Propositional Attitudes, Intentional Contents and Other Representationalist Myths (original) (raw)
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The representational and the presentational, an essay on cognition and the study of mind
Journal of Pragmatics, 1999
Benny Shanon's The representational and the presentational is an important contribution to the complex of disciplines that converge on the question of the nature of mind. While it is a work within psychology, it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries; it is suffused with a sensitive reading of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, on the one hand, and a concern for empirical psychology and modeling cognitive systems, on the other. Shanon brings together the key concerns of different disciplines so as to investigate two competing ways of conceptualizing mind. His work is not a disinterested exposition of different perspectives; Shanon argues forcefully, and convincingly, against a representational view of cognitive processes. His argument may be characterized as a rebuttal of Josef Perner's idea that '"mind' was a word in ill repute for many years within scientific psychology of the behaviorist eras until 'representation' came to its rescue" (1991: 1). Shanon opposes this idea in a sustained critique of what he calls the 'representational-computational view of mind' (which he abbreviates 'RCVM'). He defends a more dynamic and context-sensitive conception, an alternative he refers to as the 'presentational' understanding of cognition and mental life. The contrast Shanon highlights reflects the oppositions that shape current debates about mind. One view, based on analogies with computer functions, maintains that cognition manifests the existence of an underlying 'code'. This code is ostensibly composed of fixed representations that ultimately might be formally specified. Another view, rooted in phenomenology and ordinary-language philosophy, ties the nature of mind to action, body, and culture, rejecting the pursuit of formal models of representational codes as reductionist and conceptually misguided. In 250 wellcodumented pages, the author lends support to the later perspective, arguing that RCVM or 'representationalism' (used interchangeably throughout this review) cannot handle the complexity and heterogeneity of mental phenomena and behavior. Shanon's starting point is the appreciation that representations cannot encompass the knowledge manifest in behavior. Human behavior, he argues, "defies any universal code fixed prior to cognitive activity and independently of it" (p.
Conceptualizing the Mind in Western Philosophical
This work investigates into the nature of the mind as one of the classical problems in western philosophy. It argues that mind as a philosophical contention has been a philosophical concern from the Pre-Socratics till date. This work argues further that the main thrust of the debate oscillates between the conception of the mind as singularity in nature and mind as contiguous with non-mental phenomena. On these heels, theories and counter-theories have been advanced. The theories advanced arguably have been influenced by reaction to earlier theories of the mind and events of each epoch. The work further argues that scientism has further opened the contention to newer dimensions and nuances. This work concludes that the mind is a perennial philosophical challenge regardless of the massive contributions and theories that have been hypothesized on the subject matter.
My main purpose in this article is to spell out Jocelyn Benoist's view of philosophy of mind, starting from his recent work on concepts and on the conceptual/non-conceptual distinction . I trace back Benoist's contextualist counterproposal to representationalism to converging influences ranging from phenomenology (Husserl 1994) to philosophy of language (Travis 2008) and discuss some of the problems posed by viewing concepts as representations in a mental repository.
First published in 1949, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind is one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophy. Described by Ryle as a 'sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work' on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind is a radical and controversial attempt to jettison once and for all what Ryle called 'the ghost in the machine': Descartes' argument that mind and body are two separate entities. As well as rejecting dualism about the mind, Ryle goes much further, arguing that more recent materialist or functionalist theories of mind do not solve the Cartesian puzzle either and even accept some of its fundamental, mistaken, propositions. It is because of these mistaken propositions that associated problems, such as mental causation and 'other minds', arise in the first place. Ryle builds his case via an erudite and beautifully written account of the will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation and observation, imagination and the intellect. Some of the problems he tackles, such as the distinction between 'knowing how and knowing that', challenged some of the bedrock assumptions of philosophy and continue to exert important influence on contemporary philosophy. A classic work of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of the mind and human behaviour. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes a substantial commentary by Julia Tanney. Together with the reissue of both volumes of Ryle's Collected Papers, it provides essential reading for new readers interested not only in the history of analytic philosophy but in its power to challenge major currents in philosophy of mind and language today.
Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
uludag.edu.tr
The paper surveys the three major metaphysical strategies in 'framing' the mind: dualism, reductionism, and eliminativism. An evaluation of their achievements is being made in order to outline the perspectives of three main explanatory approaches to the mind: functionalism (dualistic and reductionistic), connectionism (eliminativistic), and the emerging view of the so called dynamic systems theory. The last is described as the most adequate according to contemporary condition of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.