Such claims are part 0f a viewpoint according t0 which mental images represent in thc manner of pictures. It is very natural t0 think that such claims are confused or nonsensical. One of my purposes here is a limited dcfcnsc of this supposedly confused doctrine, especially against its chief cognitive science rival. But this..

The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of philosophy-- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are.

Much of recent philosophy of perception is oriented towards accounting for the phenomenal character of perception—what it is like to perceive—in a non-mentalistic way—that is, without appealing to mental objects or mental qualities. In opposition to such views, I claim that the phenomenal character of perception of a red round object cannot be explained by or reduced to direct awareness of the object, its redness and roundness—or representation of such objects and qualities. Qualities of perception that are not (...) captured by what one is directly aware of or by representational content are instances of what Gilbert Harman has called “mental paint” (Block, 1990; Harman, 1990). The claim of this paper is that empirical facts about attention point in the direction of mental paint. The argument starts with the claim (later modified) that when one moves one's attention around a scene while keeping one's eyes fixed, the phenomenology of perception can change in ways that do not reflect which qualities of objects one is directly aware of or the way the world is represented to be. These changes in the phenomenology of perception cannot be accounted for in terms of awareness of or representation of the focus of attention because they manifest themselves in experience as differences in apparent contrast, apparent color saturation, apparent size, apparent speed, apparent time of occurrence and other appearances. There is a way of coping with these phenomena in terms of vague contents, but vague contents cannot save direct realism or representationism because the kind of vagueness required clashes wth the phenomenology itself. (shrink)

The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of philosophy-- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are.

There has been considerable debate among philosophers and psychol- ogists about whether the internal representations of imagery represent in the manner of pictures or in the manner of language. One side, pictorialism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is like a picture of Reagan. The other side, descriptionalism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is more like a string of words denoting or describing Reagan. My aim here is to expose a widespread fallacy on the part of the (...) descriptionalists. In the course of so doing, I try to clarify the pictorialist position, and show how it can undercut what appears to be a category of evidence for the other side. (shrink)

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. (...) For example, the meaning of 'chase' might be said by a molecularist to be try to catch. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine (1953) observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually, but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of 'force', 'mass', kinetic energy' and 'momentum', one doesn't learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms were all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influence what one infers. if i accept a sentence and then later reject it, i thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what i accept wouldn't be the same as what i later reject. but then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally --or even irrationally!-- change one's mind. and agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of "same/different" meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing "two factor" theories or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs. (shrink)

Meaningful relationships are centrally important for human functioning. It remains unclear, however, which aspects of meaningful relationships impact wellbeing the most and whether these differ between psychiatric patients and members of the community. Information about relationship attributes and functions were collected in community members and psychiatric patients. Relationship attributes and functions were examined for differences between groups, their impact on wellbeing and symptoms, and the size of network. Community members reported fewer relationships, higher frequency of contact and less desire for (...) change when compared to the psychiatric patients. Nevertheless, both groups reported relatively high levels of fulfilled functions. Quality of the relationship and investment into the relationship was associated with both wellbeing and symptoms for both the community and the patient group. Almost all functions were associated with wellbeing and symptoms for the community group. However, for the patient group, only few functions were associated with wellbeing and no functions were associated with symptoms. Contrary to our hypotheses, the results show that psychiatric patients do not have a deficit in fulfilling relationships. Most people report a well-functioning network of meaningful, high-quality relationships. Patients benefit from meaningful, function-fulfilling relationships just as much as community members. Results are discussed with respect to how targeting relationships can be used clinically. (shrink)

This volume of Ned Block's writings collects his papers on consciousness, functionalism, and representationism. A number of these papers treat the significance of the multiple realizability of mental states for the mind-body problem -- a theme that has concerned Block since the 1960s. One paper on this topic considers the upshot for the mind-body problem of the possibility of a robot that is functionally like us but physically different -- as is Commander Data of _Star Trek's_ second generation. The (...) papers on consciousness treat such conceptual issues as phenomenal versus access consciousness, Dennett's theory of consciousness, and the function of consciousness, as well as such empirical matters as "How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness," and an argument that there are distinct neural correlates for access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Turning to the mind-body problem, Block defends physicalism against Max Black's argument concerning phenomenal modes of presentation. The papers on representationism consider "mental paint" as well as the "Inverted Earth" thought experiment -- a world in which colors are reversed but there is a compensating reversal in the words that are used to describe them. _Consciousness, Function, and Representation_, bringing together papers that have appeared primarily in journals and conference proceedings, can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness. (shrink)

Mental disorders are often thought to be harmful dysfunctions. Jerome Wakefield has argued that such dysfunctions should be understood as failures of naturally selected functions. This suggests, implicitly, that evolutionary biology and other Darwinian disciplines hold important information for anyone working on answering the philosophical question, 'what is a mental disorder?'. In this article, the author argues that Darwinian theory is not only relevant to the understanding of the disrupted functions, but it also sheds light on the disruption (...) itself, as well as on the harm that attends the disruption. The arguments advanced here are partially based on the view that a core feature of Darwinism is that it stresses the environmental relativity of functions and dysfunctions. These arguments show a very close empirical connection between social judgments and dysfunctions, which is of interest for psychiatric theory. Philosophically, they lead to the conclusion that the concept of mental disorder is identical to the concept of mental dysfunction. Consequently, it is both misleading and redundant to conceptualize mental disorders as 'harmful dysfunctions', and not simply as 'mental dysfunctions'. (shrink)

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. (...) For example, the meaning of 'chase' might be said by a molecularist to be try to catch. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine (1953) observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually, but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of 'force', 'mass', kinetic energy' and 'momentum', one doesn't learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms were all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influence what one infers. if i accept a sentence and then later reject it, i thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what i accept wouldn't be the same as what i later reject. but then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally --or even irrationally!-- change one's mind. and agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of "same/different" meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing "two factor" theories or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs. (shrink)

The functionalist view of the nature of the mind is now widely accepted. Like behaviorism and physicalism, functionalism seeks to answer the question "What are mental states?" I shall be concerned with identity thesis formulations of functionalism. They say, for example, that pain is a functional state, just as identity thesis formulations of physicalism say that pain is a physical state.

What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a (...) pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultimate nature of the mental was to be found in a special mental substance. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions; physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is one of the major theoretical developments of Twentieth Century analytic philosophy, and provides the conceptual underpinnings of much work in cognitive science. (shrink)

The "great debate" in cognitive science today is about the nature of mental images. One side says images are basically pictures in the head. The other side says they are like the symbol structures in computers. If the picture-in-the-head theorists are right, then computers will never be able to think like people.This book contains the most intelligible and incisive articles in the debate, articles by cognitive psychologists, computer scientists and philosophers. The most exciting imagery phenomena are described, phenomena that (...) indicate that mental images can be rotated and scanned, that smaller images are harder to see than larger ones, that when mental images are made larger they eventually overflow, that the "screen" they overflow from has a determinable shape (elliptical), and that this "screen" subtends a determinate visual angle, the angle of vision of the mind's eye.Such experiments cry out for explanation. If images are pictures in the head, who (or what) looks at them? Why haven't brain scientists found them? Such questions are the subject of the great debate.IMAGERY is an excellent choice for courses in cognitive psychology, perception: artificial intelligence, computer science; philosophy of mind, of psychology and of science; minds and machines, science and society.Contributors include: Roger Brown and Richard Herrnstein (on the work of Roger N. Shepard), Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Robert Schwartz, Stephen Kosslyn, Steven Pinker, George Smith, Steven Shwartz, and Zenon Pylyshyn,. (shrink)

In this section, we will start with an influential attempt to define `intelligence', and then we will move to a consideration of how human intelligence is to be investigated on the machine model. The last part of the section will discuss the relation between the mental and the biological.

In this note, I will discuss one issue concerning the main argument of Mind in a Physical World (Kim, 1998), the Causal Exclusion Argument. The issue is whether it is a consequence of the Causal Exclusion Argument that all macro level causation (that is, causation above the level of fundamental physics) is an illusion, with all of the apparent causal powers of mental and other macro properties draining into the bottom level of physics. I will argue that such a (...) consequence would give us reason to reject the Causal Exclusion Argument. But there is also a stronger challenge, the charge that, if there is no bottom level of physics, the Causal Exclusion Argument has the consequence that “causal powers would drain away into a bottomless pit and there wouldn’t be any causation anywhere.” (81--page numbers that are not attributed to other works are to Kim, 1998). (shrink)

qualia include the ways it feels to see, hear and smell, the way it feels to have a pain; more generally, what it's like to have mental states. Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, in my view, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Yet, the existence of qualia is controversial. Here is what is controversial: whether qualia, so defined, can be characterized in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. (...) Opponents of qualia think that the content of experience is intentional content (like the content of thought), or that experiences are functionally definable, or that to have a qualitative state is to have a state that is monitored in a certain way or accompanied by a thought to the effect that I have that state (seecontent functionalism; intentionality). If we include the idea that experiential properties are not intentional or functional or purely cognitive in the definition of ‘qualia’, then it is controversial whether there are qualia. (shrink)

Essentialism is one of the most pervasive problems in mental health research. Many psychiatrists still hold the view that their nosologies will enable them, sooner or later, to carve nature at its joints and to identify and chart the essence of mental disorders. Moreover, according to recent research in social psychology, some laypeople tend to think along similar essentialist lines. The main aim of this article is to highlight a number of processes that possibly explain the persistent presence (...) and popularity of essentialist conceptions of mental disorders. One such process is the general tendency of laypeople to essentialize conceptual structures, including biological, social, and psychiatric categories. Another process involves the allure of biological psychiatry. Advocating a categorical and biological approach, this strand of psychiatry probably reinforced the already existing lay essentialism about mental disorders. As such, the question regarding why we essentialize mental disorders is a salient example of how cultural trends zero in on natural tendencies, and vice versa, and how both can boost each other. (shrink)

Maladapting Minds discusses a number of reasons why philosophers of psychiatry should take an interest in evolutionary explanations of mental disorders and, more generally, in evolutionary thinking. First of all, there is the nascent field of evolutionary psychiatry. Unlike other psychiatrists, evolutionary psychiatrists engage with ultimate, rather than proximate, questions about mental illnesses. Being a young and youthful new discipline, evolutionary psychiatry allows for a nice case study in the philosophy of science. Secondly, philosophers of psychiatry have engaged (...) with evolutionary theory because evolutionary considerations are often said to play a role in defining the concept of mental disorder. The basic question here is: Can the concept of mental disorder be given an objective definition, or is it rather a normative concept? Thirdly and finally, evolutionary thinking in psychiatry has often been a source of inspiration for a philosophical view on human nature. Thus evolutionary psychiatrists have suggested, for example, that man's vulnerability to mental disorders may well be one of the defining features of our species. -/- Written by leading authors in philosophy, psychiatry, biology and psychology, this volume illustrates that many debates in contemporary philosophy of psychiatry are profoundly influenced by evolutionary approaches to mental disorders. Conversely, it also reveals how philosophers can help contribute to the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychiatry. It is important reading for a wide range of readers interested in mental health care and philosophy. (shrink)

In one of his key publications on the harmful dysfunction analysis of mental disorder (HDA), Jerome Wakefield acknowledged that he has “explored the value element in disorder less thoroughly than the factual element. This is in part because the factual component poses more of a problem for inferences about disorder and in part because the nature of values is such that it requires separate consideration” (Wakefield 1992, 384). More than twenty years have passed since this remark, and yet a (...) thorough consideration of the value component in Wakefield’s HDA is still lacking. Quite a few contributions to this volume promise to change that situation, and ours is one of these. In this contribution, we will analyze the harm or value component and argue that Wakefield’s dealing with it is so problematic that it undermines, at least indirectly, the viability of the HDA. In the first section, we explore Wakefield’s emphasis on the subjective nature of harm and his exclusive focus on social values. The second section is devoted to an analysis of Wakefield’s examples of conditions that are dysfunctional but harmless (fused toes, albinism, reversal of the heart, dyslexia in illiterate societies, etc.). We argue that these examples are quite problematic because they do not exemplify what they are supposed to exemplify. In the third section, we show how these two problems are connected: Wakefield uses the harmfulness of a condition as an implicit criterion to distinguish normal variation from dysfunction. In doing so, he blurs the distinction between the harm component and the dysfunction component, even though this distinction is central to his HDA. (shrink)

Qualia include the ways things look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain; more generally, what it's like to have mental states. Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, in my view, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Yet, the existence of qualia is controversial. Here is what is controversial: whether qualia, so defined, can be characterized in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. Opponents of (...) qualia think that the content of experience is intentional content, or that experiences are functionally definable, or that to have a qualitative state is to have a state that is monitored in a certain way or accompanied by a thought to the effect that I have that state. If we include the idea that experiential properties are not intentional or functional or purely cognitive in the definition of ` qualia ', then it is controversial whether there are qualia. (shrink)

This paper argues that the “Canberra Plan” picture of physicalistic reduction of mind--a picture shared by both its proponents and opponents, philosophers as diverse as David Armstrong, David Chalmers Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Joe Levine and David Lewis--neglects ground (Fine, 2001, 2012). To the extent that the point of view endorsed by the Canberra Plan has an account of the physical/functional ground of mind at all, it is in one version trivial and in another version implausible. In its most general (...) form, the point of view of the Canberra Plan is committed to unacceptably treating indexical or name-related facts as part of the ultimate physical/functional ground of the mental. (shrink)

This article provides a historical perspective on how both American and European psychiatrists have conceptualized and categorized sexual deviance throughout the past 150 years. During this time, quite a number of sexual preferences, desires, and behaviors have been pathologized and depathologized at will, thus revealing psychiatry's constant struggle to distinguish mental disorder--in other words, the "perversions," "sexual deviations," or "paraphilias"--from immoral, unethical, or illegal behavior. This struggle is apparent in the works of 19th- and early-20th-century psychiatrists and sexologists, but (...) it is also present in the more recent psychiatric textbooks and diagnostic manuals, such as the consecutive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. While much of the historical literature revolves around the controversy over homosexuality, this article also reviews the recent medicohistorical and sociohistorical work on other forms of sexual deviance, including the diagnostic categories listed in the latest edition, the DSM-IV-TR: exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, frotteurism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, and transvestic fetishism. (shrink)

This research examined the role of thought suppression in the formation of mental blocks. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to generate a series of creative associates for two target words after initially suppressing a word that was semantically related to one of the two target words. Participants produced fewer responses, and experienced a greater sensation of being mentally blocked, when attempting to produce associates for the target word that was semantically related to the suppressed word. In Experiment 2, (...) participants either thought about or suppressed a series of words prior to completing a word fragment completion task. Each word either corresponded exactly to one of the word fragment solutions or resembled one of the solutions but was slightly different in its orthographic properties . Participants performed most poorly on the items for which they had initially suppressed negative primes. (shrink)

What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a (...) pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultimate nature of the mental was to be found in a special mental substance. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions; physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is one of the major theoretical developments of Twentieth Century analytic philosophy, and provides the conceptual underpinnings of much work in cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper I will revisit an argument that I have called “the supervenience argument”; it is sometimes called “the exclusion argument” in the literature. I want to reconsider several aspects of this argument in light of some of the criticisms and comments it has elicited, clarifying some points and offering a slightly reformulated—and improved—version of the argument. My primary aim, however, is to discuss and respond to Ned Block’s edifying and challenging critique of the argument in his “Do Causal (...) Powers Drain Away?”—in particular, his claim that the argument has the consequence that if there is no bottom microphysical level, causal powers will “drain away”, leaving us with no causation anywhere. The supervenience argument was designed to show that on a certain popular and influential view of mentality and its relationship to the physical, mental properties turn out to be epiphenomenal, that is, without causal powers of their own. (shrink)

In two papers, Ned Block has argued that representationalists have trouble with the empirical discovery that differences in the degree of visual attention to an object can lead to a difference in h...

A newly revised edition of the International Best-Seller, Making the Brain/Body Connection hit the book stores in June. This book has people raving about its user friendly approach and its solid research based information. Explore and experience how your brain, body and senses interrelate. Sharon Promislow's approach makes the brain research almost fun. Learn about your body's defence mechanism for stress and how you can adapt them to defuse stress instead of allowing it to accumulate into a full blown stress (...) attack. In her lively and entertaining book, Sharon blends cutting edge stress and brain research with practical exercises and techniques that have you moving beyond your current limitations and into a life you only imagined you could have. Her Quick Six stress buster techniques can be used on the street, in the board room, wherever you are when stress hits.Follow along with this step-by-step guide as she leads you through a model for change that unlocks hidden "stress circuits." Clear away mental, emotional and physical blocks to success with simple movements from the 10 Step Change Process, that make change fun. Illustrated with humorus new cartoon characters by Cathrine Levan. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of new and previously published essays focusing on one of the most exciting and actively discussed topics in contemporary philosophy: naturalistic theories of mental content. The volume brings together important papers written by some of the most distinguished theorists working in the field today. Authors contributing to the volume include Jerry Fodor, Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske, Ned Block, Robert Cummins, and Daniel Dennett.

In the human context, the ubiquitous faculty of imagination is taken for granted. Whether we are singularly equipped with this ability or whether it is an evolved faculty also present in other life forms is a question that has been an issue ever since Darwin. A variety of research projects have indicated the presence of mental processes in non-human taxa and the faculty of imagination developed with increasing complexity over time, to its present status in humans. As an evolved (...) faculty, encompassing a variety of non-humans, it serves as a useful tool to ascertain and understand the origins and unique quality of human mental processes, even to the extent of informing certain medical issues and problems in education. Several pointers exist that argue for human imagination as an evolved faculty that is shared within broad spectrum of taxa. Paleoanthropological research has provided insights as to the role of imagination in the early manifestations of religious behaviour in humans, the construction of effective stone tools by anatomically modern humans employing pyro technology, as well as their ability to mentally link ostensibly non-related natural phenomena like tidal fluctuations and the phases of the moon. Contribution: This review article explores imagination as an evolved faculty in an intersectional and interdisciplinary manner. This evolutionary reflection fits well with the purpose and inclusive nature of this special collection on the building blocks of our past, present and future. (shrink)

This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have pre-specified goal contents. For example, one cannot prespecify the content of a judgment or of a deliberation. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental actions. Given these three constraints, (...) mental and bodily actions appear to have a significantly different structure. A careful analysis of the role of normative requirements, distinguishing them from instrumental reasons, allows the distinction between mental and bodily forms of action to be clarified. Two kinds of motives must be present for a mental act to develop. The first kind is instrumental: a mental act is performed because of some basic informational need, such as the need to "remember the name of that play". The second kind is normative: given the specific type of mental action performed, there is a specific epistemic norm relevant to that act. These two motives actually correspond to different phases of a single mental act. The first motivates the mental act, i.e. makes salient the corresponding goal. The second offers an evaluation of the feasibility of the act, on the basis of its constitutive normative requirement. Conceived in this way, a characterization of mental acts avoids the three difficulties mentioned above. The possibility of pre-specifying the outcome of epistemic mental acts is blocked by the fact that such acts are constituted by strict normative requirements. That mental acts include receptive features is shown to be a necessary architectural constraint for mental agents to be sensitive to epistemic requirements. Finally, the phenomenology of intending is shown to be absent in most mental acts; the motivational structure of mental acts is, rather, associated with error- signals and self-directed doubtings. Mental acts need to be recognized as a natural kind of action meant to normatively control and enhance cognitive efficiency according to current processing needs. (shrink)

Articulate language is a form of communication unique to humans. Over time, a spectrum of researchers has proposed various frameworks attempting to explain the evolutionary acquisition of this distinctive human attribute, some deploring the apparent lack of direct evidence elucidating the phenomenon, whilst others have pointed to the contributions of palaeoanthropology, the social brain hypothesis and the fact that even amongst contemporary humans, social group sizes reflect brain size. Theologians have traditionally ignored evolutionary insights as an explanatory paradigm for the (...) origin of humankind. However, an increasing number are, of late, contributing to a worldview of humanity which accommodates both the epistemological realities of evolutionary biology as well as insights from theology. This includes reviewing and assessing the origins of articulate language and the physiological attributes necessary for its development. It is in this sense that the evolution of language is relevant from a theological perspective. The association between mental capacity and articulate language, already noted by Darwin, is relevant in explaining the larger group sizes found amongst humans, as is the incipient role played by the evolution of laughter in triggering the neuroendocrine system promoting bonding, to the eventual development of articulate language. Our aim is to review a selection of contemporary perspectives on the evolution of language, amongst others, reasons for the ease with which young children acquire language competency, and whether we may be hardwired for language from birth. Further reading is suggested in the footnotes.Contribution: This article is part of a special collection reflecting on the evolutionary building blocks of our past, present and future. It is based on historical thought and contemporary research with regards to the evolutionary emergence of language. It fits well with the intersectional and trans-disciplinary nature of this collection and journal. (shrink)

Drawing on the empirical premise that attention makes objects look more intense, Ned Block has argued for mental paint, a phenomenal residue that cannot be reduced to what is perceived or represented. If sound, Block's argument would undermine direct realism and representationism, two widely held views about the nature of conscious perception. We argue that Block's argument fails because the empirical premise it is based upon is false. Attending to an object alters its salience, but not its perceived intensity. (...) We also argue that salience should be equated with mental primer, a close cousin of mental paint that reintroduces difficulties for direct realism and representationism. The upshot is that direct realism and representationism are still in trouble, but not for the reason that Block thinks. (shrink)

Der Begriff der mentalen Repräsentation spielt eine zentrale Rolle in Theorien über geistige Phänomene und Mechanismen der Informationsverarbeitung. Philosophen, Psychologen und Neurowissenschaftler diskutieren lebhaft darüber, wie es uns beziehungsweise unserem Gehirn gelingt, die Welt zu repräsentieren, und was mentale Repräsentationen genau sind. Der Band versammelt die zentralen Texte der Debatte – von Ned Block und Fred Dretske bis zu Jerry Fodor und Ruth Millikan – erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung. Ein Grundlagenwerk zur Philosophie des Geistes und der Kognitionswissenschaft.

The aim of this paper is to understand the functional role of mental representations and intentionality in skilled actions from a systems related perspective. Therefore, we will evaluate the function of representation and then discuss the cognitive architecture of skilled actions in more depth. We are going to describe the building blocks and levels of the action system that enable us to control movements such as striking the tennis ball at the right time, or grasping tools in manual action. (...) Based on this theoretical understanding the measurement of mental representations and related research results concerning mental representation in skilled action are presented in an overview. This leads to the question how mental representations develop and change during learning. Finally, to consolidate the functional understanding of mental representation in skilled action and interaction, we provide examples how to use the measurement of mental representation in humans to inform technical systems. (shrink)

Block building is a popular play activity among young children and is also used by psychologists to assess their intelligence. However, little research has attempted to systematically explore the cognitive bases of block-building ability. The current study (N= 66 Chinese preschoolers, 32 boys and 34 girls; mean age = 4.7 years, SD = 0.29, range = 3.4 to 5.2 years) investigated the relationships between six measures of spatial skills (shape naming, shape recognition, shape composition, solid figure naming, cube transformation, and (...) mental rotation, with the former four representing form perception and the latter two representing visualization) and block-building complexity. Correlation results showed that three of the four measures of form perception (shape naming, shape recognition, and shape composition) were significantly and positively correlated with block-building complexity, whereas the two measures of visualization were not. Results from regression models indicated that shape recognition and shape composition, as well as shape-recognition-by-gender interaction, were unique predictors of children’s block-building complexity. These findings provide preliminary evidence for the basic spatial skills underlying children’s block-building complexity and have implications for classroom instructions aimed at improving preschoolers’ block-building complexity. (shrink)

An adequate solution to the problem of mental causation should deliver, not just the efficacy of mental properties, but the efficacy of mental properties as such, of mentality in its own right. But this appears to block an identity solution from the outset. Any property that’s both mental and physical, the argument goes, has a dual nature, and this just reintroduces the problem of mental causation, now framed in terms of these two natures. But a (...) powers ontology promises to save the identity theory, at least from this problem. Such an ontology identifies a mental property’s mental and physical “natures” with just the property itself. A mental property is, at once, both wholly mental and wholly physical, so that to causally engage the physical nature of a mental property is to engage its mental nature as well. (shrink)

The integration of Corporate social responsibility with BusinessStrategy has been identified as a central Corporate social responsibility concept. Corporate social responsibility, it is important to understand the Key Drivers and Building Blocks that is integral to this phenomenon and which will impact the Civil Society at large. If the Indian government and private companies are serious about meeting Sustainable Development Goals, Mandated CSR has to be used as a Strategic Vehicle not only to reduce the substantial financial shortfall but Corporate (...) social responsibility as an integral part of a company’s Strategy, to help companies achieve Competitive Advantage. The paper lists down five strategic Building Blocks of Mandated CSR namely—Shared vision, Key Drivers, Dialogue, measuring impact, and Governance which provide a mental framework to think about mCSR in a novel way. The paper emphasizes the importance of Shared vision, Problem Identification, utilizing Board’s Expertise, Innovation, building network, Best Practice sharing, managing failure risk, Shareholder’s Activism, Government’s Intention, and Capacity Building. (shrink)

Christian List and Peter Menzies 2009 have looked to interventionist theories of causation for an answer to Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion problem. Important to their response is the idea of realization-insensitivity. However, this idea becomes mired in issues concerning multiple realization, leaving it unable to fulfil its promise to block exclusion. After explaining why realization-insensitivity fails as a solution to Kim's problem, I look to interventionism to describe a different kind of solution.

The recent literature on mental causation has not been kind to nonreductive, materialist functionalism (‘functionalism’, hereafter, except where that term is otherwise qualified). The exclusion problem2 has done much of the damage, but the epiphenomenalist threat has taken other forms. Functionalism also faces what I will call the ‘problem of metaphysically necessary effects’ (Block, 1990, pp. 157-60, Antony and Levine, 1997, pp. 91-92, Pereboom, 2002, p. 515, Millikan, 1999, p. 47, Jackson, 1998, pp. 660-61). Functionalist mental properties are (...) individuated partly by their relation to the very effects those properties’ instantiations are thought to cause. Consequently, functionalist causal generalizations would seem to have the following problematical structure: The state of being, among other things, a cause of e (under such-andsuch conditions) causes e (under those conditions).3 The connection asserted lacks the contingency one would expect of a causal generalization. Mental states of the kind in question are, by metaphysical necessity, causes of e; any state that does not cause e is thereby a different kind of state. Yet, a mental state’s being the sort of state it is must play some causal role if functionalism is to account for mental causation.4 In what follows, I first articulate more fully the problem of metaphysically necessary effects. I then criticize three functionalist attempts to solve the problem directly. Given the failure of functionalist efforts to meet the problem head-on, I consider less direct strategies: these involve formulating functionalism or its causal claims in such a way that they appear not to generate the problem of metaphysically necessary effects. I argue against these indirect solutions, in each case concluding either that the problem still arises or that avoiding it requires the adoption of an unorthodox form of functionalism (itself a surprising result). In the final.. (shrink)

Understanding, for Kant, does not intuit, and intuition—which involves empirical information, i.e., sense-data—does not entail thinking. What is crucial to Kant’s famous claim that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty is the idea that we have no knowledge unless we combine concepts with intuition. Although concepts and intuition are radically separated mental powers, without a way of bringing them together (i.e., synthesis) there is no knowledge for Kant. Thus Kant’s metaphysical-scientific dualism: (scientific) knowledge is (...) limited to the world of phenomena—the world of appearance—while the thing-in-itself is unknowable because there is no intuition that can correspond to the it. This paper sets to cull Béatrice Longuenesse’s recent work on the first-person ‘I’ and put forth a novel Kantian approach to the first-person reference of mental states, working in the tradition of P.F. Strawson, Rudolf Carnap, and Wilfrid Sellars, while offering an empirical study of deafferentation to ground the thesis that the binding of representations is separate from phenomenal consciousness. Accordingly, we stake a kind of self-consciousness vis-à-vis the Fundamental Reference-Rule qua apperception that, while intimately connected to consciousness of one’s own body, apperception is nevertheless distinct from it and is, moreover, the condition for any use of ‘I’. We compliment neuroscientist Oliver Sacks’ research with Ned Block’s recent work on “no-post‐perceptual cognition” and attentional variation to couch Kant’s schema in perceptual psychology. We navigate Kant’s work on intuitions (viz. sensation, perception, and the empirical side of the cognitive faculties) and indirect realism/weak representationism first via Sellars’ naturalization of Kant’s inaccessible thing-in-itself, before challenging Sellars’ functionalist and inferentialist conception of perception and discursive intentionality. We ultimately endeavor to conceptualize the limit-conditions regarding our having reportable knowledge about our access to percepts and concepts. (shrink)

I argue for the primacy of the mental from recent physicalists’ endorsements of phenomenal transparency and the non-transparency of the physical. I argue that the conjunction of these views shows that (1) arguments for dualism from introspection are difficult to resist; and (2) a kind of Hempel’s dilemma that removes constraints that block substance dualism. This shows that (1) raises the probability of the primacy of the mental, while (2) lowers the probability of the primacy of the physical. (...) Lastly, I argue that the conjunction of (1) and (2) raise the probability of substance dualism. (shrink)

Abstract objects are widely held to pose a formidable epistemological challenge. It has seemed mysterious to many how we can have access to such strange and intangible entities. The article considers five influential ways to meet the challenge: Transcendental arguments, the indispensability argument, insisting that we just are able to grasp abstract objects and that no further explanation is needed, abstractionist accounts, and ontological reduction. None of these approaches is by itself sufficient or completely convincing, but together they make out (...) a strong cumulative case for the accessibility of abstract objects. (shrink)