For any philosophers or psychologists on Twitter, experimental philosophy has started an official twitter account. To see what has been going on in the x-phi world, or to follow xphilosopher, you can follow this link: http://twitter.com/xphilosopher
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| Posted by gualtiero piccinini at | | | |
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Many readers of Brains should be interested by this new journal: The European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) has
signed a contract with Springer concerning the establishment of a new journal:
the European Journal for Philosophy of Science (EJPS). The Editorial Team is a
group of excellent philosophers of science with a variety of backgrounds and
fields of expertise. The Editor-in-Chief is Carl Hoefer (Autonomous University
of Barcelona, Spain) and the deputy editor is Mauro Dorato (University of Rome
III, Italy). Franz Huber (Konstanz, Germany) Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh, USA),
Michela Massimi (London, UK), Samir Okasha (Bristol, UK) and Jesús Zamora
(UNED, Spain) are Associate Editors. The Editorial Team will be assisted in its
work by an Editorial Board of highly reputed philosophers of science from
around the world.
EJPS is the official journal of EPSA and will appear three
times a year, beginning in January 2011. EJPS will aim to publish first-rate
research in all areas of philosophy of science. Information concerning
submissions to EJPS will be announced in the forthcoming weeks by the Editorial
Team.
EJPS will be publishing (among other things) articles in the philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.
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| Posted by edouard machery at | | | |
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Springer just released a new quarterly journal called 'Cognitive Computation', which might be of interest to some of the readers of this blog. The editor, Amir Hussain, summarizes the goal of the journal as follows:
"Cognitive Computation specifically aims to publish cutting-edge articles describing original basic and applied work involving biologically inspired theoretical, computational, experimental and integrative accounts of all aspects of natural and artificial cognitive systems. By establishing a forum to bring together different scientific communities, Cognitive Computation will promote a more comprehensive and unified understanding of diverse topics, including those related to perception, action, attention, learning and memory, decision making, language processing, communication, reasoning, problem solving and consciousness."
You can sign up to an RSS feed for the journal by clicking here.
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| Posted by alex morgan at | | | |
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Being a
newly minted (and still jobless) PhD, I've been doing some serious thinking
about projects I want to tackle in the next five years or so. One idea was to write something— either a
few papers or perhaps a book— on interesting puzzles or problems in the
Philosophy of Mind that often get overlooked in anthologies and texts on the
subject. This has lead to some
rumination on just what the "classical" problems are, and which might
deserve to be classical, given some attention.
So I'm
appealing to Brains readers for their input.
To start, I'll list some of the problem areas that I've found dominate
intro texts to Phil of Mind:
- The Mind
Body problem (and all the "isms" we learn about— accounted for 1/2
of my undegrad POM classes)
- Problems
of Mental Causation (causal exclusion, projectibility, etc.)
- Consciousness
(its nature, scientific study, etc.)
- Naturalizing
content (I would include the nature of concepts here as well)
- The
"architecture" of the mind (GOFAI vs. connectionism, vs. dyanmical
systems vs....)
- The Self
(its nature, representation, identity conditions, etc.)
- Folk
Psychology (many interesting— and overworked— problems here)
And as
runners up...
- Emotions
(Their nature, content, etc.)
- Embedded/embodied
cognition
- Possibility
of animal thought/animal consciousness
Granted,
these are more "problem areas" than specific problems. But I'm wondering what good, interesting
problems there are that might be outside this net. A few thoughts:
- Interpretation
of split brain data with regards to personal identity (there was a fury of
activity in the 70s, and again in the 90s, but not much I've seen since then).
- Concept
sharing and publicity (do we really "share" concepts, and do we
really communicate competently?)
- How the
posits of personality psychology (e.g., personality traits) square with
philsophical ideas about the mind
- Cognitive
basis (or perceptual, or whatever) for logic and logic learning
These are
just some off-the-cuff ideas. So:
What do
Brains readers feel the newest, sexiest problems or areas are? What might students be reading in
anthologies 20 or 50 years from now?
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| Posted by Brandon Towl at | | | |
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| Here,
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| Posted by gualtiero piccinini at | | | |
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ASSC XIII finished on Monday but it was so packed that I needed a couple of days to rest and ruminate. Contrary to somehow disappointing TSC in Budapest in 2007, ASSC XIII was excellent, and as Thomas Metzinger stressed a couple of times, you could really see that the field is becoming mature.
There were almost 200 posters, 36 talks, 4 plenary symposia (with 3 talks each), and 6 keynote lectures... Yet, there were recurring themes - many talks were focusing on the very same ideas.
A recurring theme was a integrated information theory of consciousness, introduced at the start of the conference by Gulio Tononi during his presidential address. The idea of integrating information, and actually measuring the integration came back in a submitted talk by Christof Koch who improved over Tononi's measure of effective information by averaging it on all possible states of the network. Clearly, Tononi's and Koch's measure are not effectively computable for any non-trivial network, so an excellent symposium, chaired by Anil Seth, on measuring consciousness on the last day of the conference was a nice follow-up. Seth reviewed many measures offered so far and included his idea of measuring the integration of information by causal density (something which reminded me of Herbert Simon's frequency of interaction that is used to set off the boundary of nearly decomposable systems). To wit, all these accounts attempt at measuring the intensity of information integration, which in turn means that they measure the degree the system is not simply an aggregate of individual information processors but a system. In other words, the background assumption is that conciousness is made possible by highly integrated, information-processing systems, or it emerges in such systems (is an emergent property of the information network in Bill Wimsatt's sense in relation to individual information-processing elements).
Of course, if you mention emergence, you start thinking about Jaegwon Kim. In his keynote lecture, he tried to downplay emergence (in a similar way he did it in Kirchberg) and defended qualia epiphenomenalism, and consequently suggested that there cannot be a science of consciousness, only of the things that supervene it. Again, I am not at all convinced by his arguments, as he's making his job too easy by attacking strawmen. Kim's lecture, entitled Armchair Reflections on Consciousness and the Science of Consciousness, was indeed quite remote from the way philosophers and scientists alike took their stance on consciousness. The only other more conceptual-focused keynote lecture was held by David Papineau who was reasurring that we shouldn't worry that much about the explanatory gap (there were slight changes in his position about the antipathetic fallacy, by the way). Anyway, other keynotes and symposia were much more experimental.
Michael Tomasello and Susan Carey focused on social cognition, shared intentionality and theory of mind as relevant for consciousness (by the way, there was also a poster by Allison Gopnik). A talk by the William James Prize winner, Joel Pearson, on imagery influencing perception, showed an ingenious way of showing the role of imagery and top-down effects in consciousness (see his paper in Current Biology).
There were also many interesting symposia, and lots of excellent posters. The poster Do Dissociations Work by Elizabeth Irvine was awarded the prize of the best poster by a special commision that included Ned Block and Michael Tye. You can find all inspiring abstracts here. My own talk on computationalism fits, as you probably guessed, the information-integration theme.
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| Posted by marcin milkowski at | | | |
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| Here.
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| Posted by gualtiero piccinini at | | | |
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Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford, OUP, 2008.
Some quick observations on Fodor’s new book:
1. As usual, a great book: ambitious, provocative, full of ideas and arguments, and as a bonus, funny (for those who like his humor).
2. He is still a computationalist, language-of-thought representationalist, atomist and nativist about concepts, referentialist with respect to semantic content, and causal theorist about the origin of semantic content.
3. He stresses more than ever that although his theory is the best available, it fails to explain central cognitive processes. His main reason is that computation is local, whereas central cognition (e.g., inductive inference) is global. What this means is, roughly speaking, that computational processes (as he understands them) only work well when they manipulate a few representations at a time. As soon as computations try to manipulate too many representations (e.g., because they are looking for global properties of a large set of representations), they run into the intractability of the frame problem. But some cognitive processes (e.g., inductive inference) require taking into account too many representations for computational processes to be a feasible explanation of them. Fodor suggests that some “new” kind of computation might be able to explain such processes, but he doesn’t think anyone has any idea how this new kind of computation works. I wish he would have explained better why it doesn’t help to appeal to lots of parallel processes here (as, e.g., Paul Churchland does in his recent work).
4. One novelty is iconic representations, whose content is nonconceptual. Fodor argues on empirical grounds that cognition involves iconic representations as well as linguistic/conceptual ones. At the very least, iconic (nonconceptual) representations are the ones present in the “iconic buffer”, which is a processing stage postulated by some classical cognitive psychological theories. As far as I remember from his previous work, this is a new addition to Fodor’s theory.
5. As usual, Fodor relies on his semantic account of computation, according to which computation is a kind of manipulation of representations that “preserves” (some) semantic properties of the representations. This gets him into trouble when it’s time to explain how the representations acquire their content, because he can’t appeal to computational processes. (According to Fodor, for a computation to be in place, there must already be representations with their semantic properties in place.) So he ends up saying that the notion of concept learning is incoherent. Instead, he suggests that semantic content is acquired through – listen to this! – non-computational brain processes. The story gets pretty mysterious at that point; a “here a miracle happens” moment. Fodor’s own argument that acquiring semantic properties is just something the brain does is quite involved, though – he does not generate his conclusion simply on the grounds of his account of computation. But I stress the connection with the semantic account of computation because I’ve been arguing for some time that contra Fodor and many others, computation does not require representation. If I’m right, computation might help explain the origin of semantic content is ways that are precluded to Fodor et al.
6. The appeal to brain processes to explain the origin of content is surprising and ironic for someone, like Fodor, whose theory of mind seems to have been built (over many decades) by ignoring neuroscience as a matter of principle, and, occasionally, as a rationalization for why it’s ok to ignore neuroscience.
7. I strongly recommend reading this book. Like most of his previous books, it will become a standard reference for philosophers of mind.
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| Posted by gualtiero piccinini at | | | |
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| Here.
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| Posted by gualtiero piccinini at | | | |
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| If you are going to the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association next week (Carleton University) or if you happen to be around Ottawa, you might want to come to the symposium on Doing without Concepts Wednesday May 27 2:00-5:00pm (room: AY 101). (Program here.)
Christopher Hill (Brown), Diana Raffman (Toronto), and Stevan Harnad (Montreal) will comment on the book, and I will reply. The symposium has been organized by Jennifer Nagel. This should be a very interesting meeting on concepts and their role in cognitive science.
Edouard
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| Posted by edouard machery at | | | |
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