Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

Part I. Some approaches in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

1. Dualism and behaviorism

a) The map of the lecture and seminars: cognition and the mind-brain/body umbrella

b) Dualism: Descartes

c) Behaviorism: Ryle

Seminar: Descartes and Ryle (1949- from Chalmers) R. Descartes ”Meditations on First Philosophy (II and IV)”

2. Identity theory and eliminative materialism

a) Identity theory: Place and Feigl, Smart and Armstrong

- Two trends: Place and Feigl; Smart and Armstrong

- Problems: see Clark

b) Eliminative materialism

- Folk psychology vs. neuroscience

- Intertheoretic reductionism

- Qualia from a scientific vocabulary

Seminar: Place (1956), Smart (1962/1959); Paul and Patricia Churchland (“Activation vectors vs. propositional attitudes: How the brain represents reality”)

3. Functionalism and nonreductive materialism

a) Functionalism

- Problems: N. Block

b) Non-reductive materialism: Davidson, Fodor, Jackson, McGinn, Nagel, Putnam, Searle, Chalmers, and Van Gulick

c) Neutral monism, dual-aspect theory and anomalous monism

- Globus; Chalmers’ protophenomenal properties

Seminar: Block “Troubles with Functionalism” , Searle – The Rediscovery of the Mind, Chapter 4.

4. Computationalism (Representational or Computational Theory of Mind) vs. Chinese Room

- Fodor’s LOT - Formality and computation, syntax and semantics

- Searle’s Chinese Room

Seminar: Clark (Chapter 1 and 2; 2001), Searle (“Chinese Room “1997)

5. Connectionism and systematicity: neural networks’ characteristics (Elman, Clark, Bechtel and Abrahamsen, Elman et al 1996) vs. Fodor and Pylyshyn, Marcus- compositionality, systematicity, and productivity in LOTH.

Seminar: Clark (1997, 2001- Chapter 4), Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988)

6. Dynamical system approach and robotics:

Seminar: Clark (2001- Chapter 6 and 7); van Gelder’s Watt governor, Brooks’ anti-representationalism (1995), Kelso (in Clark 2001)

7. Philosophy of mind, cognitive science and the EDWs perspective

Seminar: Vacariu (2005)

8. Robots, AI and A-life

Seminar: Brooks (2001) – “Intelligence without representation”

Part II. Essential notions in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

9. Mental representations in Cognitive Science, Mandler’s dichotomies: declarative-procedural, accessible-inaccessible, conscious-unconscious, conceptual-sensorimotor, symbolic-subsymbolic, and explicit-implicit. (Mandler 1998); Propositional vs. image representation; Binding problem; Dietrich and Markman’ ssymbolic representations for cognition (2003).

Seminar: Extending the classical view of representation (Markman and Dietrich, 2000)

10. Levels, emergence vs. reduction (van Gulick, Searle, Bickle, the Churchlands)

11. The relationship between neuroscience and psychology, the explanatory gap (Levine, McGinn), Fodor’s special sciences, Cognitive Neuroscience

12. Consciousness, qualia, hard-easy problems (Chalmers- “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature”), self, blindsight (Weiskrantz), Milner and Goodale, Block (A and P-consciousness), Zombie

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13. Mental causation and supervenience: Kim J. Kim “The Many Problemes of Mental Causation” (excerpt), Block and Davidson

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