes to avoid commitment topropositions as peculiar objects in one’s ontology.

Further reading: Chisholm (1957); Tye (1989)

Affordance see Direct Perception

Agency: being in control of or responsible for one’s actions.

Analytic Functionalism (conceptual, common-sense, causalrole functionalism): the variety of functionalism whichstems from Lewis’s analysis of psychological terms. Un-like machine functionalism, analytic functionalism sup-ports type physicalism holding that a mental state can beanalysed into a role state (its role in the explanation of

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behaviour) and a realiser state (the underlying physicalstate which accounts for its causal properties). Analyticfunctionalists also accept Lewis’s approach to mental rep-resentation inspired by Ramsey’s view of beliefs as ‘mapsby which we steer’. It opposes the language of thought hy-pothesis by holding that mental representation is like rep-resentation in geographical maps: structured, systematic,containing a finite amount of information, but continu-ous. This follows from the holism of the mental: becausebeliefs and desires are attributed to subjects en masse onthe basis of their behavioural dispositions and consider-ations of rationality, the whole system of beliefs is thefundamental unit of content, and the content of individ-ual beliefs can be stated only approximately. However, itis not clear whether representation in maps is non-discreteand whether the approach can meet the compositional-ity constraint. Besides, it needs to address the problemsof content holism, indeterminacy and belief under entail-ment.

Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)

Ancient Philosophy (approximately 600 bc – ad 400): emer-ging as an inquiry about the natural world, pre-Socraticphilosophy tied the question of what distinguishes ap-pearance from reality (ontology) to that of the natureof knowledge. Thus Parmenides of Elea (c.510–451 bc)held that true Being is unchanging and can be graspedonly by reason, concluding that sensible appearances donot exist. In Athens, Anaxagoras (c.500–428 bc) resolvedParmenides’ puzzle about the impossibility of change byviewing matter as a flow of qualities rather than some ex-tended stuff supporting them and originated the concep-tion of cosmic Nous (reason, intellect) which sets matterin motion and of which humans have the largest share(arguably the first version of dualism). Democritus ofAbdera (c.460–370 bc) first raised the question about the

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relationship between sense-perception and reason, con-cluding that only reason can deliver knowledge of theessence of reality. He was also the first defender of ma-terialism, holding that, like everything else, human psy-che is made of atom combinations (psyche, translated as‘soul’, did not mean ‘the conscious self ’ but rather ‘life-principle’, necessary but not sufficient for consciousnessand thought). Plato and Aristotle then defined the sub-sequent development of much Western philosophy. Ofinterest are also the three schools that appeared afterAristotle’s death: Stoicism with its theory of phantasiakataleptike (apprehensive perception delivering knowl-edge of reality) and the first cognitive theory of emotions(Chrysippus, c.280–207 bc), Epicureanism with its com-bination of atomism and subjectivism about secondaryqualities like colour, and Scepticism.

Further reading: Annas (1992)

Animal Cognition: the way non-human animals process in-formation about their natural environments studied bycognitive ethology. Interest in animal cognition has al-ways been marked by the dichotomy of continuity anddiscontinuity in cognitive capacities of human and non-human animals and the search for distinguishing humancharacteristics (such as possession of reason according toAristotle or Kant). Many recent discussions were markedby differing stands on the Cartesian view of animals asautomata to whom the ascription of minds or conscious-ness is unnecessary. Because animals exhibit no flexibil-ity in response to novel situations, voluntary action orcreative use of language, Descartes thought that their be-haviour can be given a purely mechanistic explanation.This view is especially pronounced in a common equa-tion of thought with language possession which provokedmany investigations aiming to prove that linguistic capac-ities of non-human animals are continuous with those of

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humans. Such studies often explicitly opposed Chomsky’sviews on the uniqueness of the human faculty of language(FL), but more recently, in collaboration with cognitiveethologists, Chomsky proposed that FL characterised byrecursive syntax has a predecessor in ‘the faculty of lan-guage in the broad sense’ which includes a conceptual-intentional system and the computational mechanisms ofrecursion evolved for dealing with navigation and socialrelations. Recognising our continuity with non-humananimals provides new perspectives on the problems ofrepresentation (their capacity to correct perceptual er-rors), orders of intentionality (theory of mind), phenom-enal consciousness in its relation with intentionality (thusmultimodal integration is present in mammals but is ab-sent in the reptilian line) and self-consciousness.

Further reading: Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1998);Hauser et al. (2002)

Animalism see Personal identity

Anomalous Monism: the position advocated by Davidsonthat although all events are physical events (hence mon-ism), mental properties cannot be identified with physicalproperties. To allow for mental causation Davidson ac-cepts the identity of mental events with physical events(causal relations exist only between events that enterinto causal laws) and the dependence (supervenience) ofthe mental on the physical. However, he holds that thereare no strict laws to connect mental and physical events.The ascription of mental states to a person is holistic (awhole bunch of mental states must be ascribed to some-one in order to explain a piece of their behaviour) andguided by considerations of normativity and rationality.And although an event may have a physical and a men-tal description, because of the radically different naturesof our mental and physical predicates (holistic versus

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discrete) it is a priori impossible to formulate laws con-necting them. Mental concepts are ‘unsuited’ to laws, andonly ontological but not conceptual reduction is possible.Davidson was charged with epiphenomenalism becausehaving a mental description does not seem to affect thecausal powers of an event. His reply was that for causalpowers, unlike for laws, the nature of descriptions is ir-relevant, but it remains unclear whether this explains thecausal efficacy of the mental qua mental.

Further reading: Davidson (1970)

Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1919–2001): British philoso-pher, an authority on Wittgenstein. Anscombe anticipatedmany current ideas about action, intentionality and per-ception. She also criticised the Cartesian way of think-ing about the first-person pronoun as referring to the im-mutable self.

Further reading: Anscombe (1957)

Apperception see Self-consciousness

Aquinas, St Thomas (1225–74): Dominican theologian andphilosopher. Aquinas sought to reconcile faith and reasonthrough Aristotle’s solution to the problem of universals.From him Brentano got the notion of intentionality as ‘in-existence’: a cloud you saw a few minutes ago may notexist any more, but you can have it in your mind becauseyou have the concept (intentio) of cloud. Aquinas alsodeveloped Aristotle’s views on the soul, holding that be-ing a person requires the unity of the soul with the body,because otherwise the images on which personal mem-ory depends would be lost. He defended genuine humanagency against Augustinianism and occasionalism, anddenied privileged access holding that knowledge of ourown mental states is the result of abstraction.

Further reading: Aquinas (2001)

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Aristotle (the Philosopher, 384–322 bc): Ancient Greekphilosopher, the creator of logic and most scientific divi-sions. Aristotle rejected Plato’s forms (universals) as exist-ing outside things by adopting Plato’s own argument thatif one takes a set of two particulars sharing the form, onethen gets a set consisting of the two particulars and theform, and must find a further form unifying them, whichleads to infinite regress (‘the third man argument’). Heproposed instead that universals exist in things, whichaccords with his analysis of substance as that which per-sists through change in its accidents (accidental proper-ties). However, for Aristotle, a substance is both matterand form: thus, a wax stamp is only that when matter isgiven a particular form. Similarly, a human being cannotbe divided into the soul and the body, because the soulis the body’s form. As for Aristotle knowledge requiressome similarity between the knower and the knowable,corporeal beings must begin with sense perception. Butthe highest part of the soul, the intellect, is immortaland immaterial because otherwise it could not contem-plate all the forms abstracted from perception. This fitswell with Aristotle’s four-dimensional analysis of causal-ity (and hence, an individual’s or kind’s identity) into ma-terial, formal, efficient (the agency effecting the result)and final (the telos or purpose for which something ex-ists) causes, which is the first formulation of functionalismand teleological explanation. Aristotle’s practical syllo-gism (the rule for acting on the basis of beliefs and desires)similarly anticipates the representational theory of mind.

Further reading: Aristotle (1984)

Armstrong, David M. (b.1926): Australian philosopher, oneof the originators of the causal theory of mind. Extend-ing Place’s identity theory to beliefs and desires, he calledhis theory Central State Materialism because science finds

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causes of behaviour in the states of central nervous sys-tems. He defended scientific realism about universals anddirect realism about perception, and developed a higher-order theory of consciousness. His sympathies are stillwith reductive physicalism and he believes it a matter ofscientific investigation to explain the deducibility of men-tal properties from physical properties.

Further reading: Armstrong (1968)

Artificial Intelligence (AI): the branch of computer scienceconcerned with designing machines that could performtasks which require intelligence from humans and thatcould accomplish them in less time and with greater re-liability. Stemming from Turing’s insights, the field wasshaped by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newelland Herbert Simon. Following Searle one can distinguishbetween strong and weak AI. Strong AI holds that theright sort of computer program can literally do whathuman minds do, whereas weak AI only aims to developcomputational models simulating human cognitive abil-ities. The status of strong AI remains controversial, butrecent interest in consciousness and embodiment led tothe extension of AI’s traditional concerns towards aware-ness, emotions and imagination. The term AI (GOFAI) issometimes used more narrowly to refer to the computa-tional theory of mind as opposed to connectionism.

Aspectual Shape see Searle, John R.

Associationism (associationist psychology): the first empiricalpsychological theory anticipated by Aristotle and devel-oped by Locke, Hume, David Hartley (1705–57), bothMills and Alexander Bain (1818–1903). Associationismaimed to discover general principles of thought in laws ofassociation between ideas, which were identified as the

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laws of contiguity, similarity and contrast. Thus sensoryimpressions occurring together or in immediate succes-sion (like the furriness, four-leggedness and barking ofdogs) get associated and, because the mind operates bysumming or subtracting images, thinking of furry crea-tures causes one to think of them as four-legged. Associ-ation laws were also studied by introspective psychologyand, though not as laws of thought, by methodologicalbehaviourism which supplanted associationism. Viewingcognitive processes in terms of causal interactions be-tween ideas, associationism anticipated the computa-tional theory of mind. Its analysis of ideas in terms offeature combinations is still central to the prototype the-ory of concepts. Its tenet that thinking reduces to gener-alisation from experience was resurrected by connection-ism (after the discovery of the nerve cell in the 1890s,neural networks were contemplated by James and Freudas a biological vindication of associationism). However,as Kant and, later, Chomsky emphasised, thinking can-not be merely putting ideas into sequences but requiresorganising principles sensitive to hierarchical constituentstructure.

See also: Pinker (2002)

Asymmetric Dependence: a version of the informational the-ory of content proposed by Fodor which tackles thedisjunction problem without appeal to special types ofsituations. Asymmetric dependence is a metaphysicallybasic content-constituting condition formulated in termsof law-governed relations among properties. Thus cat

means cat and not cat or dog because the law connectingthe property of being a dog and the property of beinga cause of cat tokenings asymmetrically depends on thelaw connecting the property of being a cat and the prop-erty of being a cause of cat tokenings, so that if the law

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‘cat → cause of cat’ did not hold, the law ‘dog → causeof cat’ would not hold either, but if the law ‘dog → causeof cat’ did not hold, the law ‘cat → cause of cat’ wouldhold anyway. To deal with Twin-Earth cases, the thirdcondition states that some tokenings of a mental repre-sentation R must be actually caused by Rs.

Further reading: Fodor (1987)

Atomism: the view that the content of a concept does notdepend on its relations with other concepts (see informa-tional atomism).

Austin, John L. (1911–60): British linguistic philosopher, theoriginator of speech act theory. Austin’s attack on theargument from illusion, whose soundness he questionedarguing that there are phenomenal differences betweengenuine perception and hallucination, made Place rejectthe sense-datum theory.

Further reading: Austin (1962)

Autism: a psychological disorder characterised by social with-drawal and severe communication difficulties; possiblyan impairment of the theory of mind module (at the neu-ral level it involves reduced cerebral flow and decreasedmetabolism of the prefrontal region).

Autonomy of Psychology see Special Sciences

B

Background, The: the notion introduced by Searle to des-ignate a set of abilities, skills, dispositions and presup-positions which, being non-intentional, are necessary to

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‘ground’ intentional states. It is not enough to analyse abelief together with other beliefs as does functionalism,because this analysis has to stop somewhere. For Searle,it stops at the simple ability to act in the world.

Further reading: Searle (1983)

Behaviourism: the view that possession of mental statesshould be identified with observable behaviour or be-havioural dispositions: to be in a mental state (for ex-ample, to think that there is a tree in front of one) is tobe disposed to behave in a certain way. The central thesisof methodological and logical behaviourism is the denialof internal representational states mediating behaviour.

Belief Box see Language of Thought

Belief-Desire Psychology see Folk Psychology

Berkeley, George (1685–1753): Irish philosopher, the origi-nator of subjective idealism. If one separates the mindfrom matter (as does Cartesian substance dualism), thenit becomes difficult to understand how the mind could ac-quire knowledge of the material world through percep-tion. Representationalism confuses rather than clarifiesmatters: if what one knows is only an idea, one can neverbe sure that there is anything in the world correspondingto it, for the only way one could try to find that out is byforming another idea. Thus representationalism leads toscepticism, which Berkeley rejected. Instead, entertainingthe possibility of total illusion and reintroducing the con-tact between mind and body through a direct perceptionthesis (we directly perceive what really exists), he con-cluded that everything exists in the mind only, that thereis no material substance. To be is to be perceived (esseest percipi). This was established by Berkeley’s master

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argument: one cannot conceive of a tree which is uncon-ceived, what is conceived is in the mind, therefore there isnothing existing outside the mind. The world given to usin experience is the world of connections between partic-ular ideas in their relation to their archetypes in the mindof God who created the world of ordinary objects insidethe mental realm. (Note that Berkeley’s brand of empiri-cism denies the existence of general ideas other than merecommonalities in naming.) Although subsequent philoso-phers were not convinced by Berkeley’s argument feelingthat it is a verbal trick, he raised important issues aboutthe extent to which one can trust common sense.

Further reading: Berkeley (1975)

Binding Problem: the problem of explaining how informa-tion processed by different subsystems is integrated intounified perceptual representations within the same andacross different sensory modalities. Thus representationsof colour, shape, motion, etc. produced in different areasof visual cortex are integrated to give rise to visual expe-riences of distinct objects simultaneously having all suchproperties (temporal binding).

Biological Naturalism see Searle, John R.

Blindsight: the condition (cortical blindness resulting fromthe destruction of primary visual cortex) in which sub-jects have no experience of an object presented to theirblind field (scotoma) and are incapable of identifying it. InBlock’s terms, they lack both phenomenal and access con-sciousness. However, they retain the ability to locate ‘un-seen’ objects and discriminate between them if promptedto guess from a small number of alternatives. ‘Affectiveblindsight’ is the term for subjects’ ability to discriminate

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emotional facial expressions presented to their blind fieldsin the absence of phenomenal visual awareness.

Brain: the part of the central nervous system contained in theskull. Many philosophy of mind issues involve referenceto the brain’s organisation and cognitive functioning, butthe most pressing one is the mind–body problem. Thebelief that the mind and the brain are intimately con-nected gives rise to the locution ‘the mind/ brain’ (pop-ularised by Chomsky). But the locution itself can be un-derstood in several ways – is the mind that which thebrain does? is the mind realised by the brain? is the mindthe same as the brain? Another issue concerns the generaldebate in cognitive science surrounding the notions ofrepresentation and computation and, by extension, theirapplication to the brain’s functioning. In neuroscience,this is the issue surrounding the generally accepted neu-ron doctrine, the view that neurons are the brain’s maincomputational-representational units. Some researchersargue that it ignores the importance of structures in-ternal to the cell body (the cytoskeleton; simple but ar-guably cognitive functions can be performed by single-cellparamecia), the existence of extensive intra-dendritic in-formation processing and non-synaptic dendro-dendriticcommunication, and the involvement of larger brain unitsin cognitive functions.

Further reading: Bear et al. (2001)

Brains in Vats (brain-in-a-bottle): a thought experiment infavour of internalism (and also indirect representational-ism) intended to show that a brain put in a vat and elec-trically stimulated (or, in more recent versions, existing invirtual reality) will have a full mental life of thoughts andexperiences while not receiving any input from the envi-ronment. The scepticism engendered by the experiment

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exploits our intuitions about the contingent character ofmind–world relations.

Further reading: Putnam (1981)

Brentano, Franz (1838–1917): German philosopher who laidthe foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind byreintroducing the notion of intentionality or the mind’s‘direction toward an object’. Today, any theory of in-tentionality must address Brentano’s problem: how canmental states be about things? (Brentano’s thesis is theview that intentional states are not reducible to physicalstates.) Brentano’s own notion of intentionality, however,was importantly different from ours: for him, it was aproperty of phenomenally conscious mental acts which,apart from being directed to objects, are always directedto themselves as secondary objects.

Further reading: Brentano [1874] (1973)

Bridge Laws see Nagelian Reduction

Broad, C. D. see Emergentism

Broad Content (wide content): that content of intentionalstates (beliefs, desires, etc.) which constitutively dependson the external environment in which individuals hav-ing these states are embedded. Broadness is a property ofmany non-psychological states: whether a mark on theskin is a mosquito bite depends on there being a causal-historical connection between it and some mosquito (andnot an evil person inflicting mosquito-bite imitations onpeople). In his Twin-Earth argument Putnam showed thatthoughts about natural kinds have broad content (naturalkind externalism). Tyler Burge extended Putnam’s essen-tialism to all kinds of thoughts that depend on individ-uals’ social environment (social externalism). In Burge’s

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thought experiment, a person, say Alf, suffers from arthri-tis and has several correct thoughts about his ailment (thathe has suffered from arthritis for years, that certain achesare characteristic of arthritis, and so on). One day he de-cides that he also has arthritis in his thigh, but later learnsfrom his doctor that he was mistaken because arthritis isan inflammation of joints. However, in a different pos-sible world where doctors use the word ‘arthritis’ differ-ently, Alf would have been right. Burge concludes thatthe content of Alf’s concept arthritis depends on thelinguistic practice of his community (it is a deferentialconcept for him). Proponents of internalism object thatthis interpretation unjustly ascribes to Alf (at least be-fore he saw the doctor) two contradictory thoughts thatarthritis is and is not an inflammation of joints. Thushis concept cannot be the same as the experts’, and tomake sense of Alf’s beliefs we need to know their narrowcontent.

Further reading: Burge (1979)

Bundle Theory see Self, The

C

C Fibres see Pain

Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970): German philosopher of logi-cal positivism. Beginning with phenomenalism, Carnaplater questioned the priority of experience and workedon the unity of science. Aiming towards philosophicalclarification of scientific language, he distinguished be-tween material and formal modes of speech and, in laterwork, between questions internal and external to certain

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linguistic frameworks. (Note the difference between ask-ing whether someone is experiencing a blue after-imageand asking whether there are sense-data.) He anticipatedthe identity theory (suggesting it as a linguistic recommen-dation) and the language of thought hypothesis (thoughhe viewed propositional attitudes as relations to naturallanguage sentences). He also anticipated atomism, sug-gesting that conceptual relations can be analysed in termsof meaning postulates: x is a bachelor → x is not married.Whereas for Carnap this was an analysis of analyticityin terms of consequences arising from linguistic conven-tions, it shows how concepts can be related in thoughtwithout being contained in one another.

Further reading: Carnap (1947)

Cartesian: relating to Descartes’ philosophy.

Cartesian Theatre see Self, The

Cartesianism see Rationalism

Categorisation: the way organisms arrange stimuli into cat-egories. Cognitive psychology uses two main tasks inthe study of categorisation: category identification (whensubjects are asked to identify the category to which anobject belongs, for example say whether penguins arebirds) and category production (when subjects are askedto name the attributes of some object or decide whetheran object has a certain attribute).

Category Mistake: the mistake one makes in thinking thatfacts from different logical categories belong to the samecategory. Such a mistake would be made by someonewho, after being shown all colleges, libraries, playingfields, scientific departments and administrative offices of

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Oxford University, would insist that they have not seenthe university. Ryle argues that Cartesian substance dual-ism makes the same mistake of positing a spurious extramember.

Causal Closure of the Physical: the principle, adhered to in sci-entific explanation, that every event has a physical cause,that the physical world is ‘closed under causation’.

Causal Exclusion Principle: the principle, formulated by Kimand evidently supported by scientific practice, that noevent can have two independent causes.

Causal Inheritance Principle: the principle, formulated byKim, that a higher-order property has no causal pow-ers other than those of its physical realiser on any givenoccasion.

Causal Laws: although the correct understanding of causa-tion is open to debate, one generally accepted principle iscausal uniformity, the view that nature remains uniformthrough its past, present and future states and that itslaws are causal laws: unfailingly obtainable regularitiesbetween similar events and their effects. Fodor arguesthat a proper understanding of causal laws favoursnon-reductive physicalism. Basic sciences operate withstrict laws: when p → q (read as ‘if p, then q’) is a strictlaw, the satisfaction of its antecedent necessitates thesatisfaction of its consequent. Laws of special sciences,including psychological or intentional laws, are notstrict: they obtain only when certain ceteris paribusclauses are satisfied as well (they have the form ‘if p, thenq all else being equal’). This may lead to the view (presentin anomalous monism and counterfactual causationtheories) that mental events must be subsumed by basic

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physical laws. However, Fodor argues, science can alsooperate with ceteris paribus laws, uncovering nature’sregularities at higher levels of description. And if onecan formulate (non-strict) causal laws about individualsin virtue of their possessing some property, this propertymust be seen as causally responsible for bringing aboutcertain outcomes. Falling under the laws of folk psychol-ogy, intentional mental properties can be true causes ofbehaviour. Non-strict laws differ from strict ones notbecause they have exceptions, but because they requiremechanisms of implementation at a more basic level. ForFodor, intentional laws have computational mechanismsof implementation, which is another reason to doubt theirreducibility and the existence of psychophysical laws.

Further reading: Fodor (1989)

Causal Theory of Content see Informational Theory ofContent

Causal Theory of Mind (causal role materialism): a species ofthe identity theory developed independently in the 1960sby David Armstrong, Brian Medlin and David Lewis. Itstresses the role of the notion of causality in the expla-nation of mental states: a mental state is a state that iscaused by certain external stimuli or other mental statesand that, together with other mental states, causes be-haviour. The causal role played by mental states allowsfor their identification with brain states, and the exact na-ture of identities must be established by empirical science.

Causal Theory of Reference (meaning): the view originated byKripke that (at least some) words refer directly to objectsin virtue of a causal relation that holds between them.Opposing Frege’s distinction between sense and refer-ence and Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, Kripke

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argued that the meaning of a proper name is its refer-ence (anticipated by J. S. Mill). If one considers modalcontexts, one can see that proper names and coreferen-tial with them definite descriptions do not have the samemeaning: although in our world Aristotle was the teacherof Alexander the Great, in a different historical scenariohe might not have taught Alexander, but he would haveremained the same individual (the modal argument). Be-sides, we learn that Aristotle was the teacher of Alexanderfrom studying history, but this knowledge would haveto be a priori if the name and the description had thesame meaning (the epistemological argument), and peo-ple manage to refer to the same individuals even if theyknow little about them or associate with them differentdescriptions (the transcendental or semantic argument).Distinguishing between contingent or accidental proper-ties of individuals and their essential properties, Kripkeargued that names are rigid designators (they pick out thesame individuals in all possible worlds). A name becomesattached to an individual in an act of linguistic baptismand knowledge of its reference spreads among speakersdown a causal chain. The view was extended by Kripkeand Putnam (Twin Earth, essentialism) to natural kindterms, leading to the emergence of externalism and theinformational theory of content.

Further reading: Kripke (1980)

Central State Materialism see Armstrong, David M.

Ceteris Paribus Laws see Causal Laws

Character see Personality

Chauvinism: any approach to the mind which entails thatonly humans have certain mental features may be accused

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of chauvinism. But its opposite, liberalism, may be ac-cused of assigning mental characteristics too freely.

Cheater Detection Module see Wason Selection Task

Chinese Room: John Searle’s argument against strong arti-ficial intelligence, functionalism and the computationaltheory of mind. Taking as an example Roger Schank’sprogram which simulated human understanding of sto-ries by producing correct answers to questions withina given scenario (for example, concluding that a manwho was served a burned hamburger in a restaurant andleft without paying had not eaten it), Searle argues thatthinking cannot be computation because computer pro-grams are not capable of understanding. Programs haveonly syntactic properties (they manipulate formal sym-bols), whereas minds also have content or semantics.Thus Searle imagines himself locked in a room with alot of Chinese symbols and instructions in English whichtell him what strings of symbols to hand back in responseto what other strings of symbols that he is given througha window. He further imagines that he performs the taskso well that he passes the Turing test for understandingChinese, even though he has no knowledge of the lan-guage. In this thought-experiment Searle implements aprogram for understanding Chinese, but there is no un-derstanding on his part. Hence, syntax is not sufficient forsemantics. Critics reply that: (1) understanding is pro-duced by a larger physical or virtual system of whichSearle is only a part (situated at the level of the imple-menter, but not the implemented); (2) adding a roboticbody with sensorimotor capacities or a detailed simula-tion of brain operations would endow the system withgenuine understanding; (3) Searle confuses manipulatingformal (unintepreted) symbols with performing formal

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operations on symbols (the issue of syntax is separatefrom that of semantics); (4) Searle speculates on our in-tuitions because we do not know how to define under-standing in the case of systems different from ourselvesin size and speed of processing.

Further reading: Searle (1980); Preston and Bishop(2002)

Chomsky, Noam A. (b.1928): American linguist, the initiatorof the ‘cognitive revolution’. Chomsky’s poverty of stim-ulus argument and considerations regarding the produc-tivity of language use led him to argue for the existence ofthe language faculty, a system of universal recursive rulesof grammar innate in the human brain (universal gram-mar). Although Chomsky’s syntactic theory has seen sev-eral changes since the 1960s (his recent minimalism pos-tulates minimal representations and views the languageacquisition device (LAD) as constrained by articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional systems), his argu-mentation had a major impact on the resurrection ofrationalism about cognitive capacities which can beviewed as part of our genetically determined biologicalendowment. Chomsky’s views on linguistic competenceas a body of innate domain-specific knowledge inaccessi-ble to consciousness led to the development of psycholog-ical theories of tacit knowledge and gave rise to the notionof Chomskian modularity (‘Chomskian modules’ are notcomputational modules). But Chomsky is also sceptical ofmany problems in philosophy of mind: thus he thinks thatintentionality cannot be part of a naturalistic inquiry intolanguage and that the notion of broad content is mean-ingless because it plays no role in experimental theoryconstruction. As he puts it, there are problems that canbe solved by science and mysteries that cannot.

Further reading: Chomsky (2000)

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Classical Theory of Concepts see Definitional Theory

Cognition: the way organisms acquire, store and use knowl-edge or information. Cognition encompasses perception,attention, object and pattern recognition, memory, learn-ing, language processing, thinking, reasoning, planning,problem-solving and decision-making. The cognitive rev-olution of the mid-twentieth century was characterisedby the increasing understanding that in their everydaybehaviour organisms do not simply attend to immediateneeds but try to find out about the world, to obtain infor-mation that may be relevant to future behaviour. Becauseorganisms can only act out of what they represent andbecause the best known explanation of intelligent knowl-edge manipulation is computational, the notions of repre-sentation and computation are central to understandingthe cognitive mind. However, the emphasis of classicalcognitive science on the representational-computationalexplanation is questioned by those researchers who holdthat it ignores our embodiment, our interaction with ourphysical and social environments (embedded cognition),the appetitive (bodily desires) and affective (emotions)sides of our mental life, and, finally, consciousness.

Cognitive: relating to cognition.

Cognitive Architecture: the mind’s/brain’s computational arc-hitecture, that is its internal organisation specified interms of how it encodes and stores information, the op-erations it can carry out and the constraints (like limitedmemory) that govern its use of available resources. Toexplain how the mind works is to explain the relationbetween its architecture and the information it makes useof. That is, one must address the question of whetheran observed regularity or behavioural pattern is due to

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the mind’s internal organisation or to what is known bythe organism. The two main accounts of cognitive archi-tecture are the computational theory of mind and con-nectionism (sometimes dynamical systems theory is alsoadded to them). The cognitive architecture debate is in-tertwined with debates about innateness versus learning(rationalism versus empiricism) and modularity versusdomain-generality, but the issues involved are conceptu-ally distinct and should not be confused.

Cognitive Closure: Colin McGinn’s term for the view thatthere are problems which we (although, possibly, not be-ings with a radically different type of mind) will neverbe able to solve because we lack the ability to formadequate concepts. Thus a physicalistic explanation of(phenomenal) consciousness is cognitively closed for usbecause the scientific concepts we are capable of formingare inherently spatial in nature but our concepts of con-sciousness, formed via introspection, are not.

Further reading: McGinn (1989)

Cognitive Dissonance: absence of consistency in one’s beliefsystem. According to Leon Festinger who introduced theterm (1957, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance) people tendto reduce dissonance by making suitable adjustments totheir beliefs. Thus a person may rationalise their drink-driving by doubting the evidence about the disruptive ef-fects of alcohol.

Cognitive Ethology: the study of animal cognition and be-haviour originated by Donald Griffin who united cogni-tive science and ethology. Ethology was founded in themid-1930s by Konrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen as anapproach to animal behaviour which emphasised the needto study species-specific behaviour in natural settings.Lorenz introduced the notions of imprinting (the process

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by which chicks of some bird species become socially at-tached to their mothers) and critical period. He also ar-gued that organisms’ capacity for learning increases withthe increase in the number of innate structures and char-acterised innate traits as products of genetic information.In the 1970s Griffin argued that the notions of intention-ality and consciousness can be productively employed inanimal research and his arguments were later taken up bya number of researchers. Although some theorists opposethe ascription of mental states to animals, such oppositionoften has an a priori character or is motivated by generalmistrust of mental concepts. (Dennett is a major critic ofcognitive ethology.) For philosophers who accept mentalrealism empirical data collected by cognitive ethologistscan be used towards developing new approaches to prob-lems in philosophy of mind.

Further reading: Allen and Bekoff (1997)

Cognitive Meaning see Frege, Gottlob

Cognitive Psychology: a branch of psychology studying cog-nition in controlled laboratory experiments. In the 1960scognitive psychology replaced methodological behaviou-rism by requiring psychological explanation to be givenin terms of internal structures and processes.

Cognitive Science: an interdisciplinary study of mind and cog-nition which emerged in the 1970s conjoining cogni-tive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, philos-ophy and logic. Cognitive science is sometimes contrastedwith neuroscience as a study of mind in abstraction fromits realisation in the brain. But a better characterisationof their relationship is found in the three-level (trilevel)hypothesis, originated by Marr, according to whichcomplex information-processing systems can be descri-bed at three different levels giving rise to distinct

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generalisations: the level of what the system does (itscomputational task, the knowledge or semantic level),the level of algorithms or procedures the system uses (thesymbolic or syntactic level), and the level of physical orbiological implementation of these procedures. The firsttwo levels require the notions of representation and com-putation. Classical cognitive science thus combines therepresentational and computational theory of mind, butis challenged by other theories of cognitive architecture.

Further reading: Smith and Osherson (1995); Bechteland Graham (1998)

Colour: the most discussed secondary quality. We automati-cally attribute colours to objects in visual perception, butwhat is their nature, how do we perceive them and what isthe nature of mental colours, the qualitative properties ofour colour experiences (qualia)? Subjectivism holds thatcolours are mental properties and do not exist in the phys-ical world. It is motivated by the view that similarity rela-tions between colours are their essential properties (PaulBoghossian and David Velleman). Subjectivism charac-terises the sense-datum theory, adverbialism and projec-tivism (the view that in perception mental colours areprojected onto mind-independent objects, which has theconsequence that colour experience is massively illusory).An influential approach was proposed by C. L. Hardinwho identifies colours with neural events in the visualsystem (on the basis of such evidence as genetic abnor-malities in colour vision). Dispositionalism, resisting alack of contribution from the world, holds that coloursare dispositions of physical objects to produce certainperceptual states. These have ineliminable colour qualiabecause the what-it’s-like character of colours constitutestheir essential property (John McDowell, ChristopherPeacocke). Physicalism or colour realism, rejected by

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seventeenth-century science and resurrected by the iden-tity theory, holds that colours are properties of physicalobjects, namely surface reflectances (Armstrong, Smart).David Hilbert shows that the constancy of perceivedcolours correlates with surface reflectance, which suggeststhat colour vision’s biological function is the detection ofphysical objects by surface reflectances. A complicationarises because of metamers, physical objects with differ-ent surface reflectances perceived as the same colour. Thisrequires relativising to the visual system which is done dif-ferently by representationalism about consciousness andthe ecological theory of Evan Thompson. Some physical-ists also accept the existence of mental colours (DavidLewis, Sydney Shoemaker).

Further reading: Hardin (1993); Thompson (1995)

Common-sense Functionalism see Analytic Functionalism

Compositionality: the property of thought in virtue of whichthe meaning or content of a complex representation isdetermined by the meanings of its constituents and therules of their combination. Thus the meaning of green

triangle is determined by the meanings of green andtriangle, and triangle makes the same semantic contri-bution to green triangle and red triangle. Arguably,thought is productive and systematic because of its com-positional structure, and compositionality is thus a majorconstraint on theories of concepts. As natural languagesare not sufficiently compositional (they contain expres-sions like ‘topless bar’ or ‘kick the bucket’), one needsto posit a language of thought where compositionality isnot violated.

Computation: rule-governed or algorithmic transitionbetween states of a system which has the function of

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organising and manipulating information available to thesystem. In this sense, speaking of mind as a computer isnot metaphorical. In fact, the word ‘computer’ was usedby Turing (and well before him) to designate a persondoing calculation. One of the reasons for using the notionof computation as given by the computational theoryof mind is that one needs a level of explanation wherethought processes can be depicted as content-sensitiveand truth-preserving. And it is not clear if one can explainthese properties of thought at the neural level, especiallyif one accepts the multiple realisability thesis (viewingthe mind as ‘the software of the brain’). However, itis also possible to speak of computation in the brain,and a model exploiting this possibility is proposed byconnectionism. Yet the notion of computation itself wascriticised by Searle as unscientific because, unlike intrin-sic features of the world studied by fundamental sciences,computation is observer-relative: state transitions arecomputations only if somebody interprets them as such.Thus nothing can be a computer by itself (‘syntax isnot intrinsic to physics’) and the question whether themind/brain is one lacks sense. This criticism is, however,invalidated if one concedes that computations are statetransitions governed by counterfactual supporting,hence interpretation-independent, rules. The notion ofcomputation as inside-the-skull process is questionedby dynamical systems and extended mind theories(sometimes called post-computational approaches).

Computational Theory of Mind (CTM, classical CTM, sym-bolicism): the view that the mind is an information-processing system and that cognitive mental processes(thinking, perceiving) can be understood in terms ofcomputation. CTM became prominent in the 1980s con-solidating the insights of Turing, von Neumann, Put-nam and Fodor. It holds that mental processes are

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computational-inferential operations carried on syntacti-cally structured mental representations. Being symbols inthe language of thought, representations have both con-tent and material (formal, syntactic) properties to whichcomputational mechanisms are sensitive. The notion ofsyntactic encoding explains how a physical system canhave semantic properties and how mental processes canbe causal physical processes. The similarity between ourcognitive architecture and the architecture of the digitalcomputer consists in symbolic code manipulation: men-tal symbols are discrete content-bearing entities which aremanipulated in accordance with structure-sensitive ruleshard-wired into the mind/brain. However, CTM facesseveral challenges and objections. One challenge camefrom recognising that many intentional states (beliefs,desires) have broad content which does not seem rele-vant to scientific psychology. Reactions to this still much-discussed issue include viewing the mind as a syntactic en-gine, isolating narrow content (internalism) and arguingfor the relevance of broad content (externalism). Objec-tions to CTM include its formal character and the seemingdisregard of content (Chinese room, symbol groundingproblem), its insensitivity to biological details and statisti-cal factors (connectionism), and its inability to explain theglobal character of thought processes (abduction, frameproblem).

Further reading: Pylyshyn (1984); Block (1995b)

Conceivability Arguments: arguments like that from zombieswhich build on the intuition that if something is conceiv-able, it is metaphysically possible.

Concept Acquisition see Learning

Concepts: constituents of thought expressed by individ-ual words (more precisely, morphemes) and phrases.

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Someone who can think that cats eat fish must havethe concepts cat, eat and fish. Small capital letters arethe accepted notation used to distinguish concepts fromwords and discussions centre on (1) concepts expressedby predicates (‘is a cat’), (2) lexical concepts expressedby simple morphemes and corresponding to a language’slexicalised vocabulary. Many issues about concepts arepart of the larger issue of content and intentionality,but the problem is also addressed in cognitive psychol-ogy and the questions of what concepts are and what itis to possess a concept are answered differently by theolder image theory and definitional theory and the morerecent functional role semantics, prototype theory, ex-emplar theory, theory theory and informational atom-ism. Arguably, a theory of concepts must explain con-cept robustness (stability of content), compositionalityand shareability (in order to communicate different peo-ple must have the same concepts). However, accordingto Fodor, only informational atomism meets these con-straints. Thus most theories connect having concepts withhaving knowledge or epistemic capacities: someone whohas the concept cat knows how to tell cats from non-cats, what judgements are true of cats, what typical catslook like and what other features they have. Psycholo-gists sometimes talk about conceptual change which ischaracteristic of children’s acquisition of adult-like con-cepts (conceptions) and adults’ scientific development.But what knowledge or beliefs are constitutive of con-cept possession? If this view leads to holism, the connec-tion between psychology and epistemology may seem lessconvincing.

Further reading: Margolis and Laurence (1999);Murphy (2002)

Conceptual Role Semantics see Functional Role Semantics

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Connectionism: a computational approach to the mind/brainwhich opposes the classical computational theory of mindon the issues of cognitive architecture and mental repre-sentation. Connectionist models are artificial neural net-works (nets) consisting of layers of interconnected unitsresembling neurons. For modelling such tasks as facerecognition the modeller specifes what microfeatures aredetected by ‘sensory’ input units assigned different acti-vation values. Input units activate ‘internal processing’hidden units, which then activate output units. All unitsare linked via excitatory or inhibitory connections as-signed different weights, and the activation values of‘non-sensory’ units depend on the activation values ofunits inputing to them and connection weights (reflectingstatistical regularities of feature correlation in the envi-ronment). Except in ‘localist models’, individual internalprocessing units do not have determinate semantic prop-erties. That is, because networks have no internal struc-ture, there are no discrete representations of properties(no symbols like nose) and no separately stored represen-tations of transformational rules, but all representationsare distributed over multiple units and stored implicitlyin connection patterns. All contents, represented as acti-vation vectors in a multidimensional space, belong to thesystem’s global state and all transformational processesoccur in parallel (hence parallel distributed processingor PDP). The system learns to process inputs correctlythrough backpropagation (small adjustments of connec-tion weights by the modeller). First developed in the1950s, connectionist models (run on digital computers)became prominent in the 1980s. But although PDP can ac-count for statistically sensitive learning, it cannot explainstructure-sensitive thought and language processing be-cause it has no resources to model their systematicity (seeassociationism). This led some researchers to hold that

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the mind contains different kinds of representations or ex-plore connectionism’s potential for modelling the imple-mentation of classical architecture in the brain, whereasother attempt to overthrow the systematicity argument.

Further reading: Rumelhart and McClelland (1986)

Consciousness: that aspect of mind which necessarily involvesreference to how things are for the subject; subjectiveawareness or experience. This, however, admits of differ-ent readings and explains the multiplicity of notions cur-rent in the literature. Philosophers are mostly interestedin phenomenal consciousness, the qualitative character ofexperience (qualia, what-it’s-like). It is possible to distin-guish from it access consciousness and, further, reflexiveor monitoring consciousness, which is consciousness ofbeing in a certain mental state. The awareness of one-self as the subject of experience is self-consciousness, andone’s overall conscious state is referred to as the unityof consciousness. Another two important distinctions are(1) that between creature consciousness and state con-sciousness (should one define conscious creatures in termsof conscious states or the other way round?) and (2) thatbetween the transitive (consciousness of ) and intransitivenotions of consciousness. The crucial questions are: whydoes the relevant sort of consciousness exist? how doesit change, if at all, the mental lives of creatures who haveit? what sort of creatures have it? what difference does itmake to mental states and processes?

Further reading: Rosenthal (1986); Smith and Jokic(2003)

Consciousness, Scientific Explanations of: can be subdividedinto cognitive and neurological. Cognitive theories tryto give a functional characterisation of consciousness.Thus in Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace theory, thebrain contains many specialised modules which process

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information at a subconscious level, but when it is usefulfor several modules to have access to some informationit becomes ‘broadcast’ across the cognitive system in theform of conscious mental states so that their content canbe used in more flexible ways. Neurological theories aimto differentiate between kinds or states of consciousness(like minimal consciousness) and establish their neuralcorrelates (NCCs). To date, the best electrophysiologi-cal correlate of phenomenal consciousness is the coherent40 Hz gamma oscillation generated by the brain. Accord-ing to Francis Crick and Christof Koch, it is produced bysynchronous firing of thalamo-cortical neurons represent-ing different bits of sensory information, which also sug-gests a solution to the binding problem. This view is ques-tioned by some researchers who argue that the synchronycannot be maintained by synaptic mechanisms (quantumtheories of consciousness). Questions for philosophicalreflection include: (1) since correlation is not identity, canNCCs explain the hard problem and close the explana-tory gap? and (2) given that much research concerns thecorrelates of phenomenal awareness in different sensorymodalities (particularly vision), can one speak of (phe-nomenal) consciousness as a single property constitutinga natural kind?

Further reading: Baars (1988); Koch (2004)

Consciousness, Theories of: few philosophers today endorsesubstance dualism about the self (but see person), andmany contemporary approaches may be labelled cog-nitivism: they attempt to understand consciousness asa cognitive phenomenon, in terms of intentionality andrepresentation (higher-order theories, Dennett, Paul andPatricia Churchland). The main principle behind thisresearch, anticipated by Hume, can be stated as ‘noconsciousness without content’. Representationalismabout consciousness and the phenomenal concepts

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approach use it to explain phenomenal consciousness.This trend is opposed by philosophers who argue fordualism about qualia and the what-it’s-like character ofexperience (early Jackson, David Chalmers and ThomasNagel, who used to think that physicalism about con-sciousness is possible if one develops concepts that makethe first- and third-person perspectives logically insep-arable). It is also opposed by philosophers who thinkthat the phenomenal character of mental states cannot beexplained by their representational content (Ned Block,Christopher Peacocke), that there is close connection be-tween consciousness and intentionality, that the phenom-enal intentionality of experience has explanatory pri-ority (Colin McGinn, Charles Siewert, Terence Horganand John Tienson), and that intentionality must itselfbe explained in terms of consciousness (phenomenology,Searle, Galen Strawson).

Further reading: McGinn (1991); Siewert (1998);Horgan and Tienson (2002)

Constructivism: the view that reality is socially or culturallyconstructed. Constructivism about colour holds that col-our is a culturally constructed property so that to be red isto satisfy cultural criteria for the application of the predi-cate ‘red’ (J. Van Brakel). Constructivism about emotionsunderstands them as learnt behaviours reflecting socialnorms (Rom Harre).

Content: that which a mental representation (concept, tho-ught, subpersonal state) represents or is about. Thus thecontent of the state of believing that it is cold is the propo-sition that it is cold (at the place where the person havingthis belief is). One problem in the discussion of intention-ality is the ascription of contentful intentional states. Buteven if one agrees with folk psychology that states with

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determinate contents can be ascribed to individuals, thereare more problems to solve. Do representations have con-tents in virtue of their causal connections with the world(informational theory of content), their functional rolewithin an organism (teleological theory of content) ortheir role in reasoning (functional role semantics)? Do in-dividuals’ concepts and thoughts essentially depend ontheir environment (externalism) and have broad content(intentional or referential content; Russellian content, ifone thinks, after early Russell, that contentful states in-volve real-world objects and properties)? Or do they onlydepend on how things appear to individuals (internalism)and have narrow content (Fregean or cognitive contentfor it involves Frege’s senses or modes of presentation)?Or is their content broad but Fregean? And what canone say about perception (phenomenal states generally)?Perceptual experience allows us to form beliefs about theworld, but is its representational content conceptual orpropositional like that of belief? We probably see morethan we can conceptualise: does it follow that percep-tion involves non-conceptual content or only a species ofdemonstrative content?

Contingent Property see Accidental Property

Counterfactual Causation: an approach to mental causationdeveloped by Ernest Lepore and Barry Loewer to arguefor non-reductive physicalism. It holds that although anevent’s causal powers are completely determined by itsphysical properties, mental properties qua mental arenonetheless causally relevant to the production of be-haviour. Causality is understood here not in terms ofcausal laws, but in terms of counterfactuals (‘If John hadnot thought there was beer in the fridge, he would nothave gone to the kitchen’) as analysed in Lewis’s possible

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worlds approach. Consider a mental event m which hasboth a physical property P and a mental propertyM andwhich causes a behavioural outcome b. It seems that P isnecessary for the causation of b. But on the other hand,due to multiple realisability of mental properties, P assuch is not necessary for the causation of b, because thecounterfactual –Pm&Mm → b is true: m would havecaused b even if it did not have the physical propertyP but had instead the physical property P∗. Kim objectsthat this still leaves mental causation epiphenomenal, andto counteract this charge Loewer questions the notion ofcausation as production.

Further reading: Lepore and Loewer (1989)

Covariance Approaches to Content see Informational Theoryof Content

Creativity: psychological capacity involving productivity,imagination, inventiveness, originality, impredictabilityand a sense of aesthetic quality. Because outcome of com-puters seems to be predictable, creativity poses a majorchallenge to artificial intelligence research (why do mostpeople decline to consider short stories composed by com-puters as products of creative processes?).

Further reading: Boden (2003)

D

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003): American philosopher, theoriginator of anomalous monism. In his philosophy oflanguage, Davidson employs the notion of truth definitiondeveloped by Alfred Tarski (1901–83) for analysing truthin formalised languages (for example, ‘Snow is white’ istrue iff snow is white; convention T). But whereas Tarski’sanalysis is neutral on the issue of mental representation,

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Davidson, in his defence of radical interpretation, takesthe notion of truth rather than that of translation forgranted. Observing what sentences speakers of a languagejudge as true, the interpreter can come up with a theoryof meaning for that language. For Davidson, meaningis reference, and in assigning referents to words theinterpreter relies on the principle of charity maximisingspeakers’ rationality. Davidson also holds that thoughtemerges together with natural language. Languagelearners learn to associate sentences with situations, andthe context of learning itself favours externalism. Theyalso learn to use words correctly, which makes meaningdepend on the causal history of judgements (causal the-ory of meaning). However, Davidson opposes the causaltheory of reference (understanding reference in causalterms) because of the dependence of reference on truth,the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutabilityof reference. His view that intentional states are not realentities but rather modifications of persons makes him aproponent of interpretivism and adverbialism.

Further reading: Davidson (1984)

de dicto see de re versus de dicto

de re versus de dicto: the distinction between two differentways of interpreting sentences made clear by Russell’s(‘On Denoting’) example about a touchy yacht owner towhom a guest remarked ‘I thought your yacht was largerthan it is’, and who replied ‘No, my yacht is not largerthan it is’. The owner’s reply is de re, about a particularthing, whereas the guest’s remark is de dicto, about theidea he had formed of the yacht.

de se : de se thoughts are thoughts about oneself (thoughtswith egocentric content) expressed with the help of theindexical ‘I’. According to John Perry and David Kaplan,

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to entertain self-conscious thoughts is to have masteredthe use of the first-person pronoun, and the cognitive roleof ‘I’ is its character (‘the thinker of the thought’). Thedifficulty with de se reports is that they cannot be anal-ysed as de re or de dicto, because people may be unawareof themselves under some particular name or description(like people with amnesia, severe memory loss). GarethEvans argued that self-consciousness is at the heart of theproblem and thinking of oneself as oneself does not de-pend on being able to exploit public linguistic devices.Gabriel Segal further notes that people with autism, inca-pable of representing themselves as thinkers, do not lackthe capacity to think of themselves. Because many of ourthoughts are de se (all indexical and tensed thoughts like‘It’s raining’ seem to presuppose self-perspectivalness),Lewis holds that this counts in favour of internalism.

Further reading: Evans (1982)

Deference see Broad Content

Definitional theory (classical theory): identifies concepts withindividually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions oftheir satisfaction known to competent users of them. Thetheory was outlined by Plato and later became associ-ated with Russell’s and Moore’s conceptual analysis (de-termination of the logical structure of concepts), reachingits peak in logical positivism. The theory proved unten-able because definitions cannot exhaustively give the con-tent of most concepts, and people do not know the def-initions of such common concepts as snow, beautiful

or game. Problems arise even for ‘a bachelor is an un-married man’ because one would not think of a catholicpriest as a bachelor. The theory’s failure had to do withits attempt to analyse concepts in terms of their ultimateconstituents (empiricism) and identify concept possession

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with knowledge of definitions (verificationism). However,it contains an important idea that there must be some con-ditions which account for the content of concepts, and itsimpact is felt in subsequent approaches and lexical se-mantics (‘the Neoclassical theory’).

Deflationism: to be a deflationist about X is to downplay(allegedly) its significance by analysing it in terms ofsomething else. Deflationism about (phenomenal) con-sciousness is the view that it can be a priori analysed innon-phenomenal terms of function or representation thusallowing for its reduction (the opposite of deflationism is‘inflationism’).

Delusions: persistent false beliefs characteristic of schizophre-nia.

Demonstrative Content: thought content specifiable with thehelp of pure (‘this’, ‘that’) or complex demonstratives(‘this book’, ‘that man’). Because such thoughts areobject-dependent, they pose a problem for internalism (al-though they may also have narrow content because onecan use demonstratives to pick out different objects oreven fail to pick out anything as in the case of hallucina-tion). Demonstrative thought plays an especially promi-nent role in the strong externalism of Gareth Evans andJohn McDowell which holds that demonstrative modesof presentation constitutively depend on the objects theypick out so that your thought about a pen you see in frontof you would be different in content were it an identical-looking but a different pen. (This position is thus differentfrom ‘mild externalism’ in that it accepts Frege’s senses,even though it views them as de re senses.) McDowellalso argues that perceptual content involves irreducibledemonstrative concepts rather than non-conceptualcontent.

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Dennett, Daniel C. (b.1942): American philosopher, a critic ofthe problems of intentionality and consciousness. Dennettholds that intentionality is not an intrinsic propertyof mental states but a construct arising from the inten-tional stance towards systems’ behaviour. While this maybe seen as ‘mild realism’, his views on consciousness arecloser to eliminativism. He discards the Cartesian the-atre model of consciousness where experiences as raw‘givens’ pass before the internal observer, the consciousself. Instead he offers the Multiple Drafts Model whereconsciousness emerges from interacting cognitive capac-ities. Like health, consciousness is not a simple prop-erty of organisms. (Dennett’s homuncular functionalismdraws similar conclusions about intentionality.) There isno threshold separating the preconscious from conscious-ness, no special place where ‘it all comes together’, butat various times different contents acquire prominencein the cognitive system (‘cerebral celebrity’) and becomemanifest in verbal reports. However, Dennett does notdismiss introspection as completely misleading, holdingthat introspective reports are just another form of evi-dence that has no privileged status over psychophysicalor neurological evidence (hence heterophenomenology –phenomenology from another’s point of view). Our il-lusion of being conscious selves arises from the crucialrole of internalised natural language in our kind of con-sciousness, where the narrative constructed by differentsubsystems helps control cognitive resources (languagealso creates for us the illusion of intentionality).

Further reading: Dennett (1991, 2005)

Depth Problem: an objection to the causal theory of referenceand causal or informational accounts of content that onecannot say whether a type of mental representation rep-resents distal objects (cats) rather than proximal stimuli(a certain type of retinal excitation). The best response

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is that proximal projections of a kind of object are sovariable that a mechanism of perception which dependedon them only would not succeed in detecting this kind ofobject at all.

Descartes, Rene Cartesius (1596–1650): French mathemati-cian, the founder of modern philosophy. Given Descartes’prominent role in the emerging science, his philosophy isbest understood from his aspiration towards a unifiedscience resting on secure foundations of knowledge andhis geometric conception of matter. The starting pointis the method of doubt (Cartesian doubt or Cartesianscepticism, although the latter term is misleading as toDescartes’ project) which urges one to reject any propo-sition whose truth may be doubted. The evil demon(le malin genie) can deceive one about the physical world,but knowledge of one’s current thoughts or experience isnot so susceptible. Cogito ergo sum (I think, thereforeI am) is that foundation which underlies our capacity toform clear and distinct ideas of things that contain no con-tradiction and give the reason access to truth. Arguably,Descartes’ dualism, rationalism and representationalismall follow from this. And as it is possible to conceive ofone’s mind existing without one’s body and surviving theannihilation of the physical world, the two must be dis-tinct and independent entities: the mental substance (rescogitans), the mind or the conscious self whose essentialproperty is thinking, and the extended substance (res ex-tensa) which encompasses the spatial world.

Further reading: Descartes (1984–85)

Design Stance see Intentional Stance

Determinism: the view that every event has a determinatecause in the previously existing state of affairs. This, how-ever, does not imply that the whole evolution of the world

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is predetermined or that nothing can be unpredictable inprinciple.

Direct Perception: the thesis, developed in opposition to rep-resentationalism, that perception (particularly vision) isnot mediated by inferential processes operating on com-plex, hierarchically structured internal representations.Its most prominent modern version is found in JamesJ. Gibson’s (1904–79) ecological approach. Emphasisingthat vision must be understood in terms of organisms’active exploration of the world, Gibson argued that per-ception is a direct pickup of information afforded to or-ganisms by the environment. Instead of understandingvisual processing in computational terms, one can com-pare the mind to the resonator: sense organs are ‘tuned’to respond to certain types of physical energy called in-variants. Higher-order invariants, or stable combinationsof visually detected properties, constitute environmentalaffordances relevant to the abilities of kinds of organ-isms: containing information about possibilities for ac-tion (like locating food sources or avoiding obstacles),they guide the behaviour of organisms directly withoutthe need for internal computation. Similar ideas were de-veloped more recently by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noe intheir sensorimotor theory of vision, according to whichseeing is a way of acting, of ‘probing’ the environmentwhich serves as its own representation. When an organ-ism masters the relevant sensorimotor contingencies (akind of knowledge-how or implicit knowledge of corre-lations between actions and resulting perceptions), it ac-quires the experience of seeing (thus, seeing a bottle isknowing implicitly how its appearance changes as onemoves in relation to it; in this respect, seeing is similar totouching). Because there are no internal representations,the problem of qualia does not emerge (for example, theexperience of seeing red arises from ‘sampling’ portions

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of the environment). However, the approach meets thesame difficulties as behaviourism and cannot accommo-date evidence from lesion studies such as the existence ofvisual agnosia (visual integration failure).

Further reading: Gibson (1979); O’Regan and Noe(2001)

Direct Realism: the view that we directly perceive externalworld objects. This may be understood in three ways: (1)as naive realism, the view that the external world is theway it is presented to us in experience; (2) as a direct per-ception thesis; (3) as the view that our awareness of theworld is direct in the sense of not being consciously infer-ential. Whereas naive realism runs up against the possi-bility of illusion and the problem of secondary qualities,direct realism avoids these difficulties for it denies onlythat we are first aware of our sense-data or internal rep-resentations and then infer on their basis the existence ofphysical reality (as in the case of seeing things on a closed-circuit television screen). Evidently, we can become awareof the quality of our experiences themselves, but ratherthan refute direct realism, this raises the issue of how ourdirect awareness of the world is mediated by complexneurophysiological processes and representational states.

Direct Reference see Causal Theory of Reference

Direction of Fit see Intentional States

Disjunction Problem: arises for naturalised semantics ap-proaches. A mental representation of type R (cow) maybe caused by various sorts of things (cows or horseson a dark night). The problem is to explain why itscontent is something less than the disjunction of its possi-ble causes, especially as disjunctive content would result

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in the maximal correlation between the representationand the environment where it functions.

Disjunctivism: a theory of perception which opposes repre-sentationalism, holding that it cannot account for themind’s ‘openness’ to the world and emphasising thatgenuine perceiving is a relational state which has mind-independent objects or object – involving Frege’s sensesas its constituents (J. M. Hinton, Paul Snowdon, JohnMcDowell, M. G. F. Martin). Arguing that dependenceon physical objects is essential to the nature of percep-tion, its proponents deny that genuine perception andillusion/hallucination belong to the same psychologicalkind (‘the common kind assumption’). Even though theymay feel subjectively the same, a perceptual experience iseither a genuine perception or a hallucination. However,while accepting the direct perception thesis for genuineexperiences, disjunctivists are forced to adopt represen-tationalism for non-veridical experiences to account fortheir intentional content. This raises doubts about thepsychological distinctness of veridical and non-veridicalperception, given that both can serve as the basis for be-lief and action because of their content.

Further reading: McDowell (1994); Martin (2004)

Dispositional: (1) a mental state is dispositional if it is notoccurrent; (2) an analysis is dispositional if it is done interms of dispositions.

Dispositions: capacities of things to manifest certain be-haviour in specified conditions. Thus fragility and sol-ubility can be viewed as dispositional properties: a sub-stance is soluble if it dissolves when placed in water. Thecausal status of dispositions is subject to debate: althoughthey are functional properties and scientific terms are

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functionally determined, dispositions must be groundedin things’ intrinsic properties. (This is the problem of vir-tus dormitiva satirised by Moliere: to say that opium putspeople to sleep because of its it dormitive virtue is not togive a causal explanation.) The notion of dispositions wasalso employed in logical behaviourism, beginning withRyle’s analysis of knowledge-how. According to Ryle, as-criptions of beliefs or emotional states are hypotheticalstatements about a person’s behaviour under certain con-ditions. However, this analysis is problematic: people’sdispositions to behaviour themselves depend on what psy-chological states they are in. Thus people who know howto play chess may not always have the disposition to movechess pieces in the way that is thought to be constitutiveof their competence: their dispostions are different if theyare playing with a child to whom they wish to lose a game.However, the dispositional analysis of beliefs still appearsattractive to philosophers who think that beliefs cannotbe stored in the brain. If beliefs are individuated by theirtruth-conditions, then saying that they are representedseems to commit one to the view that people are logicallyomniscient, which they are not (entailment, KK-thesis).

Further reading: Armstrong et al. (1996)

Distributed Representation see Representation

Doxastic: relating to belief. To represent a content doxasti-cally is to represent it in belief.

Dreaming: the state of having experiences similar to percep-tions which occurs during rapid eye movement (REM)sleep to most people. Closely emulating our wakeful ex-perience (rich visual phenomenology, the egocentric per-spective, felt emotions, formation of beliefs about whatis happening), it raises questions about the nature of

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perception, imagery and (phenomenal) consciousness (theexistence of qualia).

Dretske, Fred (b.1932): American philosopher, one of theoriginators of the informational theory of content, exter-nalism and representationalism about consciousness. Inhis later work, Dretske distinguishes between indicationand representation. Indication has to do with informa-tion-carrying, is widespread and sufficient for minimalintentionality. Representation, however, requires the no-tion of function (paper clips can carry information abouttemperature, but they cannot misrepresent it, because thatis not their job). Thus the informational approach mustbe combined with the teleological theory of content togive mental states their functions. Natural selection givescontent to perceptual or phenomenal states, and learningto conceptual states (states, like beliefs, for being in whichone needs to have concepts). Dretske’s solution to the dis-junction problem, however, appeals not to teleology, butto the theses that information is relative to circumstancesand that truly mental representation can arise only in sys-tems capable of the right kind of learning.

Further reading: Dretske (1981, 2000)

Dual-Aspect Semantics see Two-Factor Theories

Dual-Aspect Theory see Dualism

Dualism: the view that the mental and the physical consti-tute two different realms of reality. Substance dualism isthe view, associated with Descartes, that minds and bod-ies belong to completely distinct kinds – the immaterialthinking substance and the material extended substancewhich, nonetheless, can enter into causal interactions(Cartesian interactionism). Attribute dualism (double- ordual-aspect theory) is the view, associated with Spinoza,

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that whereas there is only one substance, the mental andthe physical are different, independent kinds of proper-ties: although they can be instantiated in the same ob-jects, mental properties cannot be identified with physicalproperties. Attribute dualism is sometimes called prop-erty dualism, but one must be careful with the latter termbecause it is sometimes applied to non-reductive physical-ism which also holds that mental and physical propertiesare distinct kinds of properties but, unlike dual-aspecttheories, accepts the dependence of the mental on thephysical. A prominent contemporary double-aspect the-ory is found in David Chalmers’ theory of phenomenalconsciousness which views conscious properties as basicconstituents of reality on a par with fundamental physi-cal properties. According to it, information is embodiedboth in the physical-functional and the phenomenal in-formation spaces, which stand in direct isomorphism toone another. There is only one abstract information spacebut it has two distinct aspects. The ubiquitousness of in-formation brings this theory close to panpsychism andChalmers himself refers to it as panprotopsychism.

Further reading: Chalmers (1996)

Dynamical Systems (dynamicism): an approach to cognitionwhich views cognitive agents as dynamical systems. Dy-namical systems theory is mathematical modelling of thebehaviour of complex systems (like the meteorologicalsystem of our planet) using non-linear differential equa-tions. Dynamical systems are open: variables and parame-ters determining the system’s development in time are notwholly internal to it (thus in modelling the meteorologicalsystem one must keep track of the Sun’s energy arrivingat different locations). They are open-ended: their devel-opment from an initial point can follow distinct trajecto-ries. They are continuously changing, deterministic, andinvolve no internal information use by their components.

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Several researchers (Timothy van Gelder, Robert Port,Rodney Brooks, Esther Thelen, Linda B. Smith) arguetoday that dynamicism can supplant the computationaltheory of mind and connectionism (which also employsthe notions of computation and representation). Its mainideas are embedded cognition and ‘intelligence withoutrepresentation’: organisms and their environments areparts of the same dynamical system; changes in the systemare not mediated by discrete information-carrying statesinternal to organisms; cognitive agents are constituted bymany interacting dynamical systems (horizontal insteadof vertical modularity); cognition emerges from cyclesof perception–action–perception. Dynamical systems ap-proach was used to model locomotion (Scott Kelso) andinsect navigation (Brooks; situated robotics). However,despite common disclaimers, dynamical systems mod-elling does not eliminate computation (all simulations arerun on digital computers) and representation (variablesare assigned discrete quantities, and state-transitions arerule-governed). Rather, what dynamisists about cognitiondeny is that rules and contents are explicitly represented inthe minds of agents. However, although this may be trueof some processes, it poses the same question that baffledbehaviourism: what kind of behaviour is thinking?

Further reading: Brooks (1991); van Gelder (1998)

E

Ecological Perception see Direct Perception

Egocentric Content see de se

Eliminative Materialism: the view that our common-sense un-derstanding of people’s behaviour in terms of their men-tal states and the corresponding mental concepts should

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be eliminated from scientific psychology. Eliminative ma-terialism arose in the 1970s from dissatisfaction withNagelian reduction and acceptance of Quine’s views onthe impossibility of intentional science (Paul Feyerabend,Richard Rorty and Paul Churchland). In his attack onfolk psychology Churchland argued that it has all thefeatures of a false scientific theory, that the entities it pos-tulates are similar in nature to phlogiston or alchemi-cal essences and will have to be discarded by future sci-ence. Replacing folk psychology, neuroscience will showthat there is nothing like beliefs and desires in the brain.The same fate awaits folk ideas of consciousness, qualiaand the self, and this aspect of eliminativism was espe-cially welcomed by Dennett. However, it is not obvi-ous that mental concepts are theoretical constructs ratherthan part of our psychological make-up (theory of mind).More recent developments of eliminative materialismmoved away from the issue of the scientific status of folkpsychology and continue to exist under the name of neu-rophilosophy.

Further reading: Churchland (1981); Churchland andChurchland (1998)

Eliminativism: to be an eliminativist about X is to hold that Xis merely a word of everyday language for which there isno corresponding reality and it thus has to be eliminatedfrom scientific explanation (see eliminative materialism).

Embedded Cognition: the term for theories that oppose thecomputational and representational theory of mind byemphasising that it ignores the fact that cognition is em-bedded in the brain (connectionism) and in the body(embodiment), and is situated in the world (dynamicalsystems, extended mind, direct perception), being es-sentially enactive (action). Instead of ‘detached’, input–output, centrally mediated processes, they propose that

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spatially situated body–environment interactions are con-stitutive of intelligence, and that rationality consists inadaptive responses.

Embodiment: the fact that we are not pure minds but mindsembedded in bodies. The thesis that organisms’ cognitionis shaped by their gross bodily form allows for readingsof different strength. Thus Dana Ballard argued that ori-enting movements may constrain the way informationabout objects is processed at a less abstract level thanthat of symbolic reasoning (local problem-solving mech-anisms). The more radical views are that concepts emergefrom embodied schemas (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson)or that intelligent action does not require representation(dynamical systems, extended mind, direct perception,Merleau-Ponty).

Further reading: Ballard et al. (1997)

Emergentism: the view that properties of complex systemsare emergent from the properties of their constituents,being unpredictable from and irreducible to their com-binations. Emergentism was espoused by several Britishphilosophers and scientists in the early twentieth century(C. Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, C. D. Broad) as aposition concerning the status of chemical and biologicalproperties. (The idea that products of chemical reactionsare emergent properties traces to J. S. Mill, although itwas abandoned in the twentieth century with the avail-ability of the quantum mechanical explanation of chemi-cal bonding, leading to the demise of emergentism.) Mindor consciousness (the terms were used interchangeably)was similarly understood as an emergent property of thebrain. Central to emergentism is the ‘many-layers’ viewof reality: each level of increasing complexity (the biolog-ical level above the chemical level, the conscious mental

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level above the biological level) has its own novel causalproperties irreducible to those of a certain constellationof lower-level properties. Note that emergentism viewedreduction as an explanatory rather than ontological is-sue: consciousness is emergent and irreducible because wecannot explain why a certain level of complexity of physi-ological organisation should possess it. This distinguishesemergentism from many versions of contemporary non-reductive physicalism, although both approaches face theproblem of accounting for the irreducibility of the mentalwithout violating the causal closure of the physical.

Further reading: Broad [1925] (1976)

Emotions: such phenomenal states as admiration, anger, an-noyance, anxiety, awe, benevolence, compassion, contri-tion, disgust, distress, embarrassment, empathy, ennui,envy, euphoria, fear, grief, gratitude, guilt, happiness,hate, hope, humility, indignation, jealousy, joy, love, nos-talgia, pride, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, sadness,shame, sorrow, sympathy, surprise, worry, wrath. Onlysix emotions are considered as basic and accompaniedby universally recognisable facial expressions: happiness,surprise, sadness, anger, disgust and fear, and they mayconstitute natural kinds. But is ‘emotion’ a natural kindterm? What is the relation between emotions and bod-ily feelings (sensations) and disturbances (blushing, per-spiring)? The accepted view today is that emotions areobject-directed (emotional intentionality), which distin-guishes them from moods, but some emotions, like sad-ness, may be an exception to that. The relation betweenemotions (passions) and rationality is also an importantissue. Emotions are involuntary in character – they simplyhappen to us – but we also think of them as inappropri-ate or inadequate to the behaviour of a rational agentin particular situations. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio

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argues that emotions are crucial to decision-making, serv-ing as ‘somatic markers’ in the brain’s function of moni-toring the organism’s past and future responses (damageto prefrontal and somatosensory areas leads to dimin-ished emotion and impaired practical intelligence). Emo-tions also seem involved in maintaining adequate beliefformation (schizophrenia) and regulating social relations(moral emotions or emotions of self-consciousness).

Further reading: Damasio (1999)

Emotions, Theories of: the first psychological theory of emo-tions, the James-Lange theory, was proposed by WilliamJames (1884) and Dutch psychologist Carl G. Lange(1885). The theory identifies emotions with bodily feel-ings (sensations) and physiological disturbances: we feelsadness because we cry and fear because we tremble. Inthe late 1920s it was replaced by the Cannon-Bard the-ory (Walter Cannon, Philip Bard) which views emotionsas independent of physiological change detection: identi-cal physiological changes accompany different emotions(fear and anger) and non-emotional states (fever). Sincethe 1960s the leading philosophical theory of emotionshas been the cognitive theory which identifies emotionswith evaluative judgements and analyses them in terms ofintentional states like beliefs and desires. Thus fear of asnake is constituted by the belief that it might bite and thedesire not to be bitten. According to its strong versions(Robert Solomon, Richard Lazarus), emotions are just ra-tional appraisals, not irrational drives. According to themild versions or hybrid theories (William Lycan, MarthaNussbaum) they also have crucial affective components.But the cognitive theory apparently cannot explain the di-vergence between emotion and belief (believing that flyingis safe does not eliminate the fear), emotions’ phenome-nal feel and the fact that propositional contents associated

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with emotions can occur without them. Alternative ap-proaches are offered by the affect program theory (PaulEkman, Paul Griffiths, Craig DeLancey; pioneered byCharles Darwin) which views emotions as complex adap-tive responses and addresses only the basic emotions, andevolutionary psychology which explores the idea of themodularity of other emotions as well.

Further reading: Lewis and Haviland-Jones (2000)

Empirical Functionalism see Machine Functionalism

Empiricism: the view that all knowledge is based on sensoryexperience, that there is nothing in the mind that wasnot first in the senses (nihil in intellectu nisi prius insensu). British empiricists Locke and Hume held that atbirth the mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa), that ideasare copies from sensory states or combinations of suchcopies (image theory), and that thoughts are associa-tions of ideas (associationism). In response Leibniz andKant argued that the mind must contain innate categorieswith which to organise sensory experience. Conceptempiricism was recently revived by researchers who thinkthat general learning mechanisms can accomplish thestructuring task (connectionism, neural constructivism)and that alternative views commit one to radical conceptnativism (see innateness). Other arguments include thosefrom evolution and the overlap in brain areas subservingperceptual discrimination and conceptual thought. How-ever, empiricism runs against the problem, first noticed byBerkeley, of abstracting general ideas: how does the mind,on the sole basis of experience, arrive at forming ideasthat apply to more than one instance of a category? (ForBerkeley, Locke’s abstractionist thesis was all the moreunacceptable as it entailed the conceivability of such im-possible entities as triangles whose sides are neither long

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nor short.) The same difficulty later arose for logical pos-itivism (see definitional theory). In order to explain con-ceptual content one must recognise a set of innate primi-tive (non-decomposable) concepts whose identity remainsconstant across experiences. For Locke and Hume thesewere sensory concepts (concepts of colour, taste, shape,etc.), but the difficulty they had with deriving from themthe supposedly complex concepts (like those of whole andpart) still remains in force.

Further reading: Barsalou (1999); Cowie (1998)

Entailment: logical relation between propositions posingproblems for theories of rationality and the map-theoryof analytic functionalism. If someone believes that P andthat Q, and (P&Q) entail R, they must believe R (closureprinciple), but people sometimes fail to do so: one maybelieve that radios are electric devices and that electric de-vices must not be immersed in water and yet try to cleana radio by placing it in water. If beliefs represented likemaps, people would be able to know the consequences oftheir beliefs (the problem of belief under entailment).

Epiphenomenal: having no causal powers.

Epiphenomenalism: the view that mentality is a causally in-ert by-product or epiphenomenon of brain processes. Al-though mental phenomena are caused by brain processes,they cannot themselves be causes of anything. Epiphe-nomenalism arose in the late nineteenth century when theacceptance of the causal closure of the physical made itdifficult to find room for the conscious mind of Cartesiansubstance dualism in the scientific picture of the world. Itwas defended by Shadworth Hodgson, William KingdonClifford, Henry Maudsley and Thomas H. Huxley whocompared consciousness to the steam-whistle produced

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by the working of a locomotive engine but having no ef-fect on its machinery. Epiphenomenalism is counterintu-itive: it implies that pain does not make us wince, that nointentional action is possible and that mental events can-not become objects of memory and knowledge. Besides,as James noted, it seems incompatible with the theoryof evolution: why should conscious mental states haveevolved at all? Classical epiphenomenalism does not fallwithin the province of physicalism, for it does not iden-tify even mental events with brain events. In the 1980s,the term, however, began to be used somewhat differentlyin discussions of anomalous monism and non-reductivephysicalism generally, when the causal efficacy of mentalproperties was put at stake. Today, epiphenomenalism ismuch at issue in debates about ‘conscious free will’ andphenomenal consciousness.

Further reading: Huxley (2001)

Epistemology: the study of the nature and possibility ofknowledge.

Error, Problem of see Misrepresentation, Problem of

Essential Property: a property which an individual or kindcould not have failed to have, which it has in every pos-sible world and without which it would cease to exist.Thus having no electric charge is an essential property ofneutrons.

Essentialism: the view that things have essential propertiesthat make them be what they are. Metaphysical essen-tialism is the term for Kripke’s and Putnam’s extensionof the causal theory of reference to natural kind termslike ‘gold’ or ‘tiger’ whose reference is fixed by the ap-plication of a term to a sample of stuff or an animal.

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Observational accidental properties are usually involvedin reference-fixing (‘sparkles’ or ‘is orange with stripes’),but the mechanisms of reference are such that they pre-suppose that certain kinds of things have ‘hidden essences’to be discovered one day. Although we think of cats asanimals, it may turn out that they are really robots fromMars. But we will continue to refer to them as ‘cats’ in-stead of concluding that cats do not exist (we will simplystop thinking of them as animals). There exists a divi-sion of linguistic labour: you may not be able to tell abeech from an elm, but because there are experts in yourlinguistic community, you know that ‘beech’ and ‘elm’have different reference and, if necessary, you may deferto them on that matter. Psychological essentialism is theview that people’s understanding of natural kind terms in-deed involves belief in hidden essences. Thus both adultsand older children agree that a racoon made to look andsmell like a skunk will not become one, although similarconceptual transformations of artefacts are believed toinvolve identity changes. Essentialistic thinking may be auniversal feature of our tacit knowledge of the world.

Evolution: genetic modification of populations over timeresulting from small genetic mutations and organisms’interaction with the environment. Migrations place pop-ulations into different environmental conditions, and nat-ural selection operating on them results in the spread ofgenetic material from individuals with the highest repro-ductive success rates. Today’s evolutionary theory differsfrom that of Charles Darwin (1809–82) who originatedit, and a recent renewal of Darwinism (adaptationism)continues to provoke controversy. Its critics do not denythat there are adaptations, but emphasise the possibilityof saltational change. Saltations are single genetic muta-tions producing large effects on an organism’s phenotype

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(its physical and physiological features defined by theexpression of its genotype in a specific environment),and creating, in Richard Goldschmidt’s phrase,‘hopefulmonsters’. They are due to mutations of homeotic genesregulating early development. These ideas were devel-oped by Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) who notedlack of evidence for intermediate species in the fossilrecord. Together with Richard Lewontin he coined theterm spandrels for those features of organisms that, likethe spandrels of San Marco Cathedral in Venice whichare necessary to support the dome but also bear magnifi-cent mosaics, are by-products of architectural constraints(the body plan, Bauplan). Together with Elizabeth Vrbahe coined the term exaptation for features that evolve forone purpose and are then co-opted for a different purpose(bird feathers evolved for thermoregulation and were co-opted for flight).

Further reading: Gould and Lewontin (1979)

Evolutionary Psychology: a movement in psychology origi-nated by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. It opposes theStandard Social Science Model according to which indi-vidual minds contain no domain-specific representationsat birth (empiricism) and are moulded by society throughlearning (sometimes it even holds that intelligence or per-sonality have no biological determination). Evolution-ary psychologists argue that human cognitive architecturemust be understood in light of its evolutionary history andadvocate for (1) the computational theory of mind, (2) in-nateness, (3) massive modularity and (4) adaptationism.The mind is composed mostly of innate domain-specificcomputational mechanisms (modules) that were shapedby natural selection to deal with recurrent information-processing problems encountered by humans when theylived in hunter-gatherer societies (the Pleistocene adaptive

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environment). Although evolutionary psychology down-plays the environment’s contribution to individual de-velopment, suggests that each kind of problem requiresa computational mechanism of its own, diminishes therole of general reasoning abilities and views every men-tal feature as an adaptive trait contributing to individu-als’ reproductive success, understood more broadly as astudy of stable cognitive and behavioural patterns fromthe point of view of their evolution, it is a viable strategyin animal cognition and cognitive psychology research.

Further reading: Cosmides and Tooby (1992)

Exaptation see Evolution

Exemplar Theory: a psychological theory of concepts accord-ing to which concepts are sets of exemplars of a category.But although people’s memories store representations ofparticular instances, the theory does not explain their cat-egorisation.

Explanatory Gap: Joseph Levine’s term for the view that noth-ing known about the physical world can explain phenom-enal consciousness. Some philosophers believe that thegap cannot be closed because the existence of qualia can-not be deduced from any physical facts.

Further reading: Levine (1983)

Extended Mind: the view that one’s environment is consti-tutive of one’s cognitive processes (Andy Clark, MichaelWheeler, John Haugeland). As is the case with other em-bedded cognition theories, its proponents lay stress onembodiment, the role of perception as providing possibil-ities for action, and the understanding of intelligence interms of real-time success of action. It also holds that arte-facts are literally constitutive of people’s mental states:

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your mobile phone forms part of your memory for tele-phone numbers, and its contents constitute in part yourbeliefs involving these numbers. Minds extend into the en-vironment and cognition does not all happen in the head(‘active externalism’). Human cognition evolved with thedevelopment of tools and technologies, of which lan-guage is the most important. Extended mind theoristsmostly accept connectionism as their theory of cogni-tive architecture and pragmatism about concepts. Theproblem, though, is how to understand their thesis non-metaphorically (for example, what are the boundariesof the extended mind?). Extended mind/dynamical sys-tems theories were also proposed for consciousness. ThusSusan Hurley argues that action is essential to the unityof consciousness and that consciousness is neither in thebrain nor in subjective awareness.

Further reading: Clark (1997); Hurley (1998)

Extension: the set of all things that a predicate or concept istrue of. Thus the extension of ‘cat’ are all and only cats.Two predicates or concepts with the same extension arecoextensive.

Externalism: the view that intentional states (beliefs, desires,etc.) have broad content, that is content that constitu-tively depends on one’s environment. Externalism stemsfrom Putnam’s Twin-Earth argument which many foundconvincing. But the relational nature of intentional statesas understood by folk psychology seems to make themill-suited for scientific psychology and the computationaltheory of mind because only those states that are intrin-sic to individuals (supervene on their neurophysiology)can enter into causal interactions with each other andbe causes of behaviour (the local character of causation).This makes many philosophers accept internalism, while

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others argue that psychological explanation can accom-modate broad content because (1) special sciences includerelational properties in their causal explanations (TylerBurge, Lynn Rudder Baker); (2) even basic sciences for-mulate laws with reference to background conditions; (3)information carried by organisms’ psychological states isa function from their environments (informational the-ory of content); (4) the content of psychological statesis determined by their evolutionary history (teleologicaltheory of content); (5) rational explanation of action re-quires that the content of intentional states depend inpart on their relations to the outside world (ChristopherPeacocke, Timothy Williamson). However, as most ex-ternalists accept the representational theory of mind (butsee demonstrative content), this allows internalists to ar-gue that, although relevant to causal explanation, broadcontent is not involved in particular instances of mentalcausation.

Further reading: Burge (1986)

F

Factive see Propositional Attitudes

Faculty Psychology: the view that the mind is divided into sep-arate faculties or capacities (perception, memory, imag-ination, judgement) developed by Franz Joseph Gall(1759–1828) into phrenology – the theory that differentfaculties have discrete brain localisation and their promi-nence correlates with cranial prominence (bumps on theskull).

Feelings see Sensations

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Fictionalism: the strong version of instrumentalism accordingto which there are no such things as beliefs and desires,that they are merely fictions for predicting behaviour, con-venient in everyday life but unacceptable in science.

First-Person Authority: the idea, deriving from Descartes, thatone’s thoughts or experience can be known only from thefirst-person but not the third-person perspective.

Fodor, Jerry A. (b.1935): American philosopher, the authorof the language of thought hypothesis. Fodor is thus oneof the main defenders of realism about folk psychology,and to show how beliefs and desires can be genuine causesof behaviour, that is have irreducible causal powers, hedeveloped an influential version of non-reductive physi-calism (special sciences argument). He is a proponent ofrepresentational nativism (see innateness) and the origi-nator of informational atomism. His work on the modu-larity of mind inspired numerous investigations, althoughhe is an ardent critic of massive modularity, the extent ofthe computational theory of mind and connectionism.

Further reading: Fodor (2000)

Folk Psychology (belief-desire, intentional, propositional atti-tude psychology): the common-sense explanation of peo-ple’s behaviour out of their beliefs and desires (and otherintentional states). The central tenet of folk psychology isthat intentional states have causal and semantic proper-ties: they cause behaviour in virtue of their content (‘Whydid John come to the lecture theatre on Friday?’ ‘Becausehe wanted to listen to Professor N and believed that thelecture would be given there’). Folk psychology thus hasimpressive predictive and explanatory power. The viewthat it is largely true is captured in the representationaltheory of mind but is denied by eliminative materialism.

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Whether in understanding other people’s behaviour weindeed employ a folk psychological theory is the issueaddressed by theory of mind debates.

Frame Problem: a major problem for artificial intelligence andthe computational theory of mind. In doing science andin our everyday life we constantly come across situationswhen we need to update our beliefs upon receiving new in-formation and make decisions about all sorts of problems.Even when one decides whether to take an umbrella ornot, knowing that it will rain, all sorts of reasons can bearon the final decision (its colour clashes with one’s outfit).Similarly, what modifications one makes to one’s beliefsupon learning, say, about the discovery of mirror neu-rons depends on numerous factors. Our reasoning is af-fected by global considerations of relevance and context-sensitivity (there is nothing in an individual belief itselfto show when it may become relevant). Given the algo-rithmic nature of computational processes, the problemis how to ‘frame’ the relevant sets of beliefs or limit searchspaces. The problem becomes especially acute when oneconsiders the relation between the computational theoryof mind and modularity. To describe a domain computa-tionally one must specify a clear computational task to becarried out. For this the domain must be restricted withrespect to the input it can process (it must be information-ally encapsulated). This realisation ensures the success ofMarr’s theory of vision (although it poses the bindingproblem). However, general reasoning cannot be so re-stricted. This, arguably, does not show that thinking isnot computation, but all current approaches (heuristics,connectionism, quantum computation) are problematic.Some researchers now believe that emotions may benature’s solution to the frame problem.

Further reading: Minsky (forthcoming)

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Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925): German mathematician, thefounder of modern logic. His philosophy of language isof central importance to discussions of intentionality andmental content. Frege noticed a peculiar asymmetry be-tween such identity statements as ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’and ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ (Hesperus is also called ‘theevening star’, and Phosphorus ‘the morning star’). Al-though they are about the same object, the planet Venus,they differ in their informational content or cognitivemeaning. It is possible for someone to believe rationallythat Hesperus is bright without believing that Phosporusis bright. And in ascribing beliefs we can truthfully say‘Theo believes that Hesperus is bright’ but not ‘Theo be-lieves that Phosphorus is bright’ (opacity of belief ascrip-tion). How can identity statements be both true and in-formative and how can one have distinct beliefs aboutthe same object? This is known as the Frege problemand in ‘Uber Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892) Frege offered asolution to it by distinguishing between sense (Sinn) andreference (Bedeutung). The reference of an expression isthe object it denotes, and its sense is the mode of pre-sentation of the reference. ‘Hesperus is bright’ and ‘Phos-phorus is bright’ express different propositions becausethey have different senses. In belief ascription contextslike ‘Theo believes that Hesperus is bright’ the referenceof the expression (‘Hesperus’) shifts so that it does nothave its ordinary reference (the planet Venus) but refersinstead to its ordinary sense (or mode of presentation ofthe object referred to by the expression ordinarily).

Further reading: Frege (1960)

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939): Austrian psychologist, thefounder of psychoanalysis. On the basis of his studyof psychological disorders Freud postulated a tripar-tite structure of the mind: the conscious mind, the

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preconscious (the part of the mind whose contents canbecome available to consciousness) and the unconscious(the part containing repressed thoughts and memoriesthat people cannot bring to conscious awareness). LaterFreud introduced the parallel categories of the id (the partof the mind driven by instinctual needs and contradictoryimpulses), the ego (the part responsible for representingthe external world and unifying mental processes) andthe phylogenetically recent superego (the source of normsof behaviour). The ego, torn by the id’s passions, theexternal world and the superego, may break into anxi-ety, and psychoanalysis must strengthen it by making ittake over the unconscious. Psychoanalysis involves theanalyst suggesting topics to a patient for ‘free associa-tion’, which the analyst then interprets trying to uncoverideas dominating the patient’s unconscious. The methodand the overemphasis on suppressed sexual desires werelargely discredited, but Freud’s impact on philosophy ofmind should not be underestimated. Freud questioned theassumption that ‘consciousness alone is mental’, thus in-fluencing logical behaviourism, but he also anticipatedthe ideas of modularity and the intentional character ofnon-conscious processes like dreaming. Although his no-tion of the unconscious is controversial, some data sup-port the idea of memory repression by executive controlmechanisms.

Further reading: Freud (1962)

Functional Role Semantics (FRS, conceptual, inferential, com-putational role semantics): a theory of content accordingto which the content of a mental representation (belief,concept) is constituted by its role in reasoning, its infer-ential or causal relations to other representations. FRS isa consequence of extending functionalism about mentalstates to the explanation of how intentional states like

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beliefs and desires acquire their content. It is the mostcommonly held theory of content whose proponents in-clude Gilbert Harman, Ned Block, Michael Devitt, BrianLoar and William Lycan (although their views differ as towhether it is the language of thought or an internalisedpublic language that is the representational medium).Other motivations for FRS include: Wittgenstein’s andSellars’ philosophy of language; Frege’s considerationthat reference alone is insufficient to explain the cogni-tive roles of beliefs (Christopher Peacocke); the consider-ation that the meaning of logical connectives (‘and’, ‘or’)is constituted by the inferences they warrant; and the in-tuition that the content of many abstract concepts likeinfinity is fixed only by their roles in reasoning. Objec-tions include the problem of holism (interdependency ofall concepts), the lack of an explanation of representa-tions’ informational content, and Twin-Earth exampleswhich suggest that functional identity does not entail theidentity of contentful states. This led to the developmentof molecularism and two-factor theories.

Functionalism: the view that mental states are constituted bythe totality of their functional or causal relations withother mental states, sensory inputs and behavioural out-puts. Thus being in pain is constituted by detecting a nox-ious stimulus, feeling anxious, thinking that somethingis wrong with one’s health, saying ‘ouch’, etc. Function-alism is the most widely held view on the mind–bodyproblem, but functional understanding of mental statesallows for two different positions in their relation to phys-icalism: machine functionalism and analytic functional-ism. However, both positions have to deal with the prob-lem of qualia (absent qualia, inverted spectrum) whichsuggests that functional identity does not entail qualita-tive identity. Other approaches include homuncular and

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teleological functionalism. The term ‘functionalism’ isalso used for functional role semantics.

Further reading: Block (1978); Lycan (1987)

G

Gestalt: perceived configuration arising from a spatial ar-rangement able to give rise to different interpretations. Ifyou look at an arrangement of lines and see a human face,this representation has a gestalt quality (due to the brain’stendency to compensate for degenerate stimuli). Gestaltor figure-ground switching, as in the famous duck-rabbitswitch, poses questions about the nature of visual con-sciousness and the mind’s structuring of perceptual ex-perience. The school of Gestalt psychology, founded byMax Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler in1910, rejected associationism and held that psychologicalstructures generally are more than sums of their parts. Al-though their view that gestalts exist in the world provederroneous, their study of visual illusion was an importantcontribution to perception research.

Gettier Cases: counterexamples to the view that knowledgeis justified true belief presented by Edmund Gettier. Thusyou may justifiably believe that someone likes dogs fromseeing him give a dog a piece of meat and your belief mayturn out to be true, but on this particular occasion theperson gave the dog the meat with a soporific inside soas to burgle its owners’ house. You have a justified truebelief but not knowledge.

Further reading: Gettier (1963)

Ghost in the Machine see Ryle, Gilbert

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Gibsonianism see Direct Perception

GOFAI: Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence.

Grandmother Cells see Neurons

Grice, H. Paul (1913–88): British philosopher, the author ofintention-based semantics and theory of conversationalimplicature. Proponents of the informational theory ofcontent make use of his notion of ‘natural meaning’. Theword ‘mean’ has different senses and the sense of ‘nat-ural meaning’ (‘indicator-meaning’) can be detected insuch ordinary sentences as ‘These spots mean measles’ or‘Smoke means fire’. Non-natural meaning is conventionalmeaning.

Further reading: Grice (1957)

H

Hallucination: the experience of having a perception of areal-world object when no such object is being perceived(Macbeth seeing a bloody dagger in front of him).

Hebb, Donald O. (1904–85): Canadian psychologist who ar-gued that to understand how the brain subserves psycho-logical functions is to understand how it represents ex-ternal events (learning and memory). He suggested thatbrain representations are groups of simultaneously activeinterconnected neurons (cell assemblies). If the activationof an assembly is sufficiently long, connections betweenits neurons become strengthened (‘neurons that fire to-gether wire together’). He also suggested that such rep-resentations are distributed among cell connections and

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that the same cells participate in subserving perceptionand memory storage.

Further reading: Hebb (1949)

Heterophenomenology see Dennett, Daniel C.

Heuristic: a method of solving problems for which there areno algorithms or which can be solved more quickly if onebypasses exhaustive serial search. Heuristics underlyingrealistic decision-making (like the recognition heuristic)are studied by theories of bounded rationality. Someresearchers in artificial intelligence believe that heuristicproblem-solving may provide a general theory of humancognition. But there is a question whether heuristics cancircumvent the frame problem: if a number of heuristicscan be applied to the same problem, then the decisionwhich heuristic to apply is itself sensitive to a system’sglobal properties.

Further reading: Gigerenzer et al. (1999)

Higher-Order Theories: representational theories of con-sciousness which identify it with reflexive or monitoringconsciousness. We often speak of conscious mental statesas states that we are aware of being in. According to thehigher-order thought (HOT) theory (David Rosenthal,Peter Carruthers), one’s mental state M is conscious if itis accompanied by a thought that one is in M, arrived atnon-inferentially. Thus being in pain is a conscious statefor you if you have the thought that you are in pain anddid not infer that thought from other thoughts or ob-servation of your behaviour. But this account appearsto deny consciousness to infants and animals becausethey cannot have higher-order thoughts. Thus the higher-order perception (HOP) theory which understands the ac-companying representation as internal scanning similar

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to perception may seem preferable (Locke, Armstrong,William Lycan). But that raises the question of what thisinner sense is. Besides, both theories must solve the ubiq-uity problem (if such representations were sufficient forconsciousness, computers would be conscious too).

Further reading: Lycan (1996); Carruthers (2000)

Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679): English philosopher, a de-fender of materialism. Hobbes held that mental pro-cesses can be explained in mechanical terms of addingand subtracting quantities in the brain (anticipating thecomputational theory of mind).

Further reading: Hobbes [1651] (1957)

Holism: the view that the whole has priority over its parts.Confirmation holism formulated by French physicistPierre Duhem (1861–1916) and Willard van OrmanQuine is the thesis that scientific theories stand the tri-bunal of evidence as whole systems of beliefs. But holismabout belief confirmation must be distinguished from se-mantic holism, the thesis that the content of a conceptdepends on the concept’s place within the whole systemof beliefs. Semantic holism is motivated by the view inphilosophy of language that the meaning of a sentence,hence a word, depends on its role in a language (oftenthe combination of confirmation holism with verifica-tionism about meaning), and the view that mental statesare individuated by their functional roles (functionalism).Holism of the mental seems highly plausible: if some-one has the belief that there is milk for the coffee in thefridge, they must have a whole lot of beliefs about fridges,coffee, milk and relations between them. But if this en-tails semantic holism, something seems to be wrong, forit follows that no two people, nor the same individual atdifferent times, share concepts. This conclusion appears

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counterintuitive: people can debate, for example, whetherhumans are animals or not, but if their concept human

depended on their whole systems of beliefs, they wouldnot be even talking about the same thing. Semantic holismthus leads to scepticism about folk-psychological gener-alisation (interpretivism, eliminativism), and to avoid itone might consider atomism and molecularism.

Further reading: Fodor and Lepore (1992)

Holistic: sensitive to the global properties of a system as awhole.

Homuncular Functionalism: William Lycan’s term forDennett’s view that the intentionality of complex systemscan be explained functionally by decomposing them intohierarchically organised subsystems (‘homunculi’).

Homunculus Argument see Ryle’s Regress

Hume, David (1711–76): Scottish philosopher, a major pro-ponent of naturalism. Hume was the first to proposethe use of empirical methods in studying the mind, bywhich he understood discovering general truths aboutthe way humans think, feel and act (empiricism, rep-resentationalism). Hume distinguished between sensoryimpressions (perceptual representations under which healso included sensations and emotions) and ideas derivingfrom them. Operating on individual impressions imagi-nation abstracts general ideas of things, combines simpleideas into complex ones and forms associations betweenthem (associationism). However, there are no grounds forthinking that reason can be trusted to reveal the natureof things, and all ideas reflecting matters of fact mustbe traceable to impressions. This scepticism underliesHume’s projectivism about colour, causality and the self.

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As we get no impressions of causal connections, causationis the notion the mind projects onto ‘loose and separate’events as a matter of habit. And as there is no necessaryconnection between events, we cannot know that futurepatterns will follow past patterns and believe justifiablyin causal laws of nature (Hume’s problem of induction).Hume’s scepticism also extends to his views on passionsand the will. The term ‘Humean supervenience’, coinedby Lewis, refers to the view that everything supervenes onthe spatio-temporal arrangement of local intrinsic prop-erties.

Further reading: Hume [1748] (1994)

Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938): German philosopher, thefounder of phenomenology. Husserl held that the aimof phenomenology is to discover the preconditions ofexperience and reason through a first-person descriptivestudy of consciousness. Intentionality, or ‘consciousnessof’, the creation of senses in mental acts which tran-scends ‘experiential givenness’ can be studied in abstrac-tion from the actual existence of things (both veridicalperception and hallucination exhibit intentionality). InIdeas, his major work, he describes phenomenology asa pure science of essences (an eidetic science), whichrelates to empirical psychology as geometry to naturalsciences. He denounces naturalism and the naive naturalattitude which unreflectingly posits material objects. Thephenomenological attitude, in contrast, involves the ex-ercise of epoche, the systematic bracketing of all assump-tions about the external reality, so that phenomenologicalreduction could reveal the essences of pure mental pro-cesses. Husserl maintains that every intentional processcomprises immanent to it hyle (uninterpreted sense-data)and noesis, an act of sense-bestowal, the structuring ofhyletic moments by noetic components. Parallel to noesis

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is noema, which is not inherent to mental processes. Thefull noema of an intentional process includes a contentor matter (the noematic what) and its mode of given-ness or quality (given in perception, liking, judgement,certainty). In the case of tree-perception, its noema is the‘perceived tree as perceived’. As the phenomenological re-sidium discovered by transcendental reduction, noemataare abstract entities or senses determining objects of pos-sible experiences. This transcendental idealism was re-jected by other phenomenologists, and in his later workHusserl emphasised the role of intersubjectivity in consti-tuting objects of our life-world (Lebenswelt).

Further reading: Husserl [1913] (1982)

I

Idealism: the view that everything existing is mental in nature.Idealism is traced to Plato’s theory of universals as pre-ceding things, the view later developed by Leibniz, Kant,Frege and Husserl. But this is transcendental idealismwhich does not deny the existence of the physical worldand must be distinguished from the subjective idealism ofBerkeley (usually referred to as ‘idealism’), according towhich things exist only inside the mind. It is further dis-tinguished from the absolute idealism of Hegel and othernineteenth-century idealists.

Ideas: elements of thought, concepts. The notion exhibits aduality between ideas as ideal abstract entities which canbe apprehended by the mind (transcendental idealism)and ideas as entities within the mind. Early modern repre-sentationalism, modelling thinking on perception, viewedideas as objects present to the mind or mental images(‘seeing in the mind’s eye’).

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Identity, Numeric versus Qualitative: two things are qualita-tively identical when they share all their properties. Theyare numerically identical when they are one thing ratherthan two.

Identity Theory (type–type or mind–body identity theory): aspecies of physicalism, the view that every mental prop-erty is identical with some physical (brain) property. Firstsuggested by E. G. Boring in 1933, it was developed inthe 1950s by U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart in Australia,and Herbert Feigl in the USA, supplanting dualism andbehaviourism. Later the identity thesis was elaboratedin the causal theory of mind. Prior to its appearance, itwas commonly thought that identity statements expressnecessary a priori truths. Influenced by scientific devel-opments, identity theorists argued that statements withpsychological terms (‘consciousness is a brain process’,‘pain is C-fibres firing’) are no different from statementslike ‘lightning is electrical discharge’ and similarly ex-press contingent a posteriori identities to be establishedby empirical investigation. Other arguments includedconsiderations of simplicity, parsimony, unity of science(see Nagelian reduction) and avoidance of nomologicaldanglers. The theory lost some of its appeal in the 1970sdue to Kripke’s analysis of identity, arguments fromqualia, the anomalousness of the mental and multiple re-alisability. This led many philosophers to functionalism,whereas others turned to eliminative materialism. Still,the identity theory is a powerful view, and it was recentlyresurrected in the phenomenal concepts approach whichbecame known as new wave materialism or a posterioriphysicalism.

Illusion: the instance when the perceived object appears otherthan it really is (you thought your shirt had spots on

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it, but they really were patches of light). The argumentfrom illusion (generally, all kind of perceptual error in-cluding hallucination and perceptual relativity, when anobject appears different from different perspectives) wasalready used in ancient philosophy as an argument forscepticism, but is usually traced to Berkeley. The pos-sibility of illusion and the subjective indistinguishabilityof illusory and veridical experiences leads indirect repre-sentationalism and the sense-datum theory to posit inter-mediary mental entities which constitute the immediateobjects of perception. This conclusion may be avoidedif one treats illusion as an instance of misrepresentationparasitic on veridical perception. There is also an issue ofpersistent illusions like the Muller-Lyer illusion (two linesof equal length but with outward or inward directed ar-rows at their ends appear unequal) where no amount ofknowledge can make the illusory experience disappear.They pose questions about the interaction between ex-ternal world input and internal processing constraints inproducing perceptual experience (gestalt perception, per-ceptual completion phenomena).

Further reading: Wade (2004)

Image Theory: the view that ideas (concepts) are mentalimages. Already found in Aristotle, it is particularlyassociated with Hume. Despite its intuitive attractiveness(if someone asks you to think of a cat, you are likely to ex-perience a cat-image), the theory does not work. Imagesare like pictures and lack constituent structure to sup-port the systematicity of thought: pictures can be cut intopieces any way one likes, but these pieces are not theirinterpretable parts, because there is no principled way ofputting them together to form new pictures. Besides, thereare no images for many concepts (negative concepts likenot-a-cat or disjunctive concepts like a-cat-or-a-dog),

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and images themselves require interpretation (the famousduck-rabbit example, discussed by Wittgenstein). A moresophisticated modern version of the theory is found in theidea of Karl Pribram that representation in the brain isholographic in the same way as the content that is con-tributed by individual points comprising a hologram isnot fixed but varies depending on its place within thewhole. This proposal, however, meets with the same ob-jection from systematicity.

Imagery: the capacity to experience images, have quasi-perceptual experiences. Images can be experienced in allsensory modalities, but discussions usually concentrateon visual images experienced as internal pictures thatcan be scanned, rotated, zoomed, etc. Imagery is closelyconnected with perception: imagining involves the acti-vation of the visual cortex, although images are usuallyless determinate in content than actual perceptions. Itplays an important role in memory (spatial recall) andaction planning (simulating possible experiences off-line).Many discussions concern the issue of whether imageryis based on symbolic representation or whether there is aseparate kind of imagistic representation. It arose due toStephen Kosslyn who discovered a timing consistency inmental scanning and rotation experiments: the amount oftime that people take to manipulate an image (for exam-ple, ‘walk’ between locations) is directly proportionateto the amount of time similar behaviour would require inactual situations. He concluded that images themselveshave spatial properties isomorphic to those of the repre-sented situation and that imagery is not subserved by thesymbolic code (in the representation london is further

from glasgow than edinburgh, the distances betweensymbols are not themselves physically bigger or smaller).This conclusion was questioned by Zenon Pylyshyn who

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showed that with a different experimental design wheresubjects are asked to switch quickly between locations thedistance effect disappears and may thus be due not to aspecific representational medium but to the way subjectsgear their imaginings to various tasks.

Further reading: Pylyshyn (2003)

Imagination: historically, the faculty of the mind responsi-ble for thinking and concept formation (image theory).The notion was prominent in theories of perception andepistemology up to Kant, but later it became tied withquestions of creativity. Today, the imagination is usuallyunderstood as a species of thought (thinking of possibil-ities) which may or may not be accompanied by mentalimagery.

Indeterminacy: the property characterising those states of af-fairs that are neither A nor B. Arguments from our in-ability to determine what a state is (epistemology) to theinherent indeterminacy of that state (ontology) are com-mon practice in philosophy. Thus, drawing on the inde-terminacy of translation, Daniel Dennett argues that theproblem of functional indeterminacy does not arise forthe teleological theory of content because there is no factof the matter which could decide the correct ascription ofcontent to sublinguistic representations. Although Den-nett in right in pointing out the problem that inscrutabil-ity of reference poses for naturalised semantics, it doesnot follow that content itself is indeterminate becausecomputations can be carried out only on binary states.The same problem arises for analytic functionalism whichholds that the content of intentional states is indetermi-nate but that they nonetheless participate in the causa-tion of behaviour (with this view analytic functionalismcomes close to interpretivism). Appeals to indeterminacy

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are also found in arguments in favour of non-reductivephysicalism and free will where they are tied with theindeterminacy of the quantum world and the existenceof probabilistic causal laws. However, the same reason-ing should also lead one to conclude the indeterminacyof higher levels of reality. Consider a simple experimentfrom thermodynamics where a single molecule travels be-tween two communicating vessels. When one closes thepassage between them, one cannot say in which of thevessels the molecule is. Does it follow that its position isontologically indeterminate?

Indeterminacy of Translation: the most famous expressionof the idea of indeterminacy associated with Quineand Davidson. The thesis says that the totality of peo-ple’s linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour leaves itindeterminate what the correct translation of their ut-terances is. One reason for the indeterminacy of transla-tion is inscrutability of reference. Another reason is thatrational interpretation of people’s behaviour, because ofthe holism of the mental, leaves it open what particularbeliefs should be ascribed to them, if any.

Indexical: an expression whose meaning cannot be specifiedoutside a particular context (‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’,‘yesterday’).

Individualism see Internalism

Individuation: establishing what tokens belong to the sametype. The problem of individuation is the problem of de-termining the criteria of identity for things of the samekind.

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Information: the interpretable quantity of data transmittedfrom a source to a receiver along a communication chan-nel. The notions of information theory can be employedfor thinking about content and mental representation. Informulating the informational theory of content, FredDretske modified Claude Shannon’s definition of infor-mation to account for the informational content of rep-resentational states in terms of conditional probabilities.The idea is that a representational state R carries infor-mation about something having property P if R is reli-ably caused by or covaries with the presence of P (theprobability that P given R is 1 on the scale from 0 to 1).Since such correlations are found throughout nature (thenumber of rings on a tree carries information about thattree’s age), this notion of information is naturalistic andnon-intentional. Electrocommunications also provide ananalogy for understanding the distinction between con-tents and vehicles of representations: in an electrical de-vice the carrier of a signal is the vehicle, the signal it carriesis the content and the information carried correlates withchanges in the physical state of the carrier.

Informational Atomism: a theory of concepts proposed byFodor. It holds that concepts are symbols in the languageof thought which receive their content only fromthe mind’s causal connections with the environment(informational theory of content, atomism). It contrastswith other theories by viewing lexical concepts as prim-itive or having no internal structure. (As these theoriesstem from Frege’s distinction between sense and refer-ence, it denies that concepts have senses but admits non-Fregean modes of presentation.) Its opponents objectthat it cannot explain connections between concepts inthought (but it can employ Carnap’s meaning postulates)or their cognitive content (the ‘Fido’-Fido fallacy: saying

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that ‘Fido’ means Fido does not explain how people rep-resent Fido in thought), that it allows for the existence ofpunctuate minds (minds with only one belief; the prob-lem of the holism of the mental) and that it assumesradical concept innateness.

Informational Encapsulation see Modularity

Informational Theory of Content (informational seman-tics): uses the notion of information to explain naturalis-tically how intentional states can have content. Roughly,one can say that a mental representation R has F as itscontent if it carries information about Fs. That is, con-tents of representations are determined by their causes:for example, the representation cat is about cats becausecats cause it. However, something else may cause cat

to be tokened (the problem of misrepresentation). Forthis reason Dretske first restricted content-fixation to co-variance during the ‘learning period’ when systematic to-kenings of cat occur in the presence of cats and errorsare corrected. However, it is possible that during this pe-riod dogs, had there been any around, would also havecaused cat and that cat means cat or dog (the disjunc-tion problem). A different approach ties content-fixationto epistemically optimal or ideal conditions (originated byDennis Stampe in his causal theory of content, defendedby Robert Stalnaker and, briefly, by Jerry Fodor). Thusthe representation cat is about cats if it systematicallycovaries with the presence of cats under epistemicallyoptimal conditions (good illumination, suitable distance).This allows for misrepresentation because tokenings thatoccur in suboptimal conditions do not count. However,different representations require different optimal condi-tions to fix their content in a determinate way (cats arebest seen in good lighting, but fireflies are not). This makes

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the solution depend on the content of representations andsheds doubt on its being sufficiently naturalistic. Theseapproaches are known as ‘type 1 theories’, because theytie content-fixation to special types of situations. Otherapproaches include Fodor’s asymmetric dependence the-ory and Dretske’s informational-teleological theory.

Innate: not learned.

Innateness: the property in virtue of which certain traits in-variably but following a specific course appear in develop-ment, not being fully determined by the input from the en-vironment. To understand the idea of innateness one canconsider the notions of maturation (one would not saythat the emergence of stereopsis at around four monthsof age is learned from the environment) and critical pe-riod (as Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel showed, thecentral visual pathway of the monkey brain is ‘wired upand ready to function at birth’ but following early visualdeprivation within a short period of time the connectionswill be lost or modified; see also cognitive ethology). Theresurrection of rationalism about cognition is largely dueto Chomsky whose ideas were later confirmed by studiesshowing dissociation between syntactic knowledge andgeneral intelligence (the Williams syndrome) and DerekBickerton’s research on creole languages (see also tacitknowledge). Yet the view that there are innate represen-tations in the brain continues to remain controversial,especially when it comes to concept innateness: how cancomputer and soap be innate? But one should remem-ber that nativists acknowledge the need for environmen-tal impact, and the real question is whether differencesin the conceptual repertoires of different creatures can beexplained by differences in their general learning abilities

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without presupposing the existence of innate constraintson representations that are potentially available to them.

Further reading: Carruthers et al. (2005)

Input Problem (the chauvinism–liberalism dilemma): arisesfor machine functionalism with respect to characterisingthe relevant subset of sensory inputs that an organismmust receive in order to have the right functional organi-sation (for example, to count as a pain-feeling organism).If inputs are themselves characterised functionally, thenany mindless structure could satisfy the criteria for men-tality (see absent qualia). However, if inputs are charac-terised relative to human physiology, this leads to chau-vinism by excluding simple organisms and hypotheticalbeings from having the relevant mental states. It is thusunclear how a mental state could be given an adequatefunctional characterisation.

Further reading: Block (1978)

Inscrutability of Reference: the thesis developed by Quineand Davidson (see radical interpretation) that no em-pirical evidence available to the radical interpreter canuniquely determine the reference of words used by speak-ers of a language. Quine considers the case of an in-terpreter working with a tribe who hears his informantutter ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit runs past. He cannot knowwhether his informant refers to the rabbit, an undetachedrabbit part or a rabbit time-slice because all these inter-pretations are compatible with the same assignment oftruth-values to the informant’s utterances, leaving refer-ence underdetermined. The thesis thus depends on thepresupposition that the nature of thought is linguistic,and in his later work Quine explicitly endorses onto-logical relativity holding that reference is relative to a

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language. Intrigued by this issue, developmental psychol-ogists began the study of constraints regulating lexicalacquisition.

Further reading: Quine (1969)

Instrumentalism: the view of the mind according to whichquestions about the intrinsic nature of intentional states(beliefs, desires) do not make sense and one should beconcerned only with establishing criteria for their cor-rect attribution as theoretical entities. It is associated withDennett’s conception of the intentional stance.

Intelligence: a general ability required for complex cogni-tive tasks like language processing, analogical reasoning,mathematical and logical reasoning, creative reasoning(musical and artistic), theoretical and practical problem-solving, playing chess, etc. Although the term began to beused only in the early twentieth century with the develop-ment of mental testing, it shares with its historical prede-cessors, ‘intellect’ and ‘reason’, the features of rationality,effectiveness and flexibility. Recently psychologists ques-tioned the assumption of one ability, suggesting that intel-ligence is multiple and modularised, which would explainthe existence of idiots savants, people talented in one arealike mathematics but otherwise mentally retarded.

Intension: the principle by which things fall under concepts,by which concepts that apply to the same things (havethe same extension) are distinguished (often understoodas the function from possible worlds to extensions). Thuscreature with a heart and creature with a kidney

have the same extension, but their intensions are different.

Intensional: (1) sensitive to intensions; (2) represented asbeing a certain way, under some aspect. Creatures

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sensitive to intensional distinctions would distinguish be-tween equilateral triangle and equiangular trian-

gle even though all equilateral triangles are necessarilyequiangular.

Intensionality: sensitivity to intensions. Intensionality(-with-an-s) is considered to be the criterion of intentionality(-with-a-t) because only those creatures can be said to haveconcepts or genuine intentional states if they can repre-sent, for example, cats qua cats rather than merely re-spond selectively to cats. The problem of intensional-ity (the fine-grainedness problem, the problem of grain)arises for naturalised semantics because causation, co-variation and biological function are too coarse-grainedto take care of intensional distinctions. That is, the prob-lem is to explain how a mental representation R can rep-resent something as F without representing it as G whenthe properties F and G are equivalent (nomically, meta-physically or logically).

Intention: a mental plan to perform some action. Intentionsare what makes pieces of behaviour actions of rationalthinking agents, and the capacity to form intentions iscentral to our practical reasoning and rationality. As in-tentional states, intentions have satisfaction conditions(they are satisfied if they cause the projected actions).But the simple view of intentional action as an actionthat the agent had an intention to perform poses prob-lems. Thus one may intend to perform an action (increasethe company’s profits) which, as one knows, will havecertain side effects (it will squeeze a lot of small compa-nies out of business) but those are not intended by theagent for he has no desire to cause them. Is causing sideeffects an instance of intentional action? Another prob-lem is that of deviant causal chains: an assassin has an

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intention to kill a businessman but on his way to the jobhe drops a banana skin on which the businessman, tak-ing the same path later, slips, breaks his neck and dies.The killer has brought about the killing, but was it anintentional action? Many people feel that the intentionmust be connected to the action in the right way to makeit intentional action but this connection is hard to spellout. This difficulty is discussed by Searle in terms of priorintention (preceding action) and intention-in-action, themental part of one’s bodily movement (close to volition).

Further reading: Lepore and Van Gulick (1991)

Intentional: (1) exhibiting intentionality, representational; (2)carried out with a certain intention.

Intentional Laws see Causal Laws

Intentional Object: that which is represented in thought. Itdoes not have to be a really existing object but neither isit an entity in the head. Brentano’s view of intentionalityas a quasi-relation was quite similar to the current view,but some of his followers, most notably Austrian philoso-pher Alexius von Meinong (1853–1920), thought of non-existent intentional objects as in some sense real becausethought can be directed towards them.

Intentional Psychology see Folk Psychology

Intentional Realism see Realism

Intentional Stance: a strategy that, according to Dennett, weuse in explaining and predicting the behaviour of com-plex systems by attributing to them intentional stateslike beliefs. Dennett rejects the distinction between orig-inal and derived intentionality: all attributions of beliefs

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and desires are instruments for predicting behaviour(instrumentalism). The intentional stance is contrastedwith the physical stance used to explain systems’ be-haviour in terms of physical laws and the design stanceused to explain how designed systems (artefacts, bodyorgans) work. Any complex system’s behaviour can beexplained with the help of the lower stances but, givenour cognitive limitations, the intentional stance max-imises our predictive power. Thus not only ourselves butcomputers too can be treated as intentional systems (thebehaviour of a normally functioning chess-playing com-puter is more easily predicted when you think of it as‘wanting’ to checkmate your king), and Dennett rejectsthe Chinese room argument saying that the system inquestion is too slow to count as an intelligent thinker.However, Dennett says that his view is not fictionalism:beliefs and desires are idealised ‘real patterns’ discerniblethrough the interpretation provided by the intentionalstance (interpretivism). This position becomes clearer inhis later work where he endorses adaptationism to groundthe intentionality of complex systems (their optimal de-sign) in the operation of natural selection.

Further reading: Dennett (1987)

Intentional States: those mental states that possess intention-ality, that are directed at the world (beliefs, thoughts,judgements, opinions, desires, wishes, fears, etc.). Beliefsare paradigmatic intentional states: they have content(are about things), their content can be stated in a sen-tence expressing a proposition, they have satisfactionconditions (can be true or false) and they involve a cer-tain psychological attitude. Thus prototypical intentionalstates are propositional attitudes. A central question iswhether there really are such mental entities as beliefsand desires which explain people’s behaviour in virtue of

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their content. The positive answer is intentional realism(folk psychology, functionalism). Anti-realism includesbehaviourism, instrumentalism, fictionalism, eliminativematerialism and epiphenomenalism, while interpretivismis partly realism and partly anti-realism. Searle distin-guishes between directions of fit and directions of cau-sation for intentional states. Thus beliefs and perceptionshave the mind-to-world direction of fit but the world-to-mind direction of causation, whereas desires andintentions have the world-to-mind direction of fit but themind-to-world direction of causation (intentions causeactions, but the world must ‘conform’ to intention tomake it feasible). For Searle, however, intentionality issecondary to consciousness, which is an unusual view to-day because beliefs can obviously be non-conscious, andone can view non-conscious (unconscious, subdoxastic)states as intentional or representational. This understand-ing of intentional states raises important issues about therelation between intentional and phenomenal propertiesof perceptual experiences, sensations and emotions.

Intentionalism: see Representationalism about consciousness

Intentionality: mind’s directedness at objects and states of af-fairs, the property of some mental states (thoughts, be-liefs, desires) to be about something, their ‘aboutness’.Originating in medieval philosophy, the term was res-urrected by Brentano who viewed the ‘intentional inexis-tence of an object’ as one of the marks of the mental. Thismeans that intentional states always have something astheir object (intentional object). But this poses the ques-tion of the ontological status of intentional objects, for themind can be directed at non-existent things (you can thinkabout the Golden Mountain without there being any inthe world). This makes intentionality a peculiar kind of

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relation (one that does not require the existence of bothrelata) and the issue was differently addressed by Husserl,Frege and Russell. The relational character of intention-ality was then explored in the causal theory of reference,and the next step was Roderick Chisholm’s view that in-tensionality(-with-an-s) or ‘format-sensitivity’ is centralto intentionality(-with-a-t). Many contemporary theoriesof intentionality distinguish between original intentional-ity exhibited by human minds and derived intentionalitythat characterises sentences of natural languages. Under-standing intentionality in terms of mental representation,some philosophers try to find a place for it in the natu-ral world (naturalised semantics) whereas others make itdependent on consciousness (see consciousness, theoriesof).

Further reading: Chisholm (1957)

Interaction Problem: a problem for interactionism, whichmust explain how the mental, being different in kind fromthe physical, can nonetheless effect changes in the physi-cal world.

Interactionism (Cartesian interactionist dualism): the doc-trine originated by Descartes that the mental and ma-terial substances interact in a certain brain location (forDescartes, the pineal gland) through which the mind re-ceives sensations and initiates voluntary action. With thegrowing realisation that science requires causal closure ofthe physical, interactionism, which was a very widespreadview before that time, almost completely disappeared inthe twentieth century.

Internalism (individualism): the view that the content of in-tentional states (beliefs, desires) relevant to the explana-tion of behaviour is fully determined by factors internal to

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an individual. Internalism was originated by Fodor (laterconverted to externalism) under the name of methodolog-ical solipsism as the principle that cognitive psychology(and the computational theory of mind) should concernitself exclusively with what goes on inside people’s headsand disregard their external environment because onlyinternal states can be causes of behaviour and other men-tal states. To resolve the conflict between the relevanceof content to behaviour (the representational theory ofmind) and the Twin-Earth argument which shows thatintentional states have environmentally dependent broadcontent, one must isolate a special kind of non-relationalnarrow content which wholly depends (supervenes) onan individual’s internal states. As a principle of expla-nation in cognitive science, internalism finds support inthe brains in vats argument and such non-psychologicalanalogies as that to find cure for a burn one does notneed to know what caused it but only the local effects ithas on the damaged area. A different argument in favourof internalism was offered by Lewis and other propo-nents of analytic functionalism. They argue that becauseour beliefs are largely de se, beliefs with narrow contentare more fundamental psychologically, and beliefs withbroad content can be understood in terms of beliefs withnarrow content plus the history of one’s causal connec-tions to the world (deflationism about broad content).Still another defence of internalism is to question the va-lidity of Twin-Earth and arthritis thought experiments.

Further reading: Fodor (1980)

Interpretivism (interpretationism): the view that possession ofintentional states (beliefs, desires) is constituted by thefact that a suitably placed and fully informed interpreterwould ascribe them to subjects in order to interpret theirbehaviour. It opposes the idea of first-person authority

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and is associated with Quine’s and Davidson’s theory ofradical interpretation, and Dennett’s conception of theintentional stance.

Introspection: observation of one’s own mental states andprocesses, ‘looking inwards’. Though introspection is of-ten unreliable, and many states and processes are not in-trospectively accessible (sentence parsing), it remains im-portant in studying cognition (‘protocol analyses’) and,especially so, phenomenal consciousness.

Introspective Psychology: the first school of experimental psy-chology founded by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany in the1860s and developed in the USA by his student EdwardB. Titchener who, as some argue, simplified Wundt. Bythe 1920s it had been superseded by behaviourism.

Intertheoretic Reduction: establishment of relations betweenelements of two theories so that those of the higher-leveltheory would be explained through those of the lower-level theory. Is called ‘nomological reduction’ when itis held that theory construction is inseparable fromformulating causal laws. Nagelian reduction is oftentaken as its prototype, but this view is challenged by newwave reductionism.

Inverted Earth: Ned Block’s argument against functionalismand representationalism about consciousness, a modifi-cation of inverted spectrum, pertaining to show that ex-periences with the same phenomenal character may havedifferent functional roles and representational contents.Inverted Earth is different from Earth in two respects:(1) all colours are complementary to those on Earth (grassis red, the sky is yellow); (2) its inhabitants use invertedcolour words (‘red’ means green). A person from Earth

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is unknowingly transferred to Inverted Earth and colourinverters are inserted into her eyes. Upon awakening shewon’t know anything has changed. But as time passesand she gets used to the language and physical environ-ment of that planet, the representational contents of hermental states will become just like those of the other in-habitants (she will start thinking that the sky is yellow).Thus although her qualia remain the same, she becomesfunctionally and representationally inverted relative toher earlier self.

Further reading: Block (1990); Lycan (1996)

Inverted Spectrum (inverted qualia): an argument in favour ofcolour subjectivism and against functionalism. It is con-ceivable that two individuals can be functionally identi-cal, even though one of them sees red things as green andgreen things as red. Thus functionalism cannot explainthe phenomenal character of experience. However, onemay object that there will be functional differences as thetwo individuals will have different beliefs about colourand their colour words will have different meanings.

J

Jackson, Frank (b.1943): Australian philosopher, the authorof the knowledge argument and a proponent of analyticfunctionalism. Until recently he defended the sense-datumtheory of perception and dualism about qualia. Jacksonstill holds that knowledge argument must be interpretedontologically rather than epistemically but thinks that hisearlier thesis of non-deducibility is wrong. If physicalismis the most scientifically respectable approach to the mind,and a priori entailment the only conceptually sound way

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of grounding reduction, then a priori physicalism mustbe true and qualia must be deducible from physical facts(as liquidity is deducible from molecular structure). Thegrounds for such reduction are provided by representa-tionalism about consciousness.

Further reading: Jackson (2004)

James, William (1842–1910): American philosopher, thefounder of American psychology. James’s first work wason the theory of emotions and criticism of epiphenome-nalism. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) the themeof consciousness comes even more to the foreground,and James isolates the permanent flow of experience, ‘thestream of consciousness’ (opposed to Wundt’s ‘successionof ideas’) as the most concrete fact of which we are aware.He argues that the unity of consciousness cannot resultfrom the interaction of many components of a system andconcludes that consciousness cannot be distributed overmatter (‘combination problem’), but he also contemplatesthe possibility of consciousness in individual neurons.Later this led him to neutral monism (Russell’s term forJames’s ‘radical empiricism’), although some researchersargue that sometimes he comes closer to panpsychism.James also defended pragmatism as the view that beliefs(including religious beliefs) are true if they work.

Further reading: James [1890] (1981); [1912] (1976)

K

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German philosopher, thefounder of critical philosophy. In his later writings, Kantdistinguished four types of knowledge along the dimen-sions of a priori, a posteriori, analytic and synthetic.

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Analytic a priori judgements, where predicates are ‘con-tained’ in their subjects (‘father is the male parent’) are notinformative. It is the synthetic a priori that sets the pre-conditions and limits of naturalistic inquiry. We haveknowledge of things existing in space and time becausethese two categories and those of object, causation andthe experiencing self are part of the schema imposedby reason on experience. The sensory manifold (phys-ical energies bombarding our senses) is an incoherentflux which becomes experience only when imagination(Einbildungskraft) synthesises it into representations thatfall under concepts. Because of the transcendental natureof the manifold and the categories reason can only de-liver knowledge of things as they appear to us (phenom-ena) but not as they are in themselves (noumena). On theother hand, without sensory experience no object wouldbe given to us. Thus reason cannot legitimately claim tohave any knowledge of those things which have no basisin experience, including reason itself.

Further reading: Kant [1781] (1997)

Kim, Jaegwon (b.1934): American philosopher, initially a ma-jor figure in the formulation of the idea of superve-nience and supervenient causation, then a proponent ofreductive physicalism. He argues for the reduction ofintentional mental properties, but accepts partial irre-ducibility of qualia and qualia epiphenomenalism. (dif-ferences between qualia, like those between the greenquale and the red quale are functionalisable, but theirsubjective character, like the greenness of green, are notand in that respect they are irreducible).

Further reading: Kim (2005)

KK-Thesis: the thesis that if the subject S knows that P, thenS knows that S knows that P.

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Knowledge: justified true belief, according to the commonview traced back to Plato. This view was shatteredby Gettier cases and recently attacked by TimothyWilliamson who argues that no decompositional analysisof knowledge would be correct because of general prob-lems with definitions and the distinct causal connectionbetween knowledge and behaviour. You may have a justi-fied true belief that you need to be at some place at sometime (you were provisionally told so and are expected),but without knowing that you may well decide not to go.Williamson also holds that knowledge (like other factivepropositional attitudes) is best understood as a mentalstate with broad content. It is a prime state that cannotbe factorised into external (contributed by the world) andinternal (confined to an individual’s mind/brain) compo-nents because it does not allow for any recombination ofthe two components other than the existing one, whichfavours externalism. Critics object to this analysis of thefactorising strategy and point out that, as in the caseof disjunctivism, the account runs against the problemof introducing radically different explanations for sub-jectively indistinguishable states of knowledge and not-knowledge.

Further reading: Williamson (2000)

Knowledge Argument: an argument advanced by Jackson toshow that physicalism must be false because knowledgeof all relevant physical facts throws no light on the qual-itative character of experience (qualia). Imagine a super-scientist Mary who knows all the physical facts about thebrain and colour vision but has never left her black-and-white room (she has been painted black and white, too).One day she leaves that room and sees the world in its fullcolour. Does she learn anything new about colour? Theanswer seems to be yes for she discovers what it’s like to

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see red or green. But physicalism cannot allow that Maryacquire any new knowledge. Reactions to the argumentinclude: (1) saying that Mary acquires new knowledge-how, but not knowledge-that; (2) saying that she acquiresnew phenomenal concepts which constitute new knowl-edge but pick out the same properties as her old scientificconcepts; (3) seeing the problem as misconceived becausephysicalism is correct for reasons of the causal closure ofthe physical (but Jackson accepted qualia epiphenome-nalism); (4) viewing it as an epistemological, not an on-tological problem.

Further reading: Jackson (1982); Ludlow et al. (2004)

Knowledge under Entailment see Entailment

Knowledge, Declarative: in psychology, knowledge of factsand events stored in declarative memory and expressedwith the help of declarative sentences.

Knowledge, Procedural: in psychology, knowledge of howto execute procedures underlying acquired motor skills,habits and behaviours. It is stored in procedural memory.

Knowledge, Propositional see Knowledge-that

Knowledge, Tacit see Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge-How: the kind of knowledge that seems to un-derlie many of our physical activities and can be statedwith the help of a how-clause (Mary knows how to tie hershoes). Arguing that much intelligent human behaviourdoes not require knowledge-that to guide it, Ryle postu-lated knowledge-how, an ability or complex of disposi-tions. Although the dispositional analysis was rejected,some philosophers find the distinction useful and view

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knowledge-how as extending beyond procedural knowl-edge to include linguistic competence or mathematicalproof which is then viewed as a kind of action not me-diated by internal representations. Knowledge-how wasalso used by Lawrence Nemirow and David Lewis asa response to the knowledge argument: upon releaseMary acquires not some new propositional knowledge,but an ability to recognise, imagine and remember dif-ferent colours (the ability hypothesis). One problem withknowledge-how is that it cannot be identified with abilitybecause one may know how to do something while hav-ing lost the ability to do it (Carl Ginet). Besides, the anal-ysis of embedded questions reveals no important differ-ence between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. JasonStanley and Timothy Williamson argue that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that involving demonstra-tive content (to know how to do something is to knowthat w is the way to do it). Thus, if Mary’s ability to imag-ine involves knowledge-how, she must have acquired newknowledge-that.

Further reading: Lewis (1988); Stanley and Williamson(2001)

Knowledge-that: propositional knowledge statable with thehelp of a declarative sentence expressing a proposition(Mary knows that snow is white). The fact that someknowledge is an instance of knowledge-that requiresneither that the subject contemplate a proposition priorto initiating an action (it may be automatic) nor that theybe capable of consciously representing or linguisticallyexpressing the whole sequence of elements constitutingsuch a proposition.

Kripke, Saul A. (b.1940): American philosopher, the authorof an important critique of the identity theory (‘Kripkeproblem’, ‘Kripke’s modal argument’). Extending his

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causal theory of reference to natural kind terms (essen-tialism) and viewing them as rigid designators picking outthe same objects in all possible worlds, Kripke introducedinto philosophy the notion of a posteriori necessity. Be-cause theoretical identity statements like ‘light is a streamof photons’ involve rigid designators, they are a posteri-ori and necessary (they are necessarily true if shown tobe true by empirical investigation). Identity theorists ar-gued that the identifications of mental states with brainstates are similar to the identifications of physical science.Kripke objects. The reference of ‘light’ is fixed by light’saccidental property – ‘that which helps us see’, but ‘lightis a stream of photons’ captures light’s essential property.Even if we could not see, or if alien creatures receivedtheir visual impressions from sound waves, the referenceof our word ‘light’ would not change. However, things aredifferent with mind–brain identity statements like ‘painis C-fibres firing’. The reference of ‘pain’ is fixed by pain’sessential property because to be pain is to feel like pain.And it is logically possible that C-fibres firing could haveexisted without feeling like pain or that pain could haveexisted in the absence of C-fibres firing. But if this were agenuine theoretical identity, it would be necessary. Simi-lar views are developed today by David Chalmers in histheory of phenomenal consciousness.

Further reading: Kripke (1980)

L

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51): French doctor andphilosopher, a defender of materialism. In L’Homme ma-chine (1748, Man a Machine) he argued that ‘irritation’of the nerves can explain both reflexive and intelligentbehaviour, in animals and humans.

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Language and Thought see Thought and Language

Language of Thought (LOT, Mentalese): a hypothesis aboutthe form of mental representation advanced by Fodor.Noting the sensitivity of propositional attitudes (beliefs,desires) to combinatorial structure unaccounted for bymachine functionalism, Fodor proposed to view them asrelations between subjects and mental representations.Thus Mary may believe that she saw a tiger or desire tosee one but both these states are about the same thing. Themetaphor of belief and desire boxes captures this aspectof the hypothesis. LOT is the medium of thought whichshares important properties with natural language: it con-tains symbols or representational atoms (‘words’) which,following recursive rules, can be put together to formcomplex representations (‘sentences’). LOT is not identi-cal to any natural language but is innate and prior to nat-ural language (there must be a representational mediumin which one could construct logical forms of such am-biguous sentences as ‘the chicken is ready to eat’ in orderto understand their intended interpretations). A commonobjection is that LOT cannot explain representation innon-linguistic animals and infra-linguistic infants or low-level perceptual processing because these do not have theform of natural language sentences (hence, sententialism).However, the objection is misguided because LOT is notabout ‘sentences in the brain’, but about predication, theassignment of properties to objects, which characterisesall kinds of representation.

Further reading: Fodor (1975)

Learning: the process by which organisms acquire newknowledge. There are lots of things we learn and thiscapacity is essential to our operation in the world. Butthe debated question is whether the mind contains almost

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no unlearned representations (empiricism). Behaviourismand interpretivism hold that associative learning can ex-plain meaning acquisition. However, Paul Bloom showedthat acquisition of word meaning by association is charac-teristic of children with autism (if an adults drops a ham-mer and utters a swear word, they will learn it as mean-ing ‘hammer’) but not of normally developing children.The difficulty of understanding concept acquisition aslearning was emphasised by Fodor (anticipated by Plato):in concept learning experiments subjects must acquire anon-existent concept by deciding whether instances pre-sented by the experimenter fall under it. With input fromthe experimenter they soon begin categorising instancescorrectly. Thus it may turn out that ‘flurg’ means red cir-

cle. However, to understand that they had to formulateand confirm hypotheses about the meaning of ‘flurg’ thatcould only be done if they already had red and circle.Thus it seems that one can acquire simple concepts only ifone already has them. With the emergence of connection-ism theories of learning received a new domain-generalmechanism that could account for the acquisition of com-petences, including syntactic knowledge. Besides, connec-tionism realises principles of learning in neural systemspostulated by Hebb (Hebbian learning) and confirmed atthe molecular level (long-term potentiation and depres-sion). But as some research suggests, learning by backpropagation is neurally unrealistic because it implies thatthe brain implements ‘God-like algorithms’, is global andslow (whereas organisms can learn from one instance).

Further reading: Elman et al. (1996)

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716): German philoso-pher and mathematician. Leibniz developed Descartes’theory of ideas, the notion of substance (denying theexistence of the infinitely divisible extended material

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substance) and the topological conception of reality(proposing the relational understanding of space and an-ticipating the informational theory of causation). As thecreative power actualising possibilities, God cannot allowindeterminate entities, and all real individual things aredivisible into further individual things for which there isa complete idea in God’s mind such that all properties ofa thing can be deduced from it. Because God acts by theprinciple of sufficient reason, the actual world is the bestof all possible worlds (and all apparently contingent factsare in reality necessary). It is constituted by monads: sim-ple, individual, mental, self-sufficient unities (substances)whose modifications are determined by their intrinsic na-tures and are independent of other things. There is nocausal interaction in the world: just as two clocks seta minute apart may appear to be causally interactingwhen in fact they are not, everything in the world wasset in motion by God (the doctrine of pre-established har-mony, Leibniz’s version of parallelism). Individual humanminds are also monads, but ones inherently characterisedby perceptual unity and (self)consciousness which belongto simple, not complex substances: we can imagine con-structing a feeling and thinking machine the size of a mill,but walking through it and observing its mechanical oper-ations we would not find anything to explain conscious-ness (Leibniz’s Mill). Leibniz was also the inventor of ra-tional calculus (characteristica universalis) and a critic ofempiricism, adding to the nihil in intellectu dictum thewords nisi intellectus ipse: there is nothing in the intellectunless first in the senses except the intellect itself.

Further reading: Leibniz [1714] (1989)

Leibniz’s Law (identity of indiscernibles): the principle that ifx is identical with y, then x and y must have all the sameproperties.

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Lewis, David K. (1941–2001): American philosopher, one ofthe originators of the causal theory of mind. Viewingfolk psychology as a ‘term-introducing scientific theory’which explains behaviour in terms of causal roles playedby different mental states, Lewis argued that rewritingit in a Ramsey sentence and adding the requirement ofunique realisation for causal roles vindicates the identitytheory (causal roles corresponding to mental terms canonly be occupied by states causally related to behaviour,that is brain states). Acknowledging later the possibilitythat a mental state like pain may neither play its typ-ical causal role (‘mad pain’ which does not cause oneto wince) nor have its typical physical realisation due tomultiple realisability (physically different ‘Martian pain’)and, contra Kripke, embracing the non-rigidity of mentalterms, Lewis introduced the notion of domain-specific orrestricted identities. A mental state must be identified witha physical state which realises the appropriate causal rolein a limited population. This explains Martian pain, whilemad pain can be treated as an exceptional case in mem-bers of a population, and mad Martian pain must be eval-uated relative to the Martian population. Lewis’s analysisoriginated analytic functionalism, though for Lewis theidentity thesis was always more important than function-alism.

Further reading: Lewis (1972, 1980, 1994)

Locke, John (1632–1704): English philosopher, the founderof empiricism. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas came fromhis views about the inadequacy of our ideas in moral andlegal spheres, but also ideas of secondary qualities likecolour. His empiricism is thus inseparable from his dis-tinction between primary and secondary qualities, rep-resentationalism and belief in real essences. Locke ar-gued that the systematic and involuntary character of

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perceptual experience shows that it must represent an in-dependent world of material objects. The causal relationbetween the world and the mind in perception ensures theadequacy of our ideas of primary qualities, but our ideasof secondary qualities are inadequate because they do notcapture the real essences of things (still, his position wasclose to colour realism, for he viewed secondary qualitiesas objective intrinsic powers of objects to produce ideasin the minds of perceivers). Locke also originated the cur-rently most widely held view of personal identity.

Further reading: Locke [1689] (1975)

Logic: a formal science of correct reasoning by drawing in-ferences. Reasoning can be divided into deduction (in-ferring a conclusion from a set of premises by followingrules), induction (coming to a general conclusion on thebasis of instances) and abduction. The origins of logicmay be traced to Aristotle, but modern logic is creditedto Frege who invented the first propositional calculus(the study of relations among propositions) and predi-cate calculus (the study of relations among statements inwhich properties are predicated of objects). The calculi,subsequently elaborated by Russell and philosophers oflogical positivism, are employed in philosophy of mindin discussions of intentionality and representation (theproblems of belief under entailment and intensionality).Logic also underlies the computational theory of mind: indrawing deductive inferences people often manage to ar-rive at true conclusions when starting from true premises.This property of truth-preservation belongs to the formof propositions and inference may thus be implementedin machines. Modal logic, which uses the notion of pos-sible worlds to study necessity and possibility (inventedby Kripke and Stig Kanger), is invoked in discussions ofthe mind–body problem. But logic is a prescriptive, not a

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descriptive science: it tells one nothing about the extent towhich human reasoning follows content-insensitive for-mal rules. This issue is raised in recent theories of ra-tionality as psychological evidence suggests that humanreasoning is not formally logical.

Logical Behaviourism (analytic behaviourism): the philo-sophical variety of behaviourism influenced by logicalpositivism’s distrust of unobservables. Among its pro-ponents were Ryle, Hempel, Quine and Wittgenstein.It was weakened by the same factors as methodologi-cal behaviourism, but also its inability to provide be-havioural necessary and sufficient conditions for beingin some mental state, the insufficiency of behaviour formentality (a brainless puppet controlled from Mars mayexhibit behaviour indistinguishable from ours), the ir-reducibility of mental states to behavioural dispositions(one can feel pain without showing it in verbal or non-verbal behaviour), its denial of first-person authority overone’s internal states (one can know how one is feelingupon waking up when one has not moved around forone’s behaviour to ‘feedback’ this knowledge) and theuntenability of the view that introspective reports are notreports of internal states of consciousness (the point madeby the identity theory). In the 1960s behaviourism wassupplanted by functionalism, but its influence is felt infunctionalism’s thesis that tendencies to behave are con-stitutive of mental states. It is also felt in any position thatdenies representations or rejects realism about intentionalstates by coming close to supervenient behaviourism, theview that mental facts supervene on behavioural disposi-tions: that two persons with identical behavioural dispo-sitions are identical psychologically.

Further reading: Putnam (1968)

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Logical Positivism (logical empiricism): philosophy of sciencedeveloped in the 1920–30s by members of the BerlinSociety for Scientific Philosophy and the Vienna Circle.The latter included Moritz Schlick (the founder), RudolfCarnap, Otto Neurath, Kurt Godel and Herbert Feiglwho were in regular contact with Carl Hempel, AlfredTarski, Alfred Julius Ayer, Ludwig Wittgenstein and KarlPopper. Striving to free science from metaphysics, they en-dorsed radical empiricism concluding that the only mean-ingful scientific statements are either analytic (logicallytrue or false) or testable by observation (synthetic a poste-riori). This resulted in verificationism about meaning, al-though the group was split between phenomenalism andrealism about material objects. The logical positivist pro-gramme was abandoned with the realisation that scien-tific hypothesis confirmation is holistic and that scienceproceeds by postulating entities which are not immedi-ately observable. However, logical positivism had enor-mous influence on the development of logic and concep-tual analysis, and its ideal of the unity of science remainsrelevant to current discussions of physicalism.

Further reading: Ayer (1959)

M

Machine Functionalism: (input–output, empirical functional-ism or psychofunctionalism): the variety of function-alism which identifies mental states with higher-ordercomputational or functional states of a system. Putnamproposed to view the mind as a probabilistic Turing ma-chine where transitions between states occur with variousprobabilities rather than being deterministic. Putnam saw

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the functional description of the mind in terms of inputs,outputs and mediating internal states as an empirical hy-pothesis fixing the extensions of psychological terms. Ifthe same predicates (‘is in pain’, ‘is hungry’) may, on thebasis of behaviour, be applied to creatures with differ-ent physical-chemical organisation, then having a mindis identical with having a certain functional organisation.This is the multiple realisability thesis crucial to machinefunctionalism’s idea of species-independent psychologicallaws. But this view poses the input problem, which is whyalthough functionalism is often identified with machinefunctionalism, its present form is closer to a combinationof the computational theory of mind and non-reductivephysicalism (see also silicon chip replacement for theposition known as causal functionalism). Early function-alism, focusing on sensory states which probably are un-structured or monadic, also had difficulty with propo-sitional attitudes which require combinatorial structure(‘believes-that-snow-is-white’ and ‘believes-that-snow-is-wet’ cannot be unrelated states) and had to be supple-mented with a theory of convent (see functional rolesemantics).

Further reading: Putnam (1967)

Machine Table: a table giving a full description of pos-sible states of a finite state machine (a deterministicautomaton) specifying what next state it moves to andwhat output it produces given some input and its cur-rent state (think of a coke-vending machine). Any givenstate of such a machine is exhaustively characterised infunctional terms.

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715): French philosopher, amajor proponent of occasionalism. This metaphysical po-sition was consistent with his acceptance of Descartes’

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rationalism that he developed into the view that ideas areobjects in the mind of God.

Further reading: Malebranche [1674–5](1997)

Manifest Image see Sellars, Wilfrid

Manifold see Kant, Immanuel

Marr, David (1945–80): British psychologist, the author ofthe leading computational theory of vision and three-levelanalysis of information-processing adhered to in cogni-tive science. Marr proposed that the mind’s structuringeffects on visual experience identified by Gestalt psychol-ogists can be accounted for computationally. The visualsystem’s computational task is to create representationsof 3-D(imensional) objects from 2-D images on the retinaas its input. Retinal stimulations are representations oflight and intensity values (dark and bright patches) in a2-D coordinate system. On their basis the visual systemcomputes a primal sketch of surface reflectance changeswhich then serves as input to the construction of a 2.5-Dsketch representing surface depth and contours from theviewing perspective. From this, it constructs a 3-D sketch,which is what we see being aware of the way objects’surfaces are out of view. Discussions of Marr’s theoryconcern the question of how it bears on the explanationof visual consciousness and the debate between external-ism and internalism.

Further reading: Marr (1982)

Massive Modularity: the view, central to evolutionary psy-chology, that the mind largely consists of domain-specificcomputational modules. It thus reconsiders Fodor’s no-tion of modularity which distinguishes modular inputsystems from non-modular central reasoning processes.

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The clearest candidate for a central module is the cheater-detection module postulated to explain the results of theWason selection task (the theory of mind module is an-other). However, according to Fodor, a cheater-detectioncomputational module is impossible because there areno perceptual cues for automatic detection of social ex-changes. Steven Pinker objects to this, citing evidence thatpeople tend to interpret movement of dots on a screen interms of human relations. But there are also general is-sues regarding the allocation of inputs to non-peripheralmodules and the interaction between modules, for thepossibility of central modules depends on whether com-putational modules may not be informationally encapsu-lated (frame problem). The idea of massive modularitywas partly motivated by the view that general reasoningmechanisms would be overloaded with information andbe incapable of processing it. However, this may involvea misconstrual of the relation between innate structuresand the capacity for learning and inferencing (considerthe capacity of humans and possibly other higher ani-mals to understand that some perceptual experiences areillusions). For this reason it may be preferable to viewthe massive modularity thesis as requiring Chomsky’smodules.

Further reading: Samuels (2000)

Materialism: the view that everything existing is material.Historically, that was understood as being matter, the ex-tended substance. As contemporary physics admits of en-tities that are not material in this sense (like gravitationalforces), the term physicalism is often preferred today.

Medieval Philosophy (approximately 600–1400): the firstmerger between ancient philosophy and Christianity viaNeoplatonism was accomplished by St Augustine of

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Hippo (354–430). Neoplatonism (founded by Plotinus,c.205–270) reinterpreted Plato’s ideas as existing in themind of the One whose emanation creates the realms ofthe intellect and the soul; ideas can be grasped by the in-tellect whereby the immortal soul achieves reunion withthe One. Later, Manlius Severinus Boethius (480–524)resurrected the problem of universals. But a more philo-sophically important period began with the establishmentof universities in the twelfth century and the spread ofAristotle’s philosophy coming from Arabic and Greeksources. A major Arabic influence was Abu Ali Al-HusaynAvicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037) whose NeoplatonicAristotelianism and views on the soul were consonantwith the Christian doctrine. The second major influencewas Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98) who opposed Avi-cenna’s interpretation of Aristotle, holding that only in-dividuals have primary existence and that essences are theproduct of the intellect. He also believed in the eternityof the world, thought that the intellect was a separateentity from the soul rather than its faculty and thus de-nied personal immortality. His view became known asthe doctrine of double truth (different for faith and rea-son) and was condemned in 1277. The thirteenth centurywas the heyday of scholastic philosophy which producedSt Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas, Roger Baconand St Bonaventure, but the fourteenth century broughtwith it John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham whosework is equally important for understanding the problemof universals in its connection with the problem of inten-tionality.

Further reading: Pasnau (1997)

Memory: the mind’s capacity to think about past occur-rences, to retain learned information. Several types ofmemory are distinguished: declarative or propositional

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memory (memory for facts and events) is contrastedwith nondeclarative memory which includes memoryfor conditioned associations, emotional responses, andprocedural or behavioural memory (memory for skillsand behaviours). Long-term memory (items stored in itcan be recalled months and years after they were reg-istered) is contrasted with short-term memory (whereitems are placed for temporary storage; George Millershowed that short-term memory can simultaneously re-tain about seven items – ‘the magical number seven’).Explicit memory (memories that can be acknowledgedby subjects) is contrasted with implicit memory (memo-ries of which subjects have no awareness but whose ex-istence can be inferred from their improved performanceon various tasks). Working memory is the storage whichcontains information relevant to the control of ongoingbehaviour. Some researchers hold that higher forms ofself-consciousness depend on conscious autobiographicalmemory which may require language. Other philosophi-cal issues about memory concern its role in our personalidentity and limited rationality; the problem of cognitivearchitecture and memory storage; the causal theory ofmemory and the problem of deviant causal chains; and theproblem of false memories (relevant to the externalism–internalism debate).

Mental Causation: the cornerstone of the mind–body prob-lem. Mental states are caused by physical happenings inthe world (perception, upward causation), cause othermental states (thinking, same-level causation) and phys-ical events (downward or topdown causation, action).Mental-to-physical causation is particularly problematicfor proponents of non-reductive physicalism who holdthat mental properties have real irreducible causal pow-ers (for example, that it is wanting a glass of juice together

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with believing that there is juice in the fridge that makesone go to the kitchen). The problem of downward causa-tion (the supervenience or exclusion argument) was for-mulated by Kim. Consider the case when a mental eventM causes another mental event M∗. Non-reductive phys-icalists accept the physical realisation principle or the su-pervenience thesis. Thus M∗ must be physically realised.So why is M∗ instantiated? They must say: because oneof its physical realisers, P∗, is. P∗ alone is sufficient forthe instantiation of M∗. Then what is the role of M incausing M∗? M∗ can be instantiated only if P∗ is. Theymust now say that M causes P∗. This is an instance ofdownward causation. However, M must also be physi-cally realised. Thus: M is realised by P, P causes P∗ andM∗ is realised by P∗. But where is the causation of M∗ byM as such? It appears that mental states qua mental dono causing, and one is forced to chose between reductivephysicalism and epiphenomenalism (or else find a differ-ent non-reductivist solution).

Further reading: Heil and Mele (1993); Walter andHeckmann (2003)

Mental Concepts: the concepts of perceiving, sensing, feeling,believing, hoping, desiring, etc. that form part of our folkpsychology. The implicit reference they contain to theholism and rationality of thought processes is what makesthe mind–body problem and explanations of their contentso difficult. But their existence poses even more seriousproblems for eliminative materialism: if mental conceptsdo not pick out anything real (there is nothing at the levelof brain activity that, say, corresponds to the belief thatit is raining), then what do they pick out and why do wehave them? Searle notes that even if the entities positedby folk psychology are unsuited for doing science, it doesnot follow that they do not exist, for otherwise one would

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also have to deny existence to tennis rackets or golf clubs.Similarly, Stephen Stich observes that given the causaltheory of reference even a false theory can refer to existingentities: if members of a community believe that stars aregods, it only follows that they are mistaken about stars,not that they fail to refer to stars.

Further reading: Stich (1996)

Mental Content see Content

Mental Events: particular happenings in the mind.

Mental Object: an entity existing in the mind, ‘a thing in thehead’.

Mental Properties: mental kinds or types such as being in painor believing that it is raining that can be instantiated bydifferent individuals on different occasions. Like mentalstates they can be divided into phenomenal and inten-tional.

Mental Representation see Representation

Mental States: psychological states like perceiving, remember-ing, believing, desiring, hoping, intending, feeling, expe-riencing, etc. that individuals can be in. The main distinc-tion is between intentional and phenomenal states. Otherdistinctions include: occurrent and dispositional, percep-tual and conceptual, doxastic and subdoxastic, consciousand unconscious states.

Mentalese see Language of Thought

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61): French philosopher inwhose phenomenology central place is given to the idea of

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embodiment. Merleau-Ponty opposed ‘objectivism’ un-able to give explanations of many disorders of perceptionand action in mechanistic causal terms (like phantom limbphenomena). And although he radicalised Husserl’s viewof science (calling it naive and hypocritical in its ignoranceof consciousness), he also opposed Husserl’s reduction ofthe natural attitude and Sartre’s sovereign pour-soi. Na-ture and consciousness are not opposed to each other,and subjects constitute their environments as essentiallyembodied beings. The proper body (le corps propre) withits motor intentionality, not the Cartesian ego, gives sig-nifications to the world. Action and perception are in-separable, and perception is effected by the body not as amechanical thing but as consciousness of place intimatelyconnected with its capacity for goal-directed movement.In Merleau-Ponty’s later work (‘ontology of the flesh’)this emphasis on our embodied inherence in being leadshim to reject even the notion of intentionality which pre-supposes a distinction between the subject and the object.

Further reading: Merleau-Ponty [1945] (1962)

Methodological Behaviourism (psychological, empirical be-haviourism): The psychological theory of behaviourismoriginated in 1913 from American psychologist JohnBroadus Watson (1878–1958) and actively advocated byhis student Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–90). React-ing against the subjectivity of introspective psychologyand impressed by the work of Russian physiologist IvanPavlov (1849–1936) on classical conditioning and asso-ciative learning in animals, they argued for scientific psy-chology as the experimental study of observable and mea-surable behavioural responses to external stimuli. Theymade laboratory experimentation the main psychologi-cal method and resisted dualism by closing the gap be-tween humans and ‘brutes’. They extended the notion

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of conditioning to operant conditioning whereby an an-imal learns to do something to achieve some result, andargued that prediction and control of behaviour can beachieved through the discovery of stimuli–response as-sociation laws without postulating any changes in ani-mals’ knowledge or expectations. Watson later defendedeliminativism about introspectible states calling the beliefin consciousness a superstition, whereas Skinner arguedfor radical behaviourism which views all ‘private events’as forms of behaviour (perception and introspection be-come, respectively, learned responses to environmentalreinforcements and one’s own observed behaviour). Skin-ner also extended the paradigm of learning and rein-forcement to human language learning. In the 1960s be-haviourism began to wane due to Chomsky’s poverty ofstimulus argument and the emerging computational the-ory of mind which made it clear that similar observablebehaviour can be generated by systems with different in-ternal structures. Cognitive ethology recently became theleading approach to animal cognition but behaviouristmethodology is preserved in ‘behaviour analysis’ whichsees advantages in approaching the mind as if it were ablack box.

Further reading: Watson (1925)

Methodological Solipsism see Internalism

Mill, James (1773–1836): Scottish philosopher, father ofJohn Stuart Mill. He was a major proponent of associa-tionism, and the idea that people can learn to associatepersonal pleasures with the benefit of others was con-nected with his moral and political utilitarianism.

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73): British philosopher, a majorproponent of naturalism in epistemology. Mill introduced

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the notion of natural kind and countered Hume’s scepti-cism by formulating principles of induction (Mill’s meth-ods) pertaining to the discovery of causal laws. He alsodeveloped early versions of phenomenalism and emergen-tism. Distinguishing between denotation (reference) andconnotation (sense), between general and singular terms,Mill influenced Frege (who rejected his empiricism) and,holding that proper names have denotation but no con-notation, anticipated the causal theory of reference.

Further reading: Mill [1843] (2000)

Millikan, Ruth Garrett (b.1933): American philosopher, oneof the originators of the teleological theory of content.Millikan introduced the notion of ‘direct proper func-tion’ for biological items, which refers to the functionitems of a certain type have because its performance by or-ganisms’ ancestors contributed to their survival. With re-spect to the functional indeterminacy problem, she arguesthat one should consider not only mechanisms producingrepresentations, but also the ‘consumers’ of representa-tions, because the purpose of representing is to have aneffect on those devices that can put representations to use(a benefit-based theory).

Further reading: Millikan (1984, 2000)

Mind: that which encompasses the full range of mental phe-nomena: awareness, perception, thought, memory, atten-tion, volition, emotions and feelings. In modern philos-ophy it became identified with consciousness, our soulor self, the seat of reason and free will. In the twen-tieth century, due to Freud’s influence and the declineof Cartesian substance dualism, the connection betweenmind and consciousness was weakened, becoming sev-ered in functionalism. More recently, as a reaction againstthe emphasis on the cognitive mind, the problem of

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consciousness became prominent in analytical philoso-phy of mind.

Mind–Body Problem: the problem of explaining the placeof the mind in the physical world, its relationship withthe body/brain, and the possibility of their interactionor mental causation. Solutions to it are provided by:substance and attribute dualism (including interaction-ism, occasionalism and parallelism), materialism (physi-calism), idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, epiphe-nomenalism, emergentism, behaviourism, functionalismand eliminative materialism.

Mirror Neurons: a group of neurons in the premotor cortexwhich become activated both when one is performing acertain task and when one is watching somebody elseperform the same task.

Misrepresentation, Problem of (the problem of error): anyrepresenting system must be capable of misrepresenta-tion. Your thought of a cat may be caused by some-thing other than a cat (a small dog on a dark night). Butyour representation cat applies only to cats. The problemfor naturalised semantics is to explain in non-intentionalterms how this is possible.

Modal Argument against Physicalism see Kripke, Saul A.

Modern Philosophy: began with the rise of modern sciencein the seventeenth century and continues to set issues forcontemporary philosophy of mind. Modern philosophybegins with realising that qualities of sense experienceare not necessarily qualities of the external world andthus puts epistemology at the centre of its psychologi-cal concerns, all initiated by Descartes. The first issue is

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the mind–body problem stemming from Descartes’ sub-stance dualism. (Aristotle’s view of substances as univer-sals transformed by medieval philosophy’s view of God asthe only substance results in modern philosophy’s view ofsubstance as the essence of a kind’s existence.) Descartes’interactionism puzzled subsequent philosophers who ar-gued that it is impossible for two independent substancesto enter into causal interactions (the interaction problem).The search for new solutions led to occasionalism, par-allelism, panpsychism, idealism and infrequent material-ism (Hobbes, La Mettrie). The second problem concernsthe relation between ideas with which the mind operatesin thought and that which they are ideas of (representa-tionalism), and the origins of the structure of experienceand knowledge (rationalism and empiricism). The thirdproblem concerns the relationship between reason andpassions and the role of the will. The end of ‘early modernphilosophy’ came with Kant who gave a new expressionto these concerns.

Modes of Presentation (MOPs): different ways of conceivingof the same thing. The notion was introduced by Frege toaccount for differences in informational content betweenstatements containing coreferential expressions (know-ing that my native city is St Petersburg, you may notknow that so is Leningrad). For Frege, MOPs are abstractentities that can be grasped by the mind, but proponentsof externalism and Russellian content can view them aspsychologically possible ways of thinking about or rep-resenting real-world objects and properties.

Modularity: the thesis advanced by Fodor that the mind con-tains a number of specialised information-processing sub-systems or computational mechanisms (modules) whichencompass the sensory modalities and the language parser

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(the periphery input systems). The modules are charac-terised by (1) domain specificity (the detection of themelodic structure of acoustic arrays is specific to hearingbut not vision); (2) mandatory operation (people auto-matically understand utterances in their native languageand do not know what their language ‘sounds like’ toforeigners); (3) limited central access to representationscomputed by them (having processed an utterance peo-ple usually cannot recall the details of syntax, for exam-ple whether it was in the active or the passive voice); (4)fast operation; (5) informational encapsulation (a mod-ule can access only a limited amount of information, thatis why some illusions persist even when we know thatthey are illusions); (6) shallow outputs; (7) fixed neuralarchitecture; (8) specific breakdown patterns; (9) charac-teristic developmental course. In contrast to the modules,the central systems of reasoning which serve philosoph-ical, scientific and much everyday thinking are global,domain-general, holistic (or ‘Quineian’) and isotropic(anything can become relevant to belief formation andrevision, which is especially clear in our use of analo-gies). The thesis proved very influential, but it remainsdebated whether the modules are mutually impenetrable(some experiments show that auditory information mayalter visual perception) and cognitively impenetrable (iswhat one sees or hears completely unaffected by what onebelieves?). Thus, Paul Churchland argues for the theory-ladenness (plasticity) of perception, the view that one’stheoretical knowledge affects one’s perception (think oflooking into a microscope). Fodor’s notion of modularitycan also be distinguished from ‘Chomsky’s modularity’and there is a question whether all of the above char-acteristics are necessary for modularity (see also frameproblem, massive modularity).

Further reading: Fodor (1983)

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Molecularism: the view that the content of a concept is de-termined by its inferential relations with some otherconcepts. It is particularly associated with ChristopherPeacocke’s version of functional role semantics. Peacockeholds that content-constitutive inferences are primitivelycompelling (someone who has the concept of trianglefinds the judgement that triangles have sides primitivelycompelling). However, spelling this out requires the dis-credited analytic–synthetic distinction.

Further reading: Peacocke (1992)

Molyneux Problem: was formulated by the Irish surgeonWilliam Molyneux in a letter to Locke: would an indi-vidual born blind and familiar through touch with thefeel of a cube and a sphere made from the same ma-terial be able to distinguish which was which visually,without first touching them, if suddenly given sight as anadult? Locke’s and Berkeley’s answer was no because theybelieved that vision was phenomenally two-dimensionaland one learnt about the third dimension through touch.Today, the question does not make sense without furtherqualification, although most newly sighted individuals ei-ther immediately have three-dimensional vision or do notimprove with time.

Further reading: Smith (2000)

Monism: the view that there is only one kind of thing under-lying all reality. It encompasses materialism and idealismand is opposed to dualism.

Moods: background phenomenal states like feeling cheerful,sad, depressed or euphoric which form part of our nor-mal conscious experience (unity of consciousness). Thereis some uncertainty as to whether certain states shouldbe viewed as moods or emotions, but the tendency is to

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distinguish moods by their longer duration and the lackof directedness at specific objects.

Multiple Personalities: the apparent existence of two or moredifferent persons or personalities in people with multiplepersonality/dissociative identity disorder. Its main symp-tom is the lack of personal memories extending be-yond ordinary forgetfulness. Such people have difficultyforming a stable self-conception, but their unity of con-sciousness is intact relative to each ‘personality’. If real,which is questioned by some researchers, the disorderposes questions about synchronic personal identity.

Multiple Realisability: the thesis that a higher-order func-tional property may be realised in a variety of distinctphysical systems. Thus the property of being an ashtrayis independent of the materials ashtrays may be made of.Similarly, any mental property (for instance, pain) maybe realised in physical systems different from our brains.This idea was used by Putnam in the formulation of ma-chine functionalism opposing the identity theory whichseems to deny mental properties to non-humans (do mol-luscs feel pain? non-human primates? future robots?).It was taken up by Ned Block and Jerry Fodor whonoted additional problems posed by neural plasticity andconvergent evolution (though later multiple realisabilitywas turned against functionalism in absent qualia andChinese room arguments). It was then elaborated inFodor’s special sciences argument, which distinguishedbetween multiple mental realisability in different kindsof organisms and multiple mental realisability within anindividual at different times due to neural plasticity. How-ever, proponents of reductive physicalism may argue thatmultiple realisability is not as radical as it may seem. Theextent of neural plasticity is not well understood, and

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if one leaves aside extraterrestrial creatures and futurerobots, one has to make sense of some empirical findings.Thus, although the eye evolved several times in unrelatedspecies, its expression was linked to the same genes. Simi-larly, the same molecular mechanisms (calcium ions) maysubserve cognitive functions across species. Proponentsof non-reductive physicalism may respond that multiplerealisability is true in so far as the individuation of rel-evant lower-level properties depends on recognising thereality of higher-order mental properties.

Further reading: Block and Fodor (1980)

Myth of the Given: Wilfrid Sellars’ term for the view thatsense experience gives us secure foundations for knowl-edge (foundationalism). Sellars rejected it arguing thatexperience gets conceptualised by reason and these con-ceptualisations may be mistaken.

N

Nagelian Reduction: the first formulation of intertheoretic re-duction proposed within the framework of logical pos-itivism by Ernest Nagel (1901–85). According to it, ahigher-level theory (HT) can be reduced to a lower-leveltheory (LT) if the laws of the former can be logically de-rived from the laws of the latter via so-called bridge laws(bridging principles) which establish empirical type-typebiconditional correlations between elements of the twotheories (FHT ←→ GLT). The idea influenced many pro-ponents of the identity theory (though not its originators),but later lost its appeal because of multiple realisabilityarguments and the fear (prompting eliminative materi-alism) that it implies not only that mental phenomena

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have physical properties but also that physical processeshave mental properties. However, some philosophers ar-gue that it requires only one-way conditionals formulat-ing sufficient conditions at the lower level. Alternatively,its symmetry may be understood as preserving the dis-tinctiveness of higher-level phenomena (bridge laws maybe understood as establishing not identities but nomic co-extensiveness of distinct properties).

Further reading: Nagel (1961)

Naive Realism see Direct Realism

Narrow Content (cognitive or Fregean epistemic content):the content that intentional states (beliefs, desires, etc.)have intrinsically, independently of an individual’s ex-ternal environment. It is the kind of content that is ap-parently shared by Oscar and Twin-Oscar in Putnam’sTwin-Earth scenario. Proponents of internalism hold thatit is more psychologically fundamental than broad con-tent because it determines individuals’ reasoning and su-pervenes on their neurophysiology. Many internalists ac-cepted Putnam’s argument that only broad contents aretruth-conditional and proposed different ways of isolat-ing narrow contents, viewing them as functions fromcontexts to broad contents (early Fodor), conceptualroles (functional role semantics), diagonal propositions(Stalnaker, Lewis), or sets of maximal epistemic possibil-ities or scenarios that an intentional state is compatiblewith (Chalmers). However, while these approaches maysucceed in saying what narrow content must be, they arearguably unable to specify narrow contents of particu-lar thoughts in any other way than making them inef-fable or identifying them with descriptive contents (butthe inadequacy of descriptions motivated the causal the-ory of reference underlying externalism in the first place).

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Fodor later concluded that narrow content is unneces-sary because Twin cases are an exception to psychologicalgeneralisations, and in standard cases it must be nomo-logically possible for individuals to distinguish betweentwo properties of which they may have thoughts. In con-trast, Gabriel Segal argues that cognitive science requiresonly narrow content which is itself truth-conditional (rad-ical internalism). Segal admits that many concepts (likewater) are innately determined and triggered by the rightcausal connections to the environment, but argues thattheir content changes in the course of one’s lifetime astheir place in one’s reasoning changes. The acceptance ofSegal’s theory, however, depends on how one views the re-lationship between concepts and knowledge and the ideaof conceptual change.

Further reading: Segal (2000)

Nativism see Rationalism

Natural Kind: a group of entities which belong together be-cause such is the arrangement of things in nature. Natu-ral kinds are thus scientific or nomic kinds which groupcausally homogeneous (uniform) instances and in termsof which one may formulate causal laws and explana-tions. To decide whether a term designates a natural kind(is a natural kind predicate), one can check whether itpasses the projectibility test. To be projectible, a predi-cate must provide grounds for induction to allow one topredict the essential properties of future instances on thebasis of past instances. Thus jade had been thought to bea natural kind until it was discovered that it is really twominerals with different molecular structures – jadeite andnephrite. So because of its disjunctive nature, jade cannotbe a natural kind. The notion of natural kind is impor-tant to metaphysical essentialism and the debate between

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non-reductive and reductive physicalism. The difficultywith understanding biological species in terms of hiddeninternal structure led some philosophers of biology to re-ject essentialism or view species as individuals, whereasothers argue that science should include historical kinds(those whose essence depends on having a certain causalhistory), the view that supports externalism.

Naturalism: the view that the mental forms part of the nat-ural order and that its explanation must be continuouswith explanations in natural sciences (be compatible withphysicalism).

Further reading: Papineau (1993)

Naturalised Semantics: the approach to explaining intention-ality and mental content in naturalistic terms, without ap-peal to semantic notions like ‘believe’, ‘mean’, ‘refer’, ‘beabout’, ‘be true’. Because intentional properties cannotbe the fundamental features of reality, it must be shownhow physical systems can have intentional states. It in-cludes the informational and teleological theory of con-tent. Philosophers sceptical of the naturalising project ar-gue that the ‘intentional idiom’ is irreducible (because ofthe normativity, rationality and holism of the mental) orbelieve that such understanding is cognitively closed to us.

Neo-Darwinism see Adaptationism

Neural Constructivism: the view, supportive of connection-ism (the PDP version), that neural mechanisms of cogni-tive development are those of constructive learning: therepresentational complexity of the cortex, initially freeof domain-specific structure, is built by the environmentoperating on it. The view, however, ignores the fact thatcortical development is inseparable from the development

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of subcortical input systems (a mole raised in the same en-vironment as a rat will not develop cortical structures forvisual processing) and it is not clear how sensory input it-self could generate an increase in representational power.

Further reading: Quartz and Sejnowsky (1997)

Neural Darwinism (selectionism): the view that the main neu-ral mechanism of cognitive development is the executionof a genetically coded maturational programme. That is,the establishment of specialised neural circuits (for ex-ample, for processing visual information) is itself inde-pendent of the environmental input, and the impact ofthe environment consists in the selective elimination or‘pruning’ of such specialised circuits whose numbers areinitially redundant. It is supported by the fact that inearly development exuberant dendritic growth (‘arborisa-tion’) is followed by a sharp decrease in synaptic densitywithin a short period of time. The view, however, positsinnate connectivity patterns, not innate representationalcontent.

Further reading: Edelman (1987)

Neural Networks see Connectionism

Neurons: cells in the nervous system subserving its informa-tion-processing functions (more numerous glial cells arethought to have supporting functions). Neurons consistof the cell body (soma), the output fibre (axon) and in-put fibres (dendrites). The point at which the axon ter-minal contacts other neurons’ dendrites and somata isthe synapse. Information between neurons is communi-cated by means of synaptic transmission: a neuron be-comes active (‘fires’) and sends its electrochemical signalto other neurons with which it is connected. These detailsare captured in connectionism, but the action potential is

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‘all-or-none’, and information-coding is realised by neu-rons’ differential spatiotemporal firing patterns (‘spikes’,the amplitude and frequency of generated impulses, andvariation in time intervals between them) followed byneurotransmitter release at the synapse. After the work ofHebb and others, it is believed that the brain’s representa-tions of properties are stored in the connectivity patternsof distributed neuronal groups. It is also possible that spe-cialised neuronal groups selectively code for specific fea-tures. Following Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel’s dis-covery of orientation-selective neurons in striate visualcortex (‘edge-detection cells’), several investigations sug-gested the existence of specialised neurons processing in-formation about faces (‘grandmother cells’). But selectivecells were also shown to respond to a range of featuresand individual neurons may participate in coding for sev-eral properties. The problem is to understand how rep-resentation of determinate properties can be maintainedby units with multiple-property sensitivity (the questionof the brain’s topology). The issue of specialised neuronalrepresentation is central to debates about neural plasticityand neural mechanisms of cognitive development (neuralconstructivism versus neural Darwinism).

Further reading: Bear et al. (2001)

Neurophilosophy: an approach to the mind/brain defendedby Paul and Patricia Churchland. According to it, factsdiscovered by neuroscience are immediately relevant tophilosophy of mind. This, however, takes the form of acontinued attack on folk psychology, initiated by elimi-native materialism, combined with a philosophical apol-ogy of connectionism (the PDP version). Connectionismis said to capture principles of representation in biologi-cal systems (activity vectors) that are incompatible with

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discrete representational states of the language of thought(LOT) and the logico-semantic inferences of the compu-tational theory of mind. The main argument in favourof connectionist representation in the brain is gracefuldegradation of cognitive functions. While damage to asymbolic system (removal of a symbol or rule) often re-sults in a sharp decline in its performance, distributedrepresentations exhibit greater plasticity so that represen-tations become blurred rather than disappear completelyand partial retrieval remains possible. This pattern is in-deed characteristic of some cognitive deficits, but otherdeficits arguably follow the pattern of representationaldisruption in symbolic systems (the Williams syndrome,severe category-specific semantic impairments: selectiveloss of concepts for animals, tools or numbers). Besides,given neurophilosophers’ view that today’s science maynot be the science of the future, an a priori conclusionthat the brain cannot support the language of thoughtseems unwarranted.

Further reading: Churchland (1986), Churchland(1995)

Neuroscience: the study of the nervous system, especiallythe brain, by invasive (destruction of brain areas, gene‘knockout’ in non-human animals, electrode recordingof neuronal firing) and non-invasive scanning methodslike functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) andpositron emission tomography (PET). Neuroscience is of-ten contrasted with cognitive science because it does notseparate mind and brain, but many neuroscientific in-vestigations (for example, lesion studies) require the useof mental concepts (neuropsychology, cognitive neuro-science).

Further reading: Bear et al. (2001)

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Neutral Monism: the view that the primal stuff of reality isneither mental nor physical. It was held by Ernest Mach,James and Russell (briefly). The primal stuff (identifiedwith the stream of sensible qualities or James’s ‘pure ex-perience’) is mental only when taken in some arrange-ments or contexts of associated qualities (thus, neutralmonism makes consciousness non-substantial). The viewmay be hard to distinguish from panpsychism or attributedualism.

New Wave Materialism see Identity Theory

New Wave Reductionism: the approach identifying mentalstates with brain states developed by John Bickle. Bicklerejects Nagelian reduction which retains all properties ofthe reduced theory and elaborates on Clifford Hooker’sview that intertheoretic reduction involves a contin-uum of ‘smooth’, ‘revisionary’ and ‘bumpy’ reductions(Thomas Kuhn’s idea of discontinuous scientific develop-ment). Bickle proposes the following scheme: for the the-ory to be reduced (TR, folk psychology) one constructsits image model (TR∗) which uses only those terms thatare available in the base theory (TB, neuroscience). TR∗

(psychology formulated in neuroscientific terms) derivedfrom TB (neuroscience) will be only partly isomorphicwith TR (folk psychology). The idea is thus that the func-tional organisation of cognition and the notion of rep-resentation will be preserved, but specific mental statespostulated by folk psychology (and language of thought)will be eliminated. Following Robert McCauley one mayobject that Bickle conflates intralevel and interlevel re-duction: whereas the former involves elimination (like theelimination of phlogiston from chemistry), the latter doesnot (quantum mechanics eliminated neither macrophys-ical objects nor their physics). The approach thus runs

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against the problem of mental concepts that arises foreliminative materialism.

Further reading: Bickle (1998)

Nomic: (1) capable of being subsumed under causal laws; (2)lawlike.

Nomological: relating to the laws of nature. Nomologicalpossibility is consistency with causal laws of the actualworld.

Nomological Danglers: Herbert Feigl’s term for the irre-ducible mental properties of dualism which dangle fromthe nomological net of physical sciences, being unneces-sary and implausible.

Further reading: Feigl (1958)

Non-conceptual Content: the content of mental states notrepresented with the help of concepts (the notion wasintroduced by Evans to explain the possibility of demon-strative content). Perceptual experience obviously haspropositional content (it represents the world as beinga certain way), but perceptual representation seems dis-tinct from representation in belief: (1) it is information-ally rich: as the subject cannot deploy concepts for everyobject and property represented in perception, one mayperceive something without forming concepts (Dretske);(2) it is analogue: unlike belief it carries with it ex-tra information and is continuously variable (we per-ceive something as varying in brightness without de-tecting discrete states – earlier Dretske; but note thatanalogue representation can be reproduced digitally, sothis may be a question of availability to conscious-ness); (3) it is more finely grained because we perceivemore than we have concepts for (like various colours

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and shapes – Christopher Peacocke). Peacocke devel-oped an account of non-conceptual scenario content toexplain how organisms represent in experience spatialproperties of their environments relative to themselves(‘to the left’) without having the corresponding concepts.(In Peacocke’s molecularism and Bermudez’s theory ofnon-conceptual self-consciousness concepts are linguistic,judgement-dependent, entities.) Most proponents of rep-resentationalism about consciousness also argue for thenon-conceptual content of experience as that which alonedistinguishes perceptual representation from belief. Theexact understanding of the notion, however, depends onhow one understands concepts and the relation betweenperceptual discrimination and merely sensory experience.

Further reading: Gunther (2003)

Non-reductive Physicalism: the view that mental propertiesare irreducible to physical properties, that the mental quamental matters in causing behaviour (that it is your beliefthat it is raining together with your desire not to get wetthat makes you take an umbrella with you). The essen-tial point is commitment to multiple realisability or thesupervenience thesis: physical indistinguishability impliesmental indistinguishability, but mental indistinguishabil-ity does not imply physical indistinguishability. How-ever, there arises the problem of mental causation: howcan mental properties qua mental cause behaviour? Re-sponses to the problem include: (1) overdetermination;(2) counterfactual causation; (3) pragmatic theories; (4)the layered view of the world (see also emergentism).Pragmatic theories distinguish between causal efficacyand causal relevance or suitability for causal explanationsgiven our cognitive limitations. But the solution is prob-lematic because, arguably, acceptable explanation mustaddress the issue of causation. According to the manylayers view, reality itself has many levels of organisation,

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and mental properties are genuine causal properties (men-tal realism found, for instance, in Fodor’s argument fromcausal laws). However, this raises the question of howhigher-order properties could have causal powers beyondthose of their physical realisers and the issue of their mind-dependence: in what sense do special sciences’ entitiesexist for creatures incapable of representing them? Themind–body problem thus becomes related to the prob-lem of intentionality.

Further reading: Heil and Mele (1993)

Normativity: sensitivity to norms, to what is acceptable andwhat is not. In our everyday explanation of behaviour(folk psychology) we implicitly presuppose norms gov-erning reasoning and action of rational beings. The nor-mativity of our mental concepts poses problems for re-ductive and eliminative explanations of mentality becausescience is descriptive, not prescriptive, and one cannotderive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ (this is questioned today by tele-ological approaches).

O

Occasionalism: the view that all sequences of events conceiv-able of as cause and effect are occasioned by God, towhom alone causal powers must be ascribed. Occasional-ism arose in Islamic thought in the ninth century, becom-ing especially prominent in the philosophy of Abu HamidMuhammad Al-Ghazali (1059–1111). In modern philos-ophy it was held by Johannes Clauberg, Arnold Geulinex,Louis de la Forge and Nicolas Malebranche. Occasional-ism may be best understood in the context of the theoryof ideas which views causal laws (including general lawsof the union of soul and body) as propositions in the

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mind of God whose efficacy depends on being constantlyentertained by Him (the doctrine of continuous creation).

Occurrent: occurrent mental states are those that: (1) occurwithin a cognitive system at some specific moment oftime; (2) subjects are aware of being in.

Ockham’s Razor see Universals

Ontology: (1) a complete collection of entities which reallyexist; (2) the study of what exists.

Other Minds: the problem of knowing that other people haveminds and avoiding solipsism that arises for the Cartesianview according to which we have privileged access to ourown mental states and infallible self-knowledge, but onlyindirect knowledge of others’ minds. The standard re-sponse is that having mental states is the best explanationwe have of our behaviour, and we conclude that othershave minds by noticing their similarity to us and observ-ing their behaviour (the ‘argument from analogy’ asso-ciated with J. S. Mill). Behaviourism and interpretivismoppose the Cartesian view holding that knowledge of ourown minds depends on our being members of our linguis-tic communities. Sartre also opposed this view arguingthat we have immediate awareness of others’ minds, andSearle questions functionalism on the grounds that ourknowledge of ourselves involves knowing that we havethe right physiology. Today the issue is debated by theorytheory and simulation theory.

Further reading: Avramides (2001)

Overdetermination: the view that an event can have two in-dependent causes (two bullets causing the same death)intended to explain the possibility of downward mental

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causation. However, it violates the causal closure of thephysical.

P

Pain: an unpleasant sensation normally arising from the ap-plication of noxious stimuli to a group of sensory neuronswith peripheral terminals (primary afferent nociceptors,types Aδ and C). Pain has been the most discussed ex-ample in the context of the mind–body problem sincebehaviourism. Kripke’s argument that pain and C-fibresfiring are related only contingently questioned the iden-tity theory. Because damage to the ‘pain pathway’ (spinalcord, thalamus, cortex) will prevent cortically based painexperience, this is true, but pain researchers do not agreethat pain cannot be identified with any physical property.The reductive–non-reductive physicalism debate posedother important questions: is there such a thing as painin general? do all pain-feeling organisms experience thesame pain and how can one determine what organismsare capable of feeling pain? Viewing pain as a singleproperty prevents its reduction (for example, differentmolecular mechanisms are implicated in different kindsof headaches). However, there is also a strong intuitionthat our mental concept of pain picks out a single prop-erty. Functionalism captures this intuition, but cannotexplain pain’s phenomenal feel (pain does not disturbfrontal lobotomy patients; ‘phantom limb’ pains are ap-parently non-functional). Finally, whereas epiphenome-nalism about pain is probably true (pain does not causewithdrawal; but not if quantum information travels backin time, as holds Stuart Hameroff), there is also an issueof mental causation and placebo effects (how do beliefsthat some stuff will work cause pain to go away?).

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Panpsychism: the view that all constituents of reality havesome mental properties. Different versions of panpsy-chism have been entertained throughout the history ofphilosophy and are found in Spinoza, Leibniz (on someinterpretations), Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wundt, James,Peirce and Whitehead. Panpsychism, including its re-cent versions, is motivated by the idea that otherwise itwould be impossible to explain why complex entities have(phenomenal) consciousness (the problem of establishingwhen, where and how consciousness emerges).

Further reading: Rosenberg (2004)

Parallel Distributed Processing see Connectionism

Parallelism (psychophysical parallelism): the view that mentaland physical phenomena have parallel existence with nocausal interaction between them. Developed by Spinozaand Leibniz in response to the interaction problem, it wasoften held in conjunction with panpsychism.

Passions: an umbrella term for emotions and desires viewedas passive, irrational and having to be controlled by thewill. This view is often associated with modern philoso-phy before Hume. However, Descartes held that passions,disciplined by reason, contribute to our practical and the-oretical rationality, that wonder is necessary to motivatethe soul toward the search of truth, that mental content-ment may serve as evidence that a truth has been attained.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914): American philosopher,the founder of pragmatism. Peirce introduced the notionof abduction and the distinction between signs (icons) andsymbols used in the discussion of the evolution of animalcommunication and human language (but Peirce viewedsymbols as artificial signs). He defended panpsychism,

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holding that the materialist view of the mind as a mech-anism capable of feeling is not a clear hypothesis.

Further reading: Peirce (1992)

Perception: the process by which features of external realityare detected in the modalities of vision, audition, touch(haptic modality), olfaction (smell) and gustation (taste),encoded in the brain, integrated into representations ofobjects and properties and, frequently, presented to indi-vidual awareness in conscious experience. Perception isdistinguished from both sensation and cognition, and theissues it raises lie on the intersection of epistemology andthe problem of consciousness. In having perceptual expe-riences (seeing a ginger cat, hearing a door bang) we seemto be immediately aware of a mind-independent realitywith its spatial structure and discrete material objects. Butour perceptual experiences are not always veridical (ac-curate), so illusion, hallucination and dreaming pose thequestion of whether the immediate objects of perceptionare outside or inside the mind. There are also issues con-cerning the relation between perception and knowledgeof the world, the content and the phenomenal character(qualia) of perceptual experience. Representationalism,the leading theory of perception, is contrasted with thesense-datum theory, adverbialism, idealism, phenomenal-ism, direct perception theories and disjunctivism. The is-sue of modularity versus theory-ladenness of perceptionand the relation between perception and categorisationare also subject to debates.

Further reading: Smith (2002); Gendler Szabo andHawthorne (2006)

Person: being a person is usually identified with havingcontinuous identity with oneself which requires certainmental features like consciousness, conscious memory,

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self-consciousness, capacity for rationality, free agency,morality and meaningful life. Traditionally, being a per-son was understood as having an immutable immaterialsoul maintaining its identity over a person’s life and per-haps thereafter. This view is preserved in today’s infre-quent substance dualism originating in Descartes’ notionof the self. Its proponents (Roderick Chisholm, GeoffreyMandell, Richard Swinburne, John Foster) hold that,whereas we can speak of partial identity for materialthings, the notions of partial identity and survival forminds or souls are conceptually incoherent because aperson’s conscious states either belong to them or notand one cannot analyse personhood in terms of body andbrain parts (we can imagine ourselves acquiring new bod-ies). But dualism is unconvincing to most philosophers,and new principles of individuation for persons must befound, as the notion has implications for assigning moralresponsibility and making correct decisions about peoplein a persistent vegetative state, animals and embryos. Thismay require the notion of degrees of personhood.

Further reading: Foster (1996); Perring (1997)

Personal Identity: we have an intuition of being the same per-son over the course of our lives. The problem of personalidentity is to find the necessary and sufficient conditionsfor someone X to survive changes or remain the sameentity at different times (what makes one be the samething at age 5, 25, 35, etc.?) This is the issue of one’s per-sistence in time (diachronic identity) which presupposesabsolute numeric identity for persons. The discussion wasspurred by research on split-brains and involves consider-ing the implications of brain transplantation (when yourbrain is transplanted into a different body, do you gowith the brain or stay with the old body?) and fission(when your cerebral hemispheres are transplanted into

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different bodies, where do you go?) thought experiments.The most widespread approach, associated with Locke,views personal identity in terms of psychological continu-ity in conscious memory and causal dependence betweenone’s mental features (Thomas Nagel, Harold Noonan,Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker). But as it seems to denyour continuity with embryos and possible future peoplein a vegetative state, it implies that we are not humananimals. It also must admit for fission cases that one couldbe mentally continuous with two future people. Parfit ar-gues that it is not identity that matters but whether therewill be someone mentally continuous with one in the fu-ture (he defends partial continuity and argues that the‘further fact’ view of dualism about persons rests on aconceptual mistake). Contrasted with the psychologicalapproach is animalism (the somatic approach) which seespersonal identity as a matter of brute physical continuity(David Wiggins, Paul Snowdon, Eric Olson), but trans-plantation cases pose a problem for it.

Further reading: Parfit (1984); Olson (1997)

Personality (character): the sum of an individual’s stablepsychological traits analysed along five dimensions:introverted–extroverted, neurotic–stable, incurious–opento experience, agreeable–antagonistic, conscientious–undirected. Philosophical questions include: the relationbetween being a person and having a unique personality;qualitative personal identity over time; the determinationof one’s actions by one’s personality; and the interactionbetween genes, experience and social factors in shapingpersonality.

Phenomenal: appearing to an individual in a certain way. Phe-nomenal states are mental states with qualia (confusingly,they are sometimes distinguished from phenomenally

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conscious states or states available to subjective aware-ness but without associated ‘feels’, for example, beliefs).

Phenomenal Concepts: concepts we have of our sensorystates (feeling pain, experiencing a colour sensation).Several philosophers (Brian Loar, Brian McLaughlin,Christopher Hill, David Papineau, Michael Tye) holdthat understanding their nature gives the identity the-ory an argument against Kripke’s problem, zombies andthe knowledge argument. The idea is that the identity ofmental states with brain states, though necessary a poste-riori, appears to be contingent because of the special na-ture of phenomenal concepts, importantly different fromphysical-functional or theoretical concepts. Phenomenalconcepts are direct recognitional concepts whose posses-sion is linked with having the right kind of experienceand the capacity to reidentify its instances in introspectionand imagination. The existence of different concepts doesnot imply the existence of different properties. Phenom-enal concepts refer directly to the same properties thatare referred to by the corresponding physical-functionalconcepts, and the appearance of contingency is due totheir distinctive role in our cognitive life. David Chalmersobjects that this strategy assumes rather than explainsidentity and leaves unanswered the question of why twodistinct concepts should pick out the same property (itexplains why zombies are conceivable, but does not ex-plain why, despite that, they are impossible).

Further reading: Loar (1997); Chalmers (1999);Papineau (2002)

Phenomenal Consciousness: experience with its particularsubjective feel. Phenomenal states possess qualitative fea-tures (qualia), and if there is something that an experience

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feels like to you, then you are phenomenally conscious ofit. Phenomenal consciousness poses problems for bothphysicalism and functionalism because it is hard to un-derstand how and why brain states or functional statesshould give rise to qualia, to the what-it’s-like char-acter of subjective experience (David Chalmers calledthis the Hard Problem of Consciousness). Why shouldcolour experiences or emotions feel a certain way to us?Why could there not be beings just like us but havingno phenomenal consciousness (zombies)? Is phenomenalconsciousness epiphenomenal? Consciousness is knownto us only through introspection. This creates a clashbetween the first-person and the third-person (scientific)perspectives and suggests that in trying to explain con-sciousness we may be faced with the explanatory gap. Ina broader sense, as understood in phenomenology, phe-nomenal consciousness is not limited to the qualitativecharacter of experience but encompasses its organisationas a whole.

Further reading: Chalmers (1996)

Phenomenal Realism see Realism

Phenomenalism: an epistemological theory of perception heldby J. S. Mill, Russell and some philosophers of logicalpositivism (Ayer, Carnap). It views objects of perceptionas sense-data providing the foundation of all knowledge,and material objects as ‘permanent possibilities of sensa-tion’ (Mill). For Russell, physical objects were logical con-structions out of sensations (sensibilia) immediately givenin perceptual experience (logical atomism). In logical pos-itivism it turned into a programme of translating empir-ical statements into statements about the phenomenal.The project was not completed as it proved impossible to

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explain orderly occurrences of phenomenal properties inexperience without reference to public objects.

Further reading: Russell (1956)

Phenomenological Fallacy: the fallacy of inferring from ap-pearance to existence. Place used the expression for themistake of supposing that when people describe theirexperiences (that something looks green to them), theydescribe properties of some internal mental objects (ofsomething green existing in the mind).

Phenomenology: (1) the phenomenal character of experience(qualia); (2) the tradition of philosophy of mind devel-oped by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-PaulSartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the study of con-sciousness from the first-person perspective intended touncover in experience those components that account forits intentionality.

Philosophy of Mind: studies the nature of mental phenomena(thought, belief, desire, sensation, perception, volition,emotion, etc.). Its main issues are the mind–body prob-lem and intentionality (content). The problem of inten-tionality marked the divergence between analytical andcontinental traditions (phenomenology). Phenomenologyholds that the essence of mind is consciousness and em-phasises the first-person perspective. Analytical tradition,shaped by Frege and Russell, emphasises the importanceof conceptual analysis of mental terms and aims to makementality amenable to scientific (third-person) investiga-tion. With the recent resurgence of interest in the problemof consciousness, the relation between intentionality andconsciousness and their evolutionary emergence are be-coming the central issue of today’s philosophy of mind.

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Physical Realisation Principle: the principle, accepted by pro-ponents of non-reductive physicalism, that if any x hasa mental property M, there is a physical property P suchthat x has P and, necessarily, anything that has P has M(and P realises M).

Physical Stance see Intentional Stance

Physicalism (Materialism): the view that everything in the uni-verse is physical or not requiring for its existence anythingover and above entities and processes recognised by thephysical sciences (physics, but also chemistry and biol-ogy). It is useful to distinguish between (1) token andtype physicalism, (2) reductive and non-reductive physi-calism and (3) a priori and a posteriori physicalism. Tokenphysicalism holds that every mental event (like havinga pain) is identical with some physical event, whereastype physicalism holds that every type of mental event,or every mental property, is identical with some phys-ical property (being in a neural state of certain type).Token physicalism is compatible with attribute dualismand must be augmented with the idea of supervenienceor the physical realisation principle, as physicalism isopposed to dualism. This gives us supervenience phys-icalism. Supervenience physicalism (first formulated asanomalous monism) is a species of non-reductive physi-calism, whereas type physicalism (first formulated as theidentity theory) is a species of reductive physicalism. Apriori physicalism and a posteriori physicalism are formsof reductive physicalism urging either an a priori (con-ceptual; Lewis’s contingent, Jackson’s necessary) or an aposteriori (empirical; the identity theory) identification ofmental states with physical states. Finally, note that phys-icalism encompasses eliminative materialism and func-tionalism, and although it is sometimes contrasted with

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functionalism, in such cases it should be understood as re-ductive physicalism, since functionalism accepts the corephysicalist commitment.

Further reading: Gillett and Loewer (2001)

Place, Ullin T. (1924–2000): British-Australian philosopher,originator of the identity theory. Place argued for the con-stitution of consciousness by brain processes as a scientifichypothesis. However, he never extended the theory to be-liefs and desires, insisting that they, as we do not sensethem, should be given a dispositional analysis. In laterwork he developed the idea of two parallel processingsystems, the unconscious system (‘zombie-within’) andconsciousness, whose function is to deal with problem-atic inputs.

Further reading: Place (1956)

Plasticity (equipotentiality): the capacity of distinct neuralstructures to subserve identical psychological functionsand take on new functions as a result of learning orbrain damage. Proponents of connectionism, neurophi-losophy and neural constructivism argue against innatedomain-specific representational structures in the brain,quoting instances of cortical remapping and tissue re-location, foetal cortical tissue transplantation, rewiringof primary sensory areas (as in Mriganka Sur’s experi-ments when young ferrets’ auditory cortex was rewiredto process visual information), and resumption of cogni-tive functions in young children following brain lesions(left hemisphere removal). However, other data show thatthe brain is not totally plastic (early damage to prefrontalareas leads to irrepairable cognitive deficits) and remap-ping is subject to structural constraints (the primary audi-tory cortex of rewired ferrets retains connections to otherbrain areas for hearing and has low resolution visual

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representation). The existence of neural plasticity and itssupport of multiple realisability raise important issues forempirical research: to what extent are neurons’ represen-tational properties determined by their functional roles incontrast to their intrinsic properties? what factors (neu-roanatomical, neurofunctional, neurophysiological) de-termine when two distinct neural states belong to thesame kind (the problem of individuation)?

Plato (c. 427–347 bc): ancient Greek philosopher, the ma-jor source of philosophical inspiration which broughthim the title of princeps totius philosophiae, the best ofphilosophers. From the early dialogues, where Plato in-troduces the questioning figure of Socrates, particularlyinteresting is Meno with its formulation of the learningparadox: one cannot learn something of which one hasno prior understanding. In the middle dialogues (Phaedo,The Republic) the Socratic method and the search foressences of what is expressed by our concepts of justice,virtue or love are replaced with the positive theory ofForms or Ideas: changeless, independent of things, ab-stract entities from which things with the same form re-ceive their nature, and of which the highest is that ofthe Good. The forms can be apprehended by noesis, thehighest type of knowledge, which is the recollection ofthe acquaintance with the forms that the impersonal, im-mortal, rational soul (nous) contemplated before becom-ing imprisoned in the body (the theory of anamnesis).Plato’s eidetic theory (eidos, form) is the first account ofthe world’s intelligibility opposing the scepticism engen-dered by the changeability of perceptual experience. Itit is also the first formulation of the symbolic charac-ter of thought (representational theory of mind) and theproblem of universals. From the late middle dialogues,Parmenides presents a critique of the theory of forms later

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adopted by Aristotle, and Theaetetus develops the con-ception of knowledge as justified true belief (albeit thisreading of Plato may be questioned).

Further reading: Plato (1989)

Possible Worlds: a technical device for clarifying intuitionsabout modality (possibility and necessity) and analysingcounterfactual thought and language (if x had happened,y would have happened). Possible worlds are completestates of affairs which differ from the actual (our) worldin some details. They may be understood as alterna-tive scenarios of how things might have been in theactual world (Kripke), as elements of the conceptual space(Robert Stalnaker), or as existing just as this world does(Lewis’s modal realism). In Kripke’s modal logic proposi-tions must be evaluated as true or false at possible worlds,and a proposition is necessary if it is true at all possibleworlds (Leibniz’s view). Kripke’s notion of necessity isimportant for discussions of the mind–body problem andthe issue of whether, apart from nomological necessity,one should recognise both metaphysical and conceptualnecessity or whether these are the same thing (the zom-bies argument is based on the latter view). Stalnaker’sdeflationism about possible worlds shows how the in-formational theory of content and the view of proposi-tional attitudes as relations to propositions (semanticallyevaluable abstract objects) are made compatible throughan analysis of propositions as sets of possible worlds (tohave a conception of the world is to locate it in a spaceof possibilities). Stalnaker’s and Lewis’s notion of simi-larity between possible worlds, which allows one to eval-uate counterfactual statements as true if they are true atall worlds most similar to ours, is relevant to the idea ofcounterfactual causation and the externalism–internalismdebate.

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Poverty of Stimulus: the argument given by Chomsky in his1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (1956). Be-cause children receive highly impoverished stimuli fromadults (they are not explicitly taught to speak and areseldom corrected) no general learning mechanism (imi-tation, association, reinforcement) can explain how chil-dren master linguistic competence at the rates at whichthey actually master it.

Pragmatism: (1) the view associated with James, Peirce andJohn Dewey that the meaning of a doctrine and its truthmust be understood in terms of its practical effects onone’s action in the world; (2) Fodor’s recent term fortheories of concepts which identify possessing a conceptX with being able to sort things into Xs and non-Xs(Dewey, behaviourism, some theories of categorisation).This idea underlies the notion of recognitional (obser-vational) concepts like red or apple which are thoughtto be based on discriminatory capacities. But pragma-tism is also characteristic of functional role semanticswhich holds that having inferential capacities is constitu-tive of concept possession. (Pragmatism was anticipatedby Thomas Reid who rejected the existence of ideas asmental entities but accepted them as acts of thought; seealso Putnam.) The problem with pragmatism is that suchcapacities are themselves parasitic on representation (onemust represent apples to oneself before being able to pilethem separately from pears), and that it violates the com-positionality constraint.

Further reading: Fodor (2003)

Pre-established Harmony see Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm

Preconscious see Freud, Sigmund

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Primary and Secondary Qualities: the distinction drawn byLocke (still relevant to theories of perception) betweenqualities like size, shape and motion which are objec-tive properties of things or primary qualities (he some-times adds solidity and texture) and qualities like colour,sound, taste and smell which are things’ dispositions tochange sensory states of perceivers and in a sense existonly in individuals’ minds (secondary or immediate sen-sory qualities). The main criterion for the distinction isnot being tied to one particular sense modality.

Principle of Charity: the principle formulated by Davidsonthat in interpreting other people’s behaviour we ascribeto them beliefs and desires they should rationally have intheir situation. Because the interpreter must thus presup-pose that people’s beliefs are mostly true, the principlesupports externalism and provides an argument againstscepticism.

Principle of Humanity: the principle that in interpreting otherpeople’s behaviour we do not try to maximise the ratio-nality and truth of their beliefs as required by the princi-ple of charity, but rather invoke considerations of what issufficiently reasonable for them to believe. The principleis compatible with internalism.

Privacy: that feature of the mind in virtue of which a subject’sthoughts and experiences are accessible only to them-selves (privileged access).

Private Language Argument see Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Privileged Access: the idea, deriving from Descartes, that aperson has immediate epistemic access to their mental

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states. Although this view leads to the problem of otherminds, what sort of privileged access we enjoy remainsan important issue in discussions of consciousness andself-knowledge.

Productivity: the property of thought and language wherebyan infinite number of thoughts and sentences can beformed on the basis of a finite set of primitive elementsand recursive syntactic rules.

Proper Function see Millikan, Ruth Garrett

Propositional Attitudes: psychological relations of persons topropositions. Propositional attitudes are individuated bytheir psychological type like thinking, believing, desiring,knowing, doubting, hoping, fearing, etc. (expressed lin-guistically by a corresponding psychological or proposi-tional attitude verb) and the proposition that forms theircontent (expressed linguistically by a ‘that’-clause). ‘Fearsthat it will rain’, ‘hopes that it will rain’, ‘believes thatEdinburgh is in Scotland’ and ‘believes that Edinburghis not in Scotland’ are different propositional attitudes,the most discussed kind of intentional states. One inter-esting feature of psychological verbs is that they createintensional or referentially opaque contexts. In exten-sional or referentially transparent contexts one can sub-stitute co-referring expressions for one another withoutaffecting the truth-value of a sentence: ‘Mark Twain wasa writer’ and ‘Samuel Clemens was a writer’ are bothtrue (intersubstitutivity salva veritate). But ‘Ann believesthat Mark Twain was a writer’ and ‘Ann believes thatSamuel Clemens was a writer’ may have different truth-values, for Ann may not know that Samuel Clemens wasMark Twain’s real name. This phenomenon, identified

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by Frege and Russell, is known as the failure of substi-tutivity of co-referential expressions in contexts createdby psychological verbs, and the problem it creates is theco-reference problem. Another interesting feature of psy-chological verbs is that whereas ‘Mary hates George’ en-tails that George exists, ‘Mary wants to find the Fountainof Youth’ does not entail that the Fountain of Youth ex-ists. This is the failure of existential generalisation in in-tensional contexts. However, knowledge, perception andremembering (‘knows, perceives, remembers that p’) con-stitute an exception because they do entail the existence ofobjects they are directed at and are called for this reasonfactive attitudes.

Prototype Theory: the most popular theory of concepts incognitive psychology according to which concepts aresets of typical features. Prototype theory, motivated byproblems with the definitional theory and Wittgenstein’snotion of family resemblances, was proposed by EleanorRosch who noticed striking prototypicality effects in peo-ple’s judgements of category membership. Thus peoplemore readily judge that robins are birds than that pen-guins are birds and the number of categorisation mis-takes is related to the typicality of instances (typicalbirds fly, have feathers, sing, are small, etc.). Rosch alsointroduced the notion of the basic level of categorisa-tion, concepts from which (dog) are richer in their in-formational potential, have closer links with perceptionand are acquired before concepts from the subordinate(poodle) and superordinate (animal) levels. Rosch’sideas were later developed into a formal theory whichviews concepts as structured mental representations cod-ing for typical properties of objects that these conceptsrefer to (Edward Smith, James Hampton). Like the defini-tional theory, it endows concepts with internal structure,

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but posits statistical instead of logical structure. Thus con-nectionism is seen as complementing it. But prototypetheory faces the problem of concept shareability (even ifpeople’s concepts are not identical but merely similar, onemust distinguish in them a common core, which requiresviewing some features as identical), compositionality (thecontent of pet fish is not composed from the prototypesof pet and fish), and the fact that people’s knowledgeof objects is not identical with the concepts they have ofthem (people do judge penguins to be birds).

Psychoanalysis see Freud, Sigmund

Psychofunctionalism see Machine Functionalism

Psychological Laws see Causal Laws

Psychophysical Laws: laws correlating brain properties andmental properties. Their existence is debated by differentversions of physicalism.

Putnam, Hilary (b. 1926): American philosopher, the orig-inator of machine functionalism and externalism. Al-though scientific realism, realism about the mental andcontemporary functionalism are all indebted to Putnam(he coined the term ‘functionalism’), in the 1980s he be-came sceptical about the functionalist characterisation ofmental states thinking that multiple realisability appliesnot only to physical but also to computational states. Theproblem with functionalism, arising from the holism ofthe mental, lies in its approach to the individuation ofintentional states (saying when an organism has a beliefwith a certain content like ‘it is snowing’). To hold thatthe aim of psychological explanation is to produce a com-plete functional description of psychological states of an

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arbitrary organism is a utopia. There is an infinite num-ber of possible interpretations of what an organism be-lieves given a piece of its linguistic and non-linguistic be-haviour. And one cannot individuate beliefs by specifyingthe totality of an organism’s functional states because ofGodel’s incompleteness theorem: the mind cannot surveyits own limits. Thus intentionality is irreducible and sci-entific realism (the view that there is one true descriptionof reality) is a myth. This made Putnam a critic of func-tional role semantics and informational theory of con-tent. He also rejects representationalism about percep-tion (in favour of direct perception), and sees cognitivescience as the Cartesian theatre plus materialism (but heis also sceptical of neuroscience). Concurrently, his pos-itive position was internal realism, which was becomingcloser and closer to pragmatism and epistemologicalrelativism.

Further reading: Putnam (1988, 2000)

Q

qua problem: arises for the causal theory of reference and theinformational theory of content. The problem is to ex-plain how we manage to refer to or represent a certainkind of things, say, tigers qua tigers rather than qua ani-mals as the same individual that serves to fix the referenceof ‘tiger’ is both a tiger and an animal.

Further reading: Sterelny (1983)

qualia (singular: quale): qualitative or phenomenal proper-ties of experience. Seeing red, feeling pain or tasting alemon feel to us a certain way, there is something thatit is like for us to have these experiences. It means that

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these mental states have qualia. Most philosophers agreethat mental states with qualia include experiences of per-ception (hearing a loud noise), bodily sensations (feel-ing an itch), felt emotions (fear) and moods (depression).Galen Strawson argues that thoughts also have qualia, butthis is not the accepted view. Understood as intrinsic fea-tures of experience or raw feels, qualia present problemsfor physicalism and functionalism because they seem tobe irreducible and non-physical (knowledge argument).Recently, proponents of representationalism about con-sciousness suggested a different understanding of whatqualia are and a possible route for their reduction.

Quantum Theories of Consciousness: locate (phenomenal)consciousness at the level of quantum phenomena (thebest known proposal belongs to physicist Roger Penroseand anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff). Its motivationsinclude the non-algorithmic character of human thought(which must rely on a non-algorithmic physical process),the difficulty with explaining consciousness within thepresent theoretical framework and avoidance of epiphe-nomenalism. The suggested physical process is the col-lapse of the quantum mechanical wave function (the tran-sition of a quantum system from a superposition of wavefunctions to a single definite state). Quantum self-collapse(collapse not initiated by an act of measurement), thephysical correlate of consciousness, occurs in the micro-tubules of neurons’ cell bodies or dendrites which formcoherent structures across the brain via gap junctions(bypassing synaptic transmission). Critics doubt the con-nection between consciousness and quantum mechan-ics which skips a few levels of description and leads topanpsychism.

Further reading: Penrose (1994)

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Quine, Willard Van Orman (1908–2000): American philoso-pher and logician associated with logical behaviourism.Always concerned with how scientific theories make‘ontological commitments’ to the existence of certain enti-ties, Quine questioned logical positivism’s view that a truetheory must be a collection of analytic statements wherethe predicate is contained in the definition of the subject.He argued for verification holism: no hypothesis can betested in isolation from other theoretical statements, in-cluding statements about observable phenomena, whichare themselves theoretic. Changes introduced by accom-modating new data ramify through the whole theory, andthe notion of synonymy underlying analyticity cannot beformulated clearly. All theoretical statements are contin-gent and based on our deeply entrenched beliefs about theworld. Quine’s behaviourism is the view that meaning isexhausted by observable behaviour and should not be ex-plained in terms of internal mental entities. Children as-sociate sentences they hear from adults with different sit-uations and learn to apply terms of a natural language totheir internal states (stimulus generalisation constrainedby subjective similarity spaces), hence the ideas of rad-ical interpretation, indeterminacy of translation and in-scrutability of reference. The observer-relative nature ofpsychological language prevents its incorporation intonatural science. One must either accept its indispensabil-ity and reject physicalism or accept physicalism and rejectthe possibility of intentional science (that is intensional orsensitive to particular descriptions). Proponents of elimi-native materialism opted for the second horn of Quine’sdilemma, but Quine’s own views were closer to the iden-tity theory, and in his late work he embraced anomalousmonism (‘conceptual dualism’).

Further reading: Quine (1953, 1960)

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R

Radical Interpretation: the thesis developed by Quine andDavidson that the ascription of meanings to individualwords of a language is derivative from the ascription ofmeanings to all words of that language. Because the as-cription of mental states is similarly holistic, mental stateswould be exhaustively ascribed to individuals by a radicalinterpreter having at his disposal complete behaviourallinguistic evidence (interpretivism). As interpretation isthought to be radical (from zero) and taking place withina different linguistic medium, the indeterminacy of trans-lation follows.

Ramsey Sentence: a technical device for non-circular analy-sis of theoretical terms invented by British mathemati-cian Frank P. Ramsey (1903–30). In a Ramsey sentencea term of a scientific theory is replaced with a variableand all statements containing the replaced term are ex-istentially quantified. Thus, instead of saying that elec-trons attract protons and so on, one says that there issomething that attracts protons (and has certain otherproperties). In the Ramsey sentence of a whole theory allits specific terms are replaced with their functional defi-nitions or specifications of their causal roles within thattheory (Ramsification). This allows for their identifica-tion with the occupiers of the corresponding causal roles,if any.

Rationalism (nativism, Cartesianism): the view that much ofour knowledge is innate. Rationalism involves psycho-logical and epistemological theses; both were originatedin modern philosophy by Descartes and radicalised by

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Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes argued thatpure sense experience cannot by itself represent exter-nal objects and requires structuring by innate ideas dis-tinguished by what they represent (Brentano mentionsDescartes as a major source for thinking about inten-tionality). But he also held that true knowledge has ana priori character in that it can be built on the foundationof clear and distinct ideas in the manner of mathemat-ical deduction. In the twentieth century, after a periodof behaviourism’s dominance, the psychological thesiswas revived in Chomsky’s theory of universal grammarand Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis. The episte-mological thesis, shattered by Quine, was reinstated byKripke and other philosophers emphasising the impor-tance of a priori analysis.

Rationality: coherence in one’s system of beliefs (theoreticalrationality); consistency of one’s actions with one’s be-liefs (practical rationality). Rationality as the capacity fordrawing justified inferences was always seen as definitiveof human intelligence (its connection with logic was al-ready stated by Aristotle). More recently, several philoso-phers stressed that the attribution of intentional states toother people in explaining their behaviour requires see-ing them as rational as is possible in the circumstances.Even though people often behave irrationally, they can beintelligible to others only if a certain degree of coherenceis presupposed in their belief systems (holism). Rational-ity is thus linked to normativity, and for Davidson it be-comes a Kantian synthetic a priori that cannot be analysedin physical terms and explains the irreducibility of men-tal concepts. However, other philosophers disagree thatthere can be no codified theory of rationality, especially ifone considers that, not being ideally rational, humans re-main believers and decision-makers. This realisation led

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to the development of theories of bounded rationality and‘dual-process theories’ of reasoning. Although people donot have perfect logical ability, drawing invalid inferences(affirming the consequent: if P then Q, Q, therefore P)and failing deductive (Wason selection task) and proba-bilistic (stereotyping) reasoning tasks, they often manageto believe and behave rationally for the circumstances.But finite agents with limited memory and a lack of in-formation, time or cognitive resources to engage in com-plex calculations cannot always use infallible algorithmsand must rely on mental models, biases and heuristics.Still, this does not eliminate the need to explain the irra-tionality of delusion, wishful thinking, self-deception andweakness of will.

Further reading: Mele and Rawling (2004)

Raw Feels see qualia

Realism: to be a realist about X is to hold that X is somethingreal in the sense that its existence does not depend on itsbeing our mental or social construct. As such, it may defyreduction and should be admitted into scientific explana-tion. In intentional realism, X = intentional mental states(beliefs, desires). In phenomenal realism, X = qualia.

Reasons and Causes see Action

Recognitional Concepts see Pragmatism

Recursive: allowing one to form an infinite range of expres-sions from a finite set of elements by recurrent applicationof structure-sensitive rules. The recursive character of hu-man thought and language can be seen in our ability toform and process strings like ‘The man that chased thedog that chased the cat that chased the mouse tripped

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and fell’ by assigning to them correct subject-predicaterelations (it was the man who fell, not the mouse).

Reduction: identification of a higher-order property with alower-order property (for example, temperature in gasesis mean molecular kinetic energy). One may distinguishbetween ontological reduction (saying that X is Y in theworld’s ontology), conceptual or a priori reduction (say-ing that concept Xpicks out the same property as conceptY ) and intertheoretic reduction.

Reductionism (reductivism): to be a reductionist about X isto hold that X is nothing other than some different kindof thing. The term is often reserved for reductive physi-calism, although behaviourism, functionalism, functionalrole semantics and naturalised semantics can all be con-sidered as reductive approaches (about mental propertiesand content respectively).

Reductive Physicalism: the view that mental properties arephysical properties. Its main versions are the identity the-ory and the functional reduction of Armstrong and Lewis.Kim argues that only reductive physicalism can makesense of mental causation. He accepts Lewis’s restrictedidentities and shows how the argument from multiple re-alisability and special sciences can be turned against itself.The argument says that a mental property (like pain) canbe realised in physically different systems, and thus can-not be identified with a disjunction of realising its physicalproperties because disjunctions do not constitute naturalkinds. But if one accepts that physically different systemsare systems where diverse causal principles are in oper-ation, that mental properties have the causal powers oftheir realisers (causal inheritance principle) and that nat-ural kinds are individuated by their causal powers, the

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implication is that mental properties do not constitutenatural kinds either. It follows that there is no psychol-ogy as a general science, that scientific psychology is onlypossible for individual species or organism types. Whatthen is the status of mental properties? Kim concludesthat there are no mental properties (no such thing aspain in general) but only mental concepts, thus comingclose to eliminativism. However, this raises questions: ifthere are no mental properties, what are our mental con-cepts concepts of? how can we explain the continuity be-tween species and the validity of comparative psychol-ogy? The task for a reductionist thus becomes to reducemental properties without eliminating them. This mightbe achieved by: (1) accepting realism about higher-orderproperties (Lewis, Jackson); (2) holding that there mustbe a single property underlying the disjunction (once con-templated by Kim); (3) weakening the connection be-tween natural kinds and complete causal homogeneity(Ned Block).

Further reading: Block (1997); Kim (2002)

Reference see Sense and Reference

Referential Opacity see Propositional Attitudes

Reification: consideration of something for which there is anoun in the language as if at were a real entity (res – thing)whereas it may in fact be a process, a nonentity, a mentalconstruct.

Relativism: the view that the way people perceive and thinkabout the world is determined by the language they speak(linguistic relativism) or the practices of their community(cultural or conceptual relativism), and that knowledge

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and truth are relative to the perspective of one’s culture(epistemological relativism).

Representation: that which stands for something else withina different medium. A photograph can be a representa-tion of a building, not being a building itself. Similarly,mental states can represent the external world’s objects,properties and relations while being entities internal tothe mind. Representation is central to understanding in-tentionality in a naturalistic way. Instead of thinking thatthe mind is directed towards some abstract entities likepropositions, one can understand propositional attitudes(beliefs, desires) as mental phenomena and extend theclass of intentional states. However, one must be carefulto distinguish between the contents and the vehicles ofrepresentations. Whereas the vehicle of a representation isa certain brain state, its content is that which the represen-tation is about. Understanding representations as internalinformation-carrying states mediating between psycho-logical processes in virtue of their contents is central tocognitive science. But there is also the problem of form:how do minds/brains represent? The language of thought(LOT) hypothesis says that mental representation is sym-bolic. It is thus discrete or digital because each symbol hasspecific content. But in analogue or continuous represen-tation specific contents cannot be assigned to individualparts (this understanding differs from the original notionintroduced to explain non-conceptual content). Oppo-nents of LOT argue for the continuous nature of men-tal representation holding that minds represent the waypictures or holograms do (image theory, imagery) and theway maps do (analytic functionalism); that representationis distributed over subsymbolic units (connectionism) orsystems larger than an organism (dynamical systems, ex-tended mind).

Further reading: Dietrich and Markman (2003)

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Representational Theory of Mind (RTM): the view that inten-tional states (thoughts, beliefs, etc.) represent the world(actual or possible) and are semantically evaluable (maybe true or false). Anticipated by Plato, Aristotle, Ockhamand early modern representationalism, RTM, which is themain thesis of classical cognitive science, is the view thata language of thought is the medium of mental represen-tation.

Further reading: Sterelny (1990)

Representationalism: the theory of perception (particularlyvision) which holds that perceptual processes arecomputational-inferential processes that deliver represen-tations of distal objects and properties on the basis ofproximal (retinal) stimulations. Historically, the view thatthe mind operates on representations – the precursorof the representational theory of mind – is found inDescartes, Malebranche, Locke and Hume. According toit perception is the process whereby the mind receivesits sensations or particular ideas of things. These werethought to be picture-like mental copies of external ob-jects, which rendered perception indirect: access to theworld was access to one’s representations of it. The viewwas attacked by Arnauld, Foucher, Berkeley and Reid,who rejected mental representations and argued that itcreated the veil of perception, leaving the mind out oftouch with reality. Today representationalism is the lead-ing approach to perception, though the issue of imme-diate objects of perceptual experience separates its twovarieties. Direct representationalism holds that we per-ceive the external world through our representations ofit. Its proponents escape the veil by accepting direct real-ism (as does, for example, Andrew Brook), and it is oftencombined with representationalism about consciousness.In contrast, indirect representationalism emphasises thesimilarity between veridical and non-veridical perception

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with respect to internal processes (the argument fromillusion) and holds that we perceive brain-generatedpicture-like representations, the end products of causalprocesses beginning at the retina (direct brain stimula-tion can result in visual experience). It thus bears a cer-tain resemblance to the sense-datum theory, and it is notsurprising that Descartes and Locke are often mentionedas the precursers of the latter as well.

Representationalism about Consciousness (intentionalism):although the phrase is also used to include higher-ordertheories of consciousness, more commonly it designatesthe view that phenomenal states are representationalor intentional states wholly determined by what theyrepresent, by their content (Dretske, Michael Tye, GilbertHarman, Jackson). It reconsiders the nature of qualia,viewing them not as intrinsic properties of experience butas properties of external objects that experience repre-sents these objects as having: every phenomenal differenceimplies representational difference. It views sensory expe-rience as transparent or diaphanous, giving us access tothe world via our representations of it and allowing us toform beliefs about it. Connecting phenomenal conscious-ness with intentionality, representationalism gives the for-mer a clear biological function and is in a position to rec-oncile it with physicalism. However, some philosophersdoubt that it can be extended to other phenomenal stateslike sensations or emotions (orgasm, anxiety, pain) andgive counterexamples to its account of perceptual states(inverted Earth). In order to account for differences be-tween conscious and non-conscious representation, rep-resentation in perception and belief and representation indifferent sensory modalities, one may need to distinguishbetween pure representationalism which identifies anyphenomenal property with the property of representing

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a certain content and more commonly held (implicitly orexplicitly) impure representationalism which in additionincludes ‘intentional modes’ or ‘manners of representa-tion’ such as representing a content visually perceptu-ally. David Chalmers argues that because drawing thesefiner distinctions seems to require the notion of phenom-enal representation, representationalism cannot accom-plish the reduction of the phenomenal. Chalmers andother philosophers also object to representationalism’scommitment to externalism, holding that the the phenom-enal character of experience must be fixed internally.

Further reading: Dretske (1995); Tye (1995); Chalmers(2004)

Rigid Designator see Causal Theory of Reference

Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970): English philosopher and lo-gician, one of the founders of analytical philosophy. In‘On denoting’ (1905) Russell formulated three puzzlesabout denotation (hence intentionality), observing thatdenoting phrases (indefinite and definite descriptions) donot always denote existing entities. But how can one trulybelieve of a non-existent individual (like the present Kingof France) that it does not exist if using a denoting phrasepresupposes its existence (the puzzle of true negative ex-istential beliefs)? A related puzzle concerns the violationof the law of identity in contexts created by propositionalattitudes. To eliminate the view that something is alwaysdenoted by such phrases, Russell proposed to analysestatements of the form ‘the F is G’ as statements whoselogical form is: ‘there is an x such that Fx, and for any y,if Fy then y = x, and Gx’. He also proposed that somenames are abbreviated definite descriptions (thus ‘Apollo’abbreviates ‘the sun-god’) and in Principia Mathematicaextended this analysis (theory of definite descriptions) to

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all proper names. This was motivated by his distinctionbetween knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge bydescription, and the view that genuine singular thoughtsinvolve direct acquaintance with individuals, hence thatthe only logically proper names (names referring directlyto objects) are words for the immediately experiencedsense-data (‘this’, ‘that’) and universals. These consider-ations later led him to phenomenalism, and then neutralmonism.

Further reading: Russell (1956)

Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76): English philosopher, the founder oflogical behaviourism. Ryle launched an attack againstCartesian substance dualism which views the mind as aspecial ‘kind of existence’ to which we have privilegedaccess. But this view was undermined by Freud, and Rylecalls it ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine’. It com-mits a category mistake by claiming that internal pro-cesses stand behind a person’s behaviour. In contrast Ryleargues that having a mind is having behavioural dispo-sitions or knowledge-how, and illustrates this with theexample of intelligence: are there any criteria of intelli-gence other than intelligent behaviour?

Further reading: Ryle (1949)

Ryle’s Regress (homunculus argument): a problem for repre-sentationalism, and by extension the computational andrepresentational theory of mind, inspired by Ryle’s argu-ments. If the mind operates on representations, then theremust be someone who interprets them, and so one has topostulate a homunculus (a tiny person) inside the head forthe result of every causal representation-transformationalprocess, thus resulting in an infinite regress. The prob-lem has several aspects: (1) the difficulty one has withunderstanding how physical entities can carry and read

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off information (but consider DNA); (2) the fear that itwill lead one to postulate the Cartesian self; and (3) thesuspicion that positing internal representations does notreally explain perceptual experience like seeing.

S

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80): French philosopher who devel-oped an existentialist version of phenomenology. Con-cerned with the issues of intentionality and conscious-ness, Sartre began with studying imagination where therelation of consciousness to the non-existent is the mostevident. He opposed Husserl, whom he interpreted asholding that reality is immanent to consciousness, andlater introduced the categories of the in-itself (en-soi), thetransphenomenal being of things extending beyond ap-pearances, and the for-itself (pour-soi) or consciousnessconstantly reconstituting the phenomenal being includ-ing itself. With the pour-soi nothingness comes into be-ing because it is the nihilation (neantisation) of the en-soi:looking for someone who is not there we introduce noth-ingness into the otherwise complete being. Sartre’s under-standing of consciousness as non-substantial (one is nota self but a presence-to-self) underlies his views on abso-lute human freedom: at every moment one has to ‘chooseoneself’ and is the true author of one’s actions. Thinkingthat one’s actions are determined by one’s external situ-ation or one’s internal nature is a kind of self-deception,bad faith (mauvaise foi) which leads to anguish.

Further reading: Sartre [1943] (1953)

Scepticism: to be a sceptic about X is to deny that it existsbecause knowledge of its existence is impossible. Scep-ticism was a school of thought in ancient philosophy

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(founded by Pyrrho of Elis, c.361–270 bc, developed byAenesidemus of Cnossos and Sextus Empiricus) whichcriticised any attempt (particularly that of the Stoics) togo beyond appearances. Another school, Academic scep-ticism (founded by Arcesilaus in the 200s bc) was lessradical in its outlook and concentrated on uncoveringdifficulties in various philosophical positions.

Schizophrenia: mental disorder characterised by abnormalthought, perception, mood, emotional experience andbehaviour. Delusions are characteristic of paranoidschizophrenia. Thus people suffering from Capgras delu-sion fail to recognise their acquaintances, believing thatthey have been replaced by impostors, and those suf-fering from the thought insertion delusion believe thattheir thoughts are not their own. Its other symptomsinclude auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), socialwithdrawal (impaired theory of mind) and difficulty withforming a stable self-conception. It is unclear whether dif-ferent forms of schizophrenia constitute a single disorder,but there seems to be a progressive worsening in the unityof consciousness to the stage where patients appear un-aware of temporal and spacial unity between objects orare even unable to represent unified objects. Reproduc-ing the original insight of Eugen Bleuler who describedschizophrenia as a ‘splitting of the psychic functions’(1911), some researchers suggest today that schizophre-nia results from the disrupted integrity of neural circuits.

Searle, John R. (b.1932): American philosopher of languageand mind, for whom the central notion is that of con-sciousness. Searle rejects the mind–body problem formu-lated in terms of whether mental phenomena are phys-ical or non-physical, and advocates biological natural-ism, according to which conscious mental phenomena

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are higher-level features of the brain, both caused by neu-robiological processes and irreducibly subjective (closeto emergentism). This view underlies his understandingof intentionality. By Searle’s ‘connection principle’ inten-tional states can be unconscious only if they are in prin-ciple available to subjective awareness. Thus only (po-tentially) conscious states possess intrinsic, as opposed tointerpreter-relative, intentionality. Intentional states aredistinguished by their aspectual shape (intensionality),they represent things under an aspect (desire for wa-ter is different from desire for H2O), but the determi-nation of aspectual shape is only possible for consciousstates. Because Searle recognises only two types of pro-cesses in the mind/brain – intentional or subjective andbrutally neurophysiological – he is also a major critic offunctionalism (the Background), the computational the-ory of mind (Chinese room), and later, the very notion ofcomputation.

Further reading: Searle (1992)

Secondary Qualities see Primary and Secondary Qualities

Self, The: that to which each of us presumably refers whensaying ‘I’, which ensures our unity of consciousness andpersonal identity, which possibly survives the destructionof the body, the soul. Conceiving of the mind as survivingthe annihilation of the physical world, Descartes madethe self, a simple indivisible thinking substance (Carte-sian ego), a major topic in modern philosophy. Similarviews existed long before Descartes in many religious tra-ditions, and his cogito argument was anticipated by Avi-cenna’s ‘flying man’ suddenly coming into existence withfull awareness of his self but no sensation coming fromthe external world as he is suspended in an empty space.But as Descartes also originated representationalism, the

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conception of the conscious self as the bearer of sensationsand ideas (labelled by Dennett ‘the Cartesian theatre viewof consciousness’) proved extremely persistent. Holdingthat the self cannot be given in perception and we canform no idea of it, Berkeley, however, admitted it intohis philosophy as the notion we have of our awareness ofideas, necessary for understanding the human person butnot given to us with clarity. And, although Hume deniedthe existence of a single unified self, noting that he cannever catch himself without a perception and concludingthat there is nothing to the mind beyond a bundle of indi-vidual states (bundle theory of the self), the idea of the selfbeing a product of imagination, he remained dissatisfiedwith his solution. Kant, who shared Hume’s scepticismabout the empirical ego, acknowledged that the pure ego(‘I think’) must accompany all conscious experience asa transcendental principle. Today, when substance dual-ism no longer seems acceptable in the scientific pictureof the world, the problem becomes to understand self-consciousness without postulating the enduring self.

Self-Consciousness: awareness of oneself. In modern philos-ophy through Brentano to phenomenology this often im-plied being aware of one’s self as the subject of expe-riences and the author of thoughts and actions. Whilethis classical view sees reflexive awareness of one’s men-tal states or apperception (Leibniz’s term) as inseparablefrom and necessary for genuine consciousness, analyticalphilosophy mostly concentrated on the semantic problemof de se beliefs and the question of self-knowledge. Re-cently higher-order theories returned to the issue of whatmakes mental states conscious, while other researchersaddressed the nature of our self-concept. These two prob-lems were also shaped by Descartes: (1) we can think of

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our bodies, but not our minds, as aggregates of parts,for taking anything away from our minds seems incon-ceivable; and (2) ‘inner awareness of one’s thought andexistence is so innate . . . that . . . we cannot fail to have it’.To escape substance dualism, the best strategy might be toargue for eliminativism about the self (Dennett): nothingreal corresponds to our self-concept which emerges fromthe chaining together of various contents by cognitivesubsystems as an ongoing narrative. But one should becareful not to eliminate with it our sense of the self whosedisruption may underlie autism, schizophrenia and mul-tiple personality disorders. Besides, a bundle of contentscannot itself create self-perspectivalness which is a basicpsychological property of experiencing organisms, andunderstanding self-consciousness through the mastery ofthe first-person pronoun is misleading (Susan Hurley, JoseLuis Bermudez). Organisms’ capacity to navigate and ex-plore their environments already requires that they rep-resent objects and locations relative to themselves, theexperiencing subjects (the ecological self).

Further reading: Bermudez (1998); Metzinger (2003)

Self-Deception: failure to acknowledge to oneself a truth be-cause of the interference of one’s other interests (for exam-ple, refusing to admit that one is being deceived by a dearperson despite all the evidence pointing to it). The para-dox of self-deception results when one considers that or-dinary deception requires two agents, only one of whomknows the truth: how can the same agent both know andnot know a truth? One solution is to partition the self fol-lowing Freud. Another is to hold that such people do nothave contradictory beliefs but fail to arrive at the correctconclusion.

Further reading: Mele (2001)

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Self-Knowledge: knowledge of one’s own mental states. Fol-lowing Descartes is was often held that our knowl-edge of our conscious mind is epistemically privileged incomparison with other kinds of knowledge (privilegedaccess). It appears direct, unmediated, non-inferentialand thus certain, secure and even infallible. We obtainit via introspection and are the ultimate judges of thecontent of our conscious states (first-person authority).For Descartes, such was our knowledge of the persist-ing self. This view was criticised by Kant who arguedthat we can know only how we represent ourselves tobe, not how we really are. It was further attacked byFreud, James, Ryle, Wittgenstein and Sellars. But theyshowed that our minds are not completely transparentto us, which leaves it open whether some consciousstates may have a special status. We can be mistakenabout our internal states: people often have false be-liefs about their desires and motivations, they misiden-tify their emotions and rationalise their reasoning andchoice. But there is a different twist to the idea that be-ing in a mental state we know that we are in it. SydneyShoemaker noted that one cannot fail to refer to oneselfor be mistaken about oneself (I) being in some mentalstate (‘I am having such and such experience). This ‘im-munity to error through misidentification relative to thefirst-person pronoun’ suggests important connections be-tween self-consciousness and rationality. Self-knowledgeis also addressed in the externalism–internalism debatewith internalists arguing that externalism is incompati-ble with self-knowledge because our knowledge of ourthoughts seems unaffected by the environment we arein.

Further reading: Shoemaker (1994); Ludlow andMartin (1998)

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Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89): American philosopher, the firstproponent of functional role semantics (about language).His interest was in the discrepancy between ‘the scien-tific image of man’ and the manifest image that we haveof ourselves as perceivers of a three-dimensional colouredworld, thinkers and agents, and that is found in the peren-nial philosophy which takes elements of the manifest im-age for real features of the world. This underlined his ear-lier rejection of the myth of the given, and his view thatawareness (sapience or reflexive consciousness as distinctfrom mere sentience or sensation) and thought are ‘lin-guistic affairs’.

Further reading: Sellars (1963)

Semantics: (1) the study of relations between mental represen-tations and their meaning or content (psychosemantics);(2) possession of content by mental representations.

Sensations: (1) bodily states (called ‘feelings’ in discussions ofemotions) like pains, itches, tickles, pangs, throbs, tingles,burnings, hunger, thirst, nausea, experience of warmthand cold, etc. caused by physiological changes. One muchdebated issue is whether in addition to their phenomenalfeels (qualia) sensations also have representational con-tent (consider proprioception, the sensation of body po-sition and movement); (2) as used in earlier discussions ofperception, that which is delivered by sense experience.

Sense and Reference: two components of meaning isolatedby Frege. Reference is the relation between an expres-sion and that object or property that it picks out in theworld, whereas sense is the manner in which it does so.For Frege, sense determines reference, because senses arehad by propositions rather than their constituents. The

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causal theory of reference challenges Frege’s view. Thisdistinction is paralleled by those between intension andextension, connotation and denotation, and cognitiveand intentional mental content.

Sense-Data: sensible qualities, quite literally data, presentedby the senses to consciousness. In later versions of thesense-datum theory they are taken to be mental objectsor private entities given to the mind.

Sense-Datum Theory: the theory of perception (primarily vi-sion) which holds that the immediate objects of one’sawareness in perceptual experience are sense-data ratherthan ordinary physical objects. Appearing in early mod-ern philosophy, it became prominent in the early twenti-eth century in the work of G. E. Moore and C. D. Broadand was dominant until recently, counting among its ad-vocates Frank Jackson and presently Howard Robinson.The theory builds on the following premises: (1) that ofwhich a person is aware in perceptual experience is theobject of experience; and (2) veridical and non-veridicalperceptual experiences feel subjectively the same (the ar-gument from illusion). Because we cannot be sure thatobjects and properties that experience presents us withreally exist (secondary qualities), it concludes that theremust be certain private non-physical entities which consti-tute the immediate object of one’s perceptual experiences,have the experienced qualities (qualia) and are revealedin introspection. It opposes direct representationalism inemphasising the phenomenal nature of experience. How-ever, the theory, whose critics include Austin and Place,is problematic because the nature of sense-data and theirrelation to physical objects and perceivers’ neural states isobscure, it leads to (attribute) dualism, it creates the veilof perception, it commits the phenomenological fallacy

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and it disrupts the connection between perception andknowledge of the external world.

Further reading: Jackson (1977)

Sententialism see Language of Thought

Silicon Chip Replacement: a thought experiment devised byZenon Pylyshyn to argue against Searle’s view that thebrain’s biological properties are essential for mentality.For any mental state (like pain) one can imagine that theparticipating neurons are replaced one by one with siliconchip prostheses so that the causal properties of the totalintegrated circuit are preserved. After all the neurons havebeen replaced, the mental state will not change its identity,which suggests that it is causal, not biological, propertiesthat underlie the workings of the mind.

Further reading: Pylyshyn (1984)

Simulation Theory: the view, opposed to the theory theory,that our understanding of other minds is not mediated bya theory of mind, but involves imaginative simulation ofothers’ mental processes that we would have in similarsituations (Jane Heal, Robert Gordon, Alvin Goldman).However, it has to explain how we manage to mastermental concepts and know our own mental states. Someresearchers hold that it complements the theory theoryrather than opposes it, and others find support for it inthe discovery of mirror neurons (but more recent evidencesuggests that empathy and theory of mind are subservedby different, although overlapping, brain systems).

Further reading: Carruthers and Smith (1996)

Singular: about a concrete particular.

Situated Cognition see Embedded Cognition

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Smart, John J. C. (b.1920): English-born Australian philoso-pher, one of the originators of the identity theory. Initiallya proponent of logical behaviourism, he was converted byPlace, made prominent the notion of identity in the for-mulation of the theory and generalised it to propositionalattitudes (beliefs, desires). He proposed to analyse sensa-tion reports in topic-neutral terms (‘there is somethinggoing on which is like what is going on when . . . ’) to ex-plain how introspectable sensations can be identical withbrain processes, thus paving the way for the causal theoryof mind.

Further reading: Smart (1959)

Solipsism: the belief that only one’s own mind and immediateexperience really exist.

Soul see Person

Spandrel see Evolution

Special Sciences: elaboration of the multiple realisability ar-gument by Fodor. Reductionism is too strong a con-straint on the unity of science if it requires that accept-able theories in the special sciences (geology, economics,psychology) be ultimately reducible to physics (as im-plies Nagelian reduction). Special sciences employ pred-icates which are unique to them and allow them to for-mulate counterfactual-supporting generalisations aboutevents whose physical realisations may have nothing incommon (one can make generalisations about monetaryexchanges irrespective of the physical nature of the stuffthat functions as money in different communities). Specialsciences are autonomous and irreducible because higher-order properties they deal with are multiply realisable atlower physical levels, such that none of them (like the

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property of being a mountain) may be identified with asingle physical property. But identifying a higher-orderproperty with a (potentially open-ended) disjunction ofphysical properties realising it is also an unacceptable so-lution because disjunctions cannot form natural kinds.Thus, if psychological properties are multiply realisable(across species and, due to neural plasticity, within thesame species or the same individual), psychology is au-tonomous from and irreducible to neurology.

Further reading: Fodor (1974)

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict) (1632–77): Dutch Jewish philoso-pher, the originator of attribute dualism. Spinoza ques-tioned Descartes’ premise that a substance must have onlyone defining attribute, and argued that there can be onlyone substance or self-subsistent being, which is God, foreverything owes its existence to Him. But God is not dis-tinct from nature, and every individual existent is a modeor state (affectio) of this only substance, God or nature(deus sive natura). It presents itself to reason under theattributes of thought and extension, as mind and matter,which are different aspects or parallel expressions of thesame reality (parallelism). This truth can be grasped byreason when, analysing the order and relation of ideasidentical to those of things, it arrives at the complete ideaof God (rationalism). Desires and emotions (bodily af-fects or modifications, corporis affectiones) prevent onefrom realising the true causes of things and the necessarycharacter of all events. But by understanding their mo-tivations, people can begin to control and modify theiremotions (Spinoza’s psychological psychiatry).

Further reading: Spinoza (1994)

Split Brains: the existence of two dissociable centres of con-sciousness in patients after ‘brain bisection’ operations or

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commisurotomy (surgical severance of the corpus callo-sum, the great commissure consisting of axons connectingthe cortex of the two hemispheres, practised in the 1960sto prevent epileptic activity spreading from one hemi-sphere to the other). The dissociation appears in carefullycontrolled conditions when visual stimuli are presentedto only one hemisphere. Because the left hemisphere con-trols speech in most people, such patients become unableto describe anything to the left of their visual fixationpoints (they say they see nothing or deny that there is any-thing in their left hand) without appearing disturbed byit. These studies, showing ‘two independent brains’ con-trolling different halves of the body, questioned the exis-tence of the unifying self and provoked much discussionabout personal identity: are there two persons in onebody? one person split between two bodies? or is therea one and a half persons? Outside the laboratory, how-ever, split-brains people usually show no disturbance ofthe unity of consciousness, retaining awareness of them-selves as subjects.

Further reading: Nagel (1971)

Strawson, Peter F. (1919–2006): English philosopher who de-fended the ordinary view of the world against scepticismand the revisionary metaphysics of philosophers like Sell-ars. (This term of Strawson’s is now commonly applied toeliminative materialism.) Philosophical reflection shouldbegin with taking for granted the background frameworkof our thought: distinguishing persons from bodies andviewing the concept of person as primitive, admittingthat in perception we are immediately aware of mind-external things, or noticing that being self-conscious re-quires recognising the self-consciousness of others.

Further reading: Strawson (1959)

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Strong AI see Artificial Intelligence

Subdoxastic: that of which a person cannot be aware in belief(doxa). Subdoxastic states are subpersonal states charac-terising low-level information processing.

Subliminal: below the threshold of conscious perception.

Substance Dualism see Dualism

Supervenience: a relation of dependence between two (setsof) properties: B supervenes on A iff whenever A is in-stantiated, B is instantiated too. The notion is employedin externalism–internalism debates and discussions ofthe mind–body problem where it was introduced byDavidson (anomalous monism) to capture the idea of de-pendence without reducibility. To say that the mental su-pervenes on the physical is to say that the physical natureof a thing or event wholly determines its mental proper-ties, that there is no mental difference without physicaldifference. This can be elaborated in several ways. Thusweak supervenience is the claim that, for every possi-ble world, if two entities are physically indistinguishable,they are also mentally indistinguishable. But this notionis too weak for physicalism, because, applying to onlyone world, it permits worlds, physically like ours, whereamoebae have mentality but humans haven’t. Thus oneneeds strong supervenience – the claim that for any indi-viduals x and y and worlds w1 and w2 if these individualsin their respective worlds are physically indistinguishable,they are also mentally indistinguishable. This idea and thenotion of supervenience base were used by proponentsof non-reductive physicalism to argue for the reality ofmental causation as supervenient causation. But because

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of the problem of mental causation, one may argue forglobal supervenience – the claim that any two worldsthat are physically indistinguishable are mentally indis-tinguishable (though Kim holds that it does not avoid theproblem). Finally, supervenience physicalism is the thesisthat physicalism is true if, and only if, every world that isa minimal (nothing added) physical duplicate of the ac-tual world is its duplicate simpliciter (Jackson).

Further reading: Kim (1993); Jackson (1993)

Supervenience Argument see Mental Causation

Supervenience base (subvenient physical base:) a (open-ended) series of physical properties the instantiation ofeach of which is sufficient for the instantiation of a givenmental property.

Supervenient Behaviourism see Logical Behaviourism

Swampman: a creature invented by Davidson to test his the-ory of meaning, but often used to argue against external-ism, teleological functionalism and the teleological the-ory of content. Swampman comes into existence afterlightning hits a tree and is an exact physical replica ofDavidson so nobody can tell one from the other. Histor-ical theories must deny him intentional states because hedoes not have any evolutionary or developmental history,and many people find this conclusion counterintuitive.

Further reading: Davidson (1987)

Symbol Grounding Problem: the problem for the computa-tional theory of mind formulated by Steven Harnad. Evenif the mind is a symbol-manipulating device, one must ex-plain how meaning or content attaches to symbols. For

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Harnad, the meaning of symbols must be grounded in sen-sorimotor capacities (robotic functions) and the phenom-enal character of experience, which may be the brain’ssolution to the problem, but the CTM has no resourcesto capture that.

Further reading: Harnad (1990)

Synaesthesia: a condition in which the perception of a certainkind of stimuli is systematically accompanied by normallyunrelated perceptual experiences from the same or a dif-ferent sensory modality (letters or musical notes are per-ceived as having their own colours). Its existence supportsthe privileged status of phenomenal self-knowledge andmay pose problems for representationalism about con-sciousness.

Syntactic Engine: according to some philosophers, the mindunderstood from the perspective of scientific psychology.Stephen Stich argued that if the computational theory ofmind is right and if intentional states (beliefs, desires)have broad content, then content is irrelevant to psycho-logical explanation. Scientific psychology must provide acausal explanation of what happens inside the mind/brainbut broad contents fail to supervene on physiology. Thusfolk psychology’s appeal to the content of mental statesin explaining behaviour (John stretched his hand towardsthe bottle because he wanted to drink and thought thatthere was water in the bottle) is unscientific, and cog-nitive psychology should not individuate mental statesby their semantic properties. Besides, such individuationis impossible because of the holism and pragmatic sensi-tivity of content attribution (when we say that someonewants or believes something we invoke a similarity judge-ment which is vague and context-dependent). Thus even

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narrow content cannot help the representational theoryof mind, and viewing the mind as a semantic engine ismistaken. Stich called this the principle of psychologi-cal autonomy; it is also known as the syntactic theory ofthe mind, and is nothing other than eliminativism aboutcontent. The approach was adopted by proponents ofeliminative materialism and later modified through theiracceptance of connectionism (but Stich always acceptedthe autonomy of psychology and later criticised elimina-tivism about mental concepts).

Further reading: Stich (1983)

Systematicity: the property of thought and language in virtueof which if one can think that Mary loves John onecan also think that John loves Mary. The systematicityof thought may require that representation in the mind/brain have the form of a language of thought.

Further reading: Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988)

T

Tacit Knowledge: a set of internally represented innate know-ledge structures that explain our folk non-scientific com-petence in various domains of experience. Inspired byChomsky’s idea of universal grammar, developmentalpsychologists proposed theories of folk physics (from in-fancy people’s interaction with objects is guided by theprinciples of continuity and solidity – Elizabeth Spelke),folk biology (essentialism – Frank Keil) and folk psychol-ogy (theory of mind).

Further reading: Keil (1989); Spelke (1990)

Teleological: involving a purpose, end or goal.

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Teleological Functionalism (teleofunctionalism): the varietyof functionalism which avoids the too liberal assignmentof mental states by holding that the functional organi-sation of beings with genuine mentality must be char-acterised teleologically in terms of functions their statesacquired in the course of evolution.

Teleological Theory of Content (teleosemantics): uses the no-tion of biological function to explain how mental repre-sentations can have content. Parts of biological organ-isms are ascribed functions because their performancecontributed to the fitness and survival of these organ-isms’ ancestors. These functions were selected for in thecourse of evolution. That’s why the function of the heartis to pump blood and not to make thumping noises. Thebiological notion of function is teleological and norma-tive: it refers to what parts of organisms are supposed todo and permits the possibility of malfunctioning. Thusmechanisms producing mental representations similarlyhave the production of certain true representations astheir teleofunctions. To use the classical example: beforethe frog snaps its tongue at a fly, its visual system goesinto the representational state that corresponds to thepresence of a fly (that is its teleofunction). In this way,contents of representational states derive from functionsof the mechanisms that produce them. This may seemto solve the problem of misrepresentation, but it was ar-gued by Dretske and Fodor that because it is indetermi-nate how one should describe the functions of biologi-cal mechanisms, no determinate contents can be assignedto representations produced by them. (What is it exactlythat the frog’s visual system represents: flies? flies-or-bee-bees? small black moving things?) This is the problem offunctional indeterminacy similar to the disjunction prob-lem. Solutions to it were proposed by Fred Dretske, Ruth

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Millikan, David Papineau and Karen Neander. Otherproblems include Swampman and the need to account forconcepts that have no immediate impact on organisms’fitness.

Theory of Mind (TOM): an implicit theory we employ in ex-plaining other people’s behaviour by attributing to theminternal states like beliefs and desires (folk psychology).Its existence is defended by the theory theory and de-nied by the simulation theory. Within the theory the-ory researchers are divided between viewing it as a re-sult of our domain-general theory-forming capacity (JosefPerner, Henry Wellman, Alison Gopnik) and viewing it asconstituting tacit knowledge or even falling under com-putational modularity (Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie,Gabriel Segal). Discussion centres on ‘false-belief tasks’which show that children acquire an understanding offalse beliefs only at the age of four or five (three-year-olds do not understand that someone can have a falsebelief, for example, about where something is). Accord-ing to Perner, the designer of the task, between the agesof three and four children develop new concepts and un-dergo a major conceptual change similar to conceptualchange in science. However, this view is problematic asthe same pattern is exhibited by all normally developingchildren regardless of differences in general intelligenceand learning ability. The existence of such correlation isalso contradicted by data on Williams syndrome.

Further reading: Carruthers and Smith (1996)

Theory Theory: (1) the view that our understanding of otherminds is mediated by an implicit theory, the theory ofmind, which, as Lewis noted, resembles a scientific theoryin using a number of interconnected theory-specific terms;

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(2) a psychological theory of concepts according to whichconcepts are sets of beliefs or mini-theories of categoriesthat they represent in thought (Susan Carey, Frank Keil).However, as a version of semantic holism, the theory failsto meet the publicity constraint.

Thought and Language: the view that thought is linguis-tic, that natural language is necessary for (propositional)thought, as its consequence or condition, is quite wide-spread. However, this cognitive conception of languageis relatively new, becoming prominent in the twentiethcentury and replacing the image theory. This view origi-nates with Frege’s analysis of the intentionality of thoughtthrough the logical structure of language and his linguis-tic holism (words have meaning only in the context of asentence). Thus Michael Dummett holds that languagemust be primary to thought in the order of explana-tion because the ascription of thoughts is a matter of in-terpretation, that only verbalised thought is sufficientlyuniform for that purpose, and that verbal formulationscannot adequately represent the content of mental pro-cesses of languageless creatures who do not possess therequisite concepts. But if one ties concept possession tonatural language and accepts a public theory of linguis-tic meaning, one receives a stronger conception whichdenies languageless thought and even views thought it-self as subvocal saying (behaviourism, Sellars, Davidson,Dennett). Contrasted with this conception is the commu-nicative conception of language according to which lin-guistic expressions inherit their semantic properties fromthoughts they conventionally express and language mustbe analysed in terms of speakers’ communicative inten-tions. This view, which finds significant empirical sup-port, is particularly associated with Grice, but also with

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Russell, Lewis, Searle, Fodor and other proponents of therepresentational theory of mind.

Further reading: Carruthers and Boucher (1998)

Thought Experiment: an experiment done mentally, onlywith the help of imagination. While thought experimentspredicting a certain course of events were also employedin hard sciences, particularly physics, some people feelthat many thought experiments in philosophy of mindare unreliable ‘intuition pumps’. Although they often helpclarify conceptual issues, some of them are too unspecificin detail, for example, to be run as a computer simulation.

Transcendent: beyond the limits of possible experience, un-available in experience.

Transcendental: (1) constituting a necessary precondition ofany experience; (2) concerning transcendent matters.

Transcendental Naturalism: the view that certain philosoph-ical problems cannot be solved because of the naturallimitations on human cognitive abilities.

Turing, Alan M. (1912–54): English mathematician, one ofthe originators of artificial intelligence and the computa-tional theory of mind. Working on computable numbershe described the universal computing machine known asthe Turing machine (Alonzo Church’s term), the fore-bearer of the modern digital computer, and later formu-lated the Turing test to evaluate machine intelligence.

Turing Machine: a device imagined by Turing in developingthe notion of computation. A Turing machine consistsof an infinitely long tape divided into squares with sym-bols from a finite alphabet printed in some of them and a

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reading-writing device which moves along the tape scan-ning the symbols. The device executes a set of instructionsspecified in its machine table so that upon encounteringa certain symbol it can replace it with a different symboland then move left or right by one square. This way, de-spite its seeming simplicity, the machine is able to trans-form any input into any output if the two are relatedthrough a computable function.

Turing Test: a behavioural test (‘imitation game’) devised byTuring to determine whether an artificial system possessesintelligence. Considering the ability to maintain conver-sation as a mark of intelligence, Turing proposes that ifafter interrogating by teletype a human and a machinefor a period of time, a human judge cannot tell which iswhich, the machine should be considered intelligent.

Further reading: Turing (1950)

Twin-Earth: a planet invented by Putnam to argue that sensedoes not determine reference. The argument was initiallyformulated for linguistic meaning (‘meanings just ain’tin the head’), but Putnam later accepted its extension topsychological states (externalism). Twin-Earth is like ourEarth in all respects except one: the stuff indistinguishablefrom water in all its observational properties is not H2Obut a totally different chemical substance XYZ (twin-water). Imagine that Oscar from Earth has an exact inter-nal duplicate on Twin-Earth, Twin-Oscar. Knowing noth-ing about water’s and twin-water’s microstructure (thethought experiment is set in 1750), they both may thinkabout the substances on their planets under the same de-scription ‘colourless, odourless substance found in rivers,lakes and seas, falling from the sky as rain and used bypeople for drinking’. But Oscar’s and Twin-Oscar’s seem-ingly identical beliefs which they both express using the

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word ‘water’ (‘Water quenches thirst’) cannot have thesame content because the reference of their ‘water’ wordsand their respective psychological states were formedin different physical environments. Because intentionalstates (thoughts, beliefs, desires) are individuated by theirtruth conditions (and concepts – by their extensions),it follows that thoughts involving natural kind conceptsmust have environmentally determined broad content. Interms of supervenience: content does not supervene onneurophysiology because two intrinsically identical indi-viduals may have thoughts with different content. (Al-though this particular example is unfortunate as humanbodies are 60 per cent water, other examples like topaz-citrine avoid this problem.)

Further reading: Putnam (1975); Pessin et al. (1996)

Two-Factor Theories: theories which hold that there aretwo determinants of content of mental representations(Hartry Field, Ned Block, Brian Loar, Colin McGinn,William Lycan): the external determinant (specifiable bytheir causal connections with the environment) and theinternal component (their conceptual roles or narrowcontent). The external factor accounts for the possibil-ity of translation and communication, but the internalfactor serves the purpose of psychological explanation.The problem, however, is how to make the two factorscompatible.

Further reading: Block (1986)

Type/Token Distinction: the distinction between a kind andits individual instances (tokens). Thus the word ‘advan-tage’ contains three tokens of the same letter type ‘a’.

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U

Unconscious: a state or process is unconscious if it belongs toa low level of information processing and is in principleunavailable to subjective awareness or if it is not expe-rienced but could have been had attention been focusedon it. A person is considered unconscious if there is noinformation processing at all and they are non-responsiveto themselves or the environment. Without further qual-ification the term seldom has today the meaning given toit by Freud.

Unity of Consciousness: integrated representation of theworld and oneself which involves simultaneous phenom-enal awareness of discrete objects with their properties,often detectable through different sensory modalities (see-ing a ginger cat and hearing him mewing), their related ex-istence in space and time, one’s bodily sensations, overallemotional or mood state and a flow of conscious thou-ghts. All these experiences appear unified into a singlestate of consciousness existing against the background ofone’s self-awareness as their subject. This seems to re-quire the existence of the self unifying all the differentcontents of experience, but the tenability of this view wasquestioned after the discovery of split brains and multiplepersonalities phenomena.

Further reading: Cleeremans (2003)

Unity of Science: the view associated with logical positivismthat all sciences can be unified into a single science via thereduction of sciences of different levels of reality to thenext lower level (psychology–biology–chemistry–physics)so that the laws of microphysics would become the basic

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laws of all sciences. It was questioned by the special sci-ences argument, but the issue of the extent to which lower-level laws determine higher-level laws remains open.

Universals: properties expressed by general concepts and in-stantiated by different particular things, particulars (everycat instantiates catness or the property of being a cat).Asking whether genera and species exist in themselvesor only in thought, Porphyry (c.232–305) formulatedthe problem of universals for medieval philosophy. Butits still contemporary significance transpires only in thecontrast between Aquinas’ realism and Ockham’s nomi-nalism. Like Aristotle, Aquinas held that knowledge be-gins with perception. Because perception delivers univer-sals, philosophical analysis must go back to particularsseparating properties of things known through generalconcepts. By abstraction the immaterial intellect arrivesat the knowledge of the forms. In contrast, William ofOckham (c.1285–1349) held that universals exist only inthought. However, his view arguably does not stem fromOckham’s razor, the principle that ‘plurality is not to beposited without necessity’. For Ockham, intuitive cogni-tion begins with the direct apprehension of particulars.Noticing similarity between them, abstractive cognitionforms general concepts which represent real objects in ourmental language (language of thought). But no particularis necessary because God could have created things in anyother non-contradictory way (possible worlds). Leavingaside the theology, one can see how intentionality (and thecontingency of our perception of similarity) poses diffi-culties for non-reductive physicalism and may motivate apriori physicalism.

Further reading: Ockham (1990); Armstrong (1989)

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V

Veil of Perception (∼ experience, ∼ appearance): the prob-lem for theories of indirect perception from which it fol-lows that there is something like a thin film of mentalentities separating perceivers from access to the externalworld.

Veridical see Perception

Verificationism: the view, associated with logical positivism,that the meaning of a statement expressing a propositionis its conditions of verification.

Vision: sense modality which produces the experience of see-ing. Because we receive most information about the worldthrough vision (colour vision in particular), it is central todebates in philosophy of perception, where one must al-ways keep in mind the ambiguity in the verb ‘see’: register-ing visual information versus having conscious perceptionof it; being directed at mind-independent objects versushaving visual experience; having versus not having con-ceptual knowledge of what one sees (Dretske’s distinctionbetween epistemic and non-epistemic seeing). Landmarksof vision research include the discovery of orientation-sensitive neurons, Marr’s computational theory, and thediscovery of two visual processing systems, the dorsaland ventral streams (M. Ungerleider and L. Mishkin,M. A. Goodale and A. D. Milner). The dorsal stream(the striate-posterior parietal pathway) codes visuomo-tor information about objects’ spatial properties (shape,size, orientation, location), whereas the ventral stream(the occipital-temporal pathway) processes recognitional

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information about objects which allows for their iden-tification. Perceptual control of action can be achievedby the dorsal stream in the absence of conscious aware-ness, which suggests that visual phenomenal conscious-ness requires the activation of the ventral stream (andprobably intact parietal and frontal pathways subserv-ing attention). Another phenomenon which may throwlight on mechanisms of visual consciousness is binocularrivalry, when different stimuli presented to the two eyesare experienced as alternating percepts.

Further reading: Noe and Thompson (2002); Goodaleand Milner (2005)

Volition: activity of the will manifested in individual acts,volitions.

von Neumann, John (1903–57): American mathematician,the designer of the first computers (NORC, MANIAC),the forebearers of the modern digital computer (storedprogram consecutive execution computing device) knownas the von Neumann machine.

W

Wason Selection Task: a psychological tool for testing condi-tional reasoning (evaluating conditional rules of the form‘if P then Q’) designed by Peter Wason in the 1960s. Thesubject is presented with four cards, for example ‘D’, ‘F’,‘3’ and ‘7’, and is asked to determine whether the rule ‘ifD is on one side, then 3 is on the other side’ holds. Thesubject is allowed to turn over only two cards. The rightcards are ‘D’ and ‘7’, but about 90 per cent of subjects

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fail the task (usually selecting ‘D’ and ‘3’). Curiously,people’s performance improves radically if problems withparallel structure have concrete content like ‘If a personis drinking beer in a bar, then the person should be over18’. The cards are, correspondingly, ‘Is drinking beer’,‘Is drinking lemonade’, ‘Is over 18’ and ‘Is under 18’,and most people give the right answer. One explanationfor this content effect is that people’s practical reasoningskills are sounder than their theoretical skills. But pro-ponents of evolutionary psychology argue that the effectis due to our cognitive architecture, namely the evolveddomain-specific algorithms pertaining to reasoning aboutsocial contracts and reducing risk in hazardous situations.Humans are social animals and must maintain group sta-bility by making sure that it contains no ‘free riders’, thatsomeone who received a benefit paid a cost. The pressureto keep track of social contracts led to the evolution ofthe cheater-detection module whose operation is mani-fested in the content effects. This conclusion is questionby proponents of the relevance theory who hold that theeffect is due to the operation of more general pragmaticcomprehension mechanisms.

What-It’s-Like: Thomas Nagel’s characterisation of con-sciousness as that inherently subjective aspect of mindwhich cannot be captured by reductive theories (physi-calism). A creature is conscious if there is something thatit is like to be that creature which cannot be understoodfrom the objective standpoint. In his knowledge argu-ment, Jackson modified this criterion applying it to men-tal states rather than whole organisms.

Further reading: Nagel (1974)

Wide Content see Broad Content

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Will, The: in modern philosophy, the faculty of mind respon-sible for decision, choice and action initiation. Individualvolitions were thought to be causes of movements of boththe body and the soul. This created two problems (antic-ipated in ancient and medieval philosophy). The will asa force directing passions to the service of intellect posedthe problem of understanding why people sometimes failto act out of their best judgements (akrasia or weaknessof the will). And causal determinism posed the problem offree will. Hume’s sceptical view of reason as the slave ofpassions received a metaphysical expression in the volun-tarism of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) who identi-fied the will with the basic force operating throughout na-ture (‘man can do what he wills, but he cannot will whathe wills’). With the rejection of Cartesian dualism withits notions of the self and the conscious will there arisesthe problem of epiphenomenalism about consciousness.Benjamin Libet’s timing studies show that neural eventsidentified with the initiation of an action (moving one’swrist or making a forced choice) precede consciousawareness of the corresponding intention or thought byabout 350 milliseconds. This makes conscious voluntaryaction unconsciously initiated: does it make conscious-ness epiphenomenal? is consciousness causally relevantonly after the event, ‘training’ the unconscious mind? is‘free conscious will’ manifested in our ability to ‘veto’ theunconsciously initiated actions (Libet’s view)? why andhow do we have the subjective feeling of agency in ourself-consciousness?

Further reading: Libet (2004); Wegner (2002)

Williams Syndrome: a genetic disorder marked by significantmental retardation. People with Williams syndrome haveimpaired arithmetic, visuo-spatial, problem-solving andtheoretical reasoning abilities. However, they retain high

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linguistic (perfect syntax) and theory of mind abilities(routinely passing false-belief tests).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951): Austrian philosopher, amajor proponent of logical behaviourism. In his late phi-losophy, noticing the heterogeneity in our use of words(the ‘language games’ we play), he questioned the powerof words to correspond to anything, especially privatesensations. Saying that they are in pain, a person can-not be reporting a purely private state because they use aword of a public language. But if they privately decidedto give their sensation a name P using an ostensive def-inition ‘this is P’, they would not introduce a word oftheir private language because they would fail to spec-ify a rule for using the word correctly on later occasions(private language argument). Reports of mental states arenot real reports capable of truth or falsity, but avowals,pieces of linguistic behaviour that people are disposedto manifest in various situations. Kripke emphasises thatWittgenstein’s argument raises general scepticism aboutrule-following: if the meaning of a word is something thatdetermines its correct application in novel situations, thenby defining a word’s meaning on the basis of its past usesone will come up with different prescriptions for its fu-ture use. Thus there are no internal criteria determiningthe meaning of a word (or the content of a concept). Theseconsiderations underlie Wittgenstein’s view that meaningis use, that the application of a word like ‘game’ to differ-ent realities is guided by unspecific family resemblancesrather than a single common property, and that linguisticbehaviour is nothing other than a form of life.

Further reading: Wittgenstein (1953); Kripke (1982)

Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920): German philosopher, thefounder of introspective psychology and the first

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psychological laboratory (Leipzig, 1875). Wundt en-dorsed parallelism and panpsychism, but he also be-lieved that psychological phenomena can be experimen-tally studied by controlled introspection (observation ofone’s mental experiences in response to the application ofvariable sensory stimuli).

Z

Zombies: beings physically identical to humans but lackingphenomenal consciousness. If we can imagine them with-out any contradiction, they are conceivable and thus pos-sible. David Chalmers recently resurrected the zombieidea as an argument against physicalism intended to showthat the identity of mental states with brain states cannotbe necessary because there is no a priori entailment fromphysical to phenomenal facts. Critics question the movefrom conceivability to possibility or address the specialnature of phenomenal concepts.

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Bibliography

Useful collections

Block, N. (ed.) (1980), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology,2 volumes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chalmers, D. J. (ed.) (2002), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Con-temporary Readings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cummins, R. and D. D. Cummins (eds) (2000), Minds, Brains andComputers: The Foundations of Cognitive Science, An Anthology,Oxford: Blackwell.

Heil, J. (2004), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and An Anthology,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lycan, W. (ed.) (1990), Mind and Cognition: A Reader, Oxford:Blackwell.

Lycan, W. (ed.) (1999), Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, Oxford:Blackwell.

O’Connor, T. (2003), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings,London: Routledge.

Rosenthal, D. M. (ed.) (1991), The Nature of Mind, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Some useful companions and textbooks

Botterill, G. and P. Carruthers (1999), Philosophy of Psychology,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Braddon-Mitchell, D. and F. Jackson (1996), Philosophy of Mind andCognition, Oxford: Blackwell.

Heil, J. (2004), Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction,2nd edn, London: Routledge.

Guttenplan, S. (ed.) (1994), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind,Oxford: Blackwell.

Kim, J. (2005), Philosophy of Mind, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO: WestviewPress.

195

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Rey, G. (1997), Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A ContentiouslyClassical Approach, New York: Blackwell.

Stich, S. and T. Warfield (eds) (2003), Blackwell Guide to Philosophyof Mind, Oxford: Blackwell.

Some useful websites

David Chalmers’ Annotated Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind:http://consc.net/biblio.html

Chris Eliasmith’s Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind: http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict

A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind: http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu

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Annas, J. (1992), Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley, CA: Uni-versity of California Press.

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957), Intention, Oxford: Blackwell.Aquinas, St Thomas (2001), Aquinas’s Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas’s

Own Concise Version of His Summa Theologica, Sophia: SophiaInstitute Press.

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