Minds Without Meanings
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Author | : Jerry A. Fodor |
Publisher | : MIT Press |
Total Pages | : 202 |
Release | : 2015 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 0262027909 |
Two prominent thinkers argue for the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference to be concepts' sole semantic property.In cognitive science, conceptual content is frequently understood as the “meaning” of a mental representation. This position raises largely empirical questions about what concepts are, what form they take in mental processes, and how they connect to the world they are about. In Minds without Meaning, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn review some of the proposals put forward to answer these questions and find that none of them is remotely defensible.Fodor and Pylyshyn determine that all of these proposals share a commitment to a two-factor theory of conceptual content, which holds that the content of a concept consists of its sense together with its reference. Fodor and Pylyshyn argue instead that there is no conclusive case against the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference as their sole semantic property. Such a theory, if correct, would provide for the naturalistic account of content that cognitive science lacks—and badly needs. Fodor and Pylyshyn offer a sketch of how this theory might be developed into an account of perceptual reference that is broadly compatible with empirical findings and with the view that the mental processes effecting perceptual reference are largely preconceptual, modular, and encapsulated.
Author | : Jerome Bruner |
Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | : 212 |
Release | : 1993-01-01 |
Genre | : Psychology |
ISBN | : 0674253051 |
Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as “information processor,” has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.
Author | : Savas L. Tsohatzidis |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 308 |
Release | : 2007-10-18 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 9780521685344 |
This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning scepticism in relation to rule-following, and the proper characterization of 'what is said' in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area.
Author | : Scott Soames |
Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | : 253 |
Release | : 2015-05-26 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0691160457 |
In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it. He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.
Author | : Paul Thagard |
Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | : 293 |
Release | : 2010-02-14 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0691142726 |
Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it."--Jacket.
Author | : Benjamin K. Bergen |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 311 |
Release | : 2012-10-30 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 0465028292 |
A cognition expert describes how meaning is conveyed and processed in the mind and answers questions about how we can understand information about things we've never seen in person and why we move our hands and arms when we speak.
Author | : Philip Pettit |
Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | : 191 |
Release | : 2009-07-26 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0691143250 |
Argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis - the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind.
Author | : Gregg D. Caruso |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 393 |
Release | : 2018 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0190460725 |
Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good. The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety. In Neuroexistentialism, a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.
Author | : Paul M. Pietroski |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 404 |
Release | : 2018 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 0198812728 |
Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.
Author | : Claudio Paolucci |
Publisher | : Springer Nature |
Total Pages | : 167 |
Release | : 2021-02-01 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 3030429865 |
This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.