VOLUME 11 (1998), ISSUE 3

Manuscripts:

FRED A. KEIJZER
Doing without representations which specify what to do

• Abstract: A discussion is going on in cognitive science about the use of representations to explain how intelligent behavior is generated. In the traditional view, an organism is thought to incorporate representations. These provide an internal model that is used by the organism to instruct the motor apparatus so that the adaptive and anticipatory characteristics of behavior come about. So-called interactionists claim that this representational specification of behavior raises more problems than it solves. In their view, the notion of internal representational models is to be dispensed with. Instead, behavior is to be explained as the intricate interaction between an embodied organism and the specific make up of an environment. The problem with a non-representational interactive account is that it has severe difficulties with anticipatory, future oriented behavior. The present paper extends the interactionist conceptual framework by drawing on ideas derived from the study of morphogenesis. This extended interactionist framework is based on an analysis of anticipatory behavior as a process which involves multiple spatio-temporal scales of neural, bodily and environmental dynamics. This extended conceptual framework provides the outlines for an explanation of anticipatory behavior without involving a representational specification of future goal states.

JAMES W. GARSON
Chaotic emergence and the language of thought

• Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the merits of the idea that dynamical systems theory (also known as chaos theory) provides a model of the mind that can vindicate the language of thought (LOT). I investigate the nature of emergent structure in dynamical systems to assess its compatibility with causally efficacious syntactic structure in the brain. I will argue that anyone who is committed to the idea that the brain's functioning depends on emergent features of dynamical systems should have serious reservations about the LOT. First, dynamical systems theory casts doubt on one of the strongest motives for believing in the LOT: principle P, the doctrine that structure found in an effect must also be found in its cause. Second, chaotic emergence is a double-edged sword. Its tendency to cleave the psychological from the neurological undermines foundations for belief in the existence of causally efficacious representations. Overall, a dynamic conception of the brain sways us away from realist conclusions about the causal powers of representations with constituent structure.

IRENE APPELBAUM
Fodor, modularity, and speech perception

• Abstract: Fodor argues that speech perception is accomplished by a module. Typically, modular processing is taken to be bottom-up processing. Yet there is ubiquitous empirical evidence that speech perception is influenced by top-down processing. Fodor attempts to resolve this conflict by denying that modular processing must be exclusively bottom-up. It is argued, however, that Fodor's attempt to reconcile top-down and modular processing fails, because: (i) it undermines Fodor's own conception of modular process; and (ii) it cannot account for the contextually varying top-down influences that characterize speech perception.

VALERIE G. HARDCASTLE
The puzzle of attention, the importance of metaphors

• Abstract: I have two goals in this paper. First, I want to show by example that inferences about theoretical entities are relatively contingent affairs. Previously accepted conceptual metaphors in science set both the general form of new theories and our acceptance of the theories as plausible. In addition, they determine how we define the relevant parameters in investigating phenomena in the first place. These items then determine how we conceptualize things in the world. Second, and maybe more importantly, I want to solve a puzzle that falls out of our current explication of attention, namely why we have it. Given the now widely accepted view that our brains are massively parallel, it is difficult to see shy we should have evolved attentional mechanisms at all. Why gate when we can already process what we transduce in parallel? Here I answer that puzzle and suggest a perspective on attention that makes it a bit easier to understand, although this perspective also entails that we have to revise how we individuate experimental protocols and relevant data.

ALFRED R. MELE
Motivated belief and agency

• Abstract: Can the existence of motivationally biased beliefs plausibly be explained without appealing to actions that are aimed at producing or protecting these beliefs? Drawing upon some recent work on everyday hypothesis testing, I argue for an affirmative answer. Some theorists have been too quick to insist that motivated belief must involve, or typically does involve, our trying to bring it about that we acquire or retain the belief, or our trying to make it easier for ourselves to believe a preferred proposition - and too quick to conclude that such exercises of agency are involved in specific instances of the phenomenon. There are alternative ways to accommodate the data, and it is far from clear that the 'agency view' accommodates them better.

DON GUSTAFSON
Pain, qualia, and the explanatory gap

• Abstract: This paper investigates the status of the purported explanatory gap between pain phenomena and natural science, when the 'gap' is thought to exist due to the special properties of experience designated by 'qualia' or 'the pain quale' in the case of pain experiences. The paper questions the existence of such a property in the case of pain by: (1) looking at the history of the conception of pain; (2) raising questions from empirical research and theory in the psychology of pain; (3) considering evidence from the neurophysiological systems of pain; (4) investigating the possible biological role or roles of pain; and (5) considering methodological questions of the comparable status of the results of the sciences of pain in contrast to certain intuitions underpinning 'the explanatory gap' in the case of pain. Skepticism concerning the crucial underlying intuitions seems justsified by these considerations.

Book Reviews:

DAVID R. KOEPSELL
Review of BRIAN CANTWELL SMITH's On the origin of objects

CHRIS ELIASMITH
Review of WILLIAM LYONS' Modern philosophy of mind

ACHIM STEPHAN
Review of JAEGWON KIM's Philosophy of mind