VOLUME 12 (1999), ISSUE 1

Manuscripts:

ALEX LEVINE & MARK H. BICKHARD
Where Fodor went wrong

• Abstract: In keeping with other recent efforts, Fodor's Concepts focuses on the metaphysics of conceptual content, bracketing such epistemological questions as "How can we know the contents of our concepts?" Fodor's metaphysical account of concepts, called "informational atomism," stipulates that the contents of a subject's concepts are fixed by the nomological lockings between the subject and the world. After sketching Fodor's "what else?" argument in support of this view, we offer a number of related criticisms. All point to epistemology of conceptual content; his theory makes answers to the epistemological questions impossible.

GORDON R. FOXALL
The contextual stance

• Abstract: The contention that cognitive psychology and radical behaviorism yield equivalent accounts of decision making and problem solving is examined by contrasting a framework of cognitive interpretation, Dennett's intentional stance, with a corresponding interpretive stance derived from contextualism. The insistence of radical behaviorists that private events such as thoughts nd feelings belong in a science of human behavior is indicted in view of their failure to provide a credible interpretation of complex human behavior. Dennett's interpretation of intentional systems is an exemplar of the interpretive stance radical behaviorism requires; a corresponding interpretive position can be based initially on a radical behaviorist view of human behavior and its determinants. This "contextual stance" is ontologically and methodologically distinct from the intentional stance over the range of explanations for which scientific psychology, cognitive or behaviorist, is responsible.

PETE MANDIK
Qualia, space, and control

• Abstract: According to representationalists, qualia-the introspectible properties of sensory experience-are exhausted by the representational contents of experience. Representationalists typically advocate an informational psychosemantics whereby a brain state represents one of its causal antecedents in evolutionarily determined optimal circumstances. I argue that such a psychosemantics may not apply to certain aspects of our experience, namely, our experience of space in vision, hearing, and touch. I offer that these cases can be handled by supplementing informational psychosemantics with a procedural psychosemantics whereby a representation is about its effects instead of its causes. I discuss conceptual and empirical points that favor a procedural representationalism for our experience of space.

WILLIAM S. WILKERSON
From bodily motions to bodily intentions: The perception of bodily activity

• Abstract: This paper argues that one's perception of another person's bodily activity is not the perception of the mere flexing and bending of that person's limbs, but rather of that person's intentions. It makes its case in three parts. First, it examines what conditions are necessary for children to begin to imitate and assimilate the behavior of other adults and argues that these conditions include the perception of intention. These conditions generalize to adult perception as well. Second, changing methodologies, the paper presents a first person phenomenology of watching another person act which demonstrates that one's own perception is of intentions. The phenomenological analysis of time consciousness is keystone of this argument. Finally, the paper looks at some recently established facts about infant and child development, and shows that these facts are best explained by thinking that the child is already perceiving intention.

JOHN BARRESI
On becoming a person

• Abstract: How does an entity become a person? Forty years ago Carl Rogers (1955) answered this question by suggesting that human beings become persons through a process of personal growth and self-discovery. In the present paper I provide six different answers to this question, which form a hierarchy of increasingly stringent, mainly empirical, criteria that can be used to understand human personhood. The are: 1) Persons are constructed out of natural but organic materials; 2) Persons emerge as a form of adaptation through the process of evolution; 3) Persons develop ontogenetically; 4) Persons are created through the unifying activity of self-narrative; 5) Persons are constituted through socio-historical and cultural processes; 6) The concept of persons is a normative ideal. I suggest that it is important to consider all of these criteria in order to appreciate fully how an entity becomes a human person.

Book Reviews:

DON GUSTAFSON
Review of NED BLOCK, OWEN FLANAGAN, & GüVEN GüZELDER's The nature of consciousness: Philosophical debates

A.H.C. van der HEIJDEN
Review of HAROLD PASHLER's The psychology of attention

ALFRED R. MELE
Review of ANNETTE BARNES' Seeing through self-deception

PAUL E. GRIFFITHS
Review of ROSALIND PICARD's Affective computing