VOLUME 14 (2001), ISSUE 1

Manuscripts:

RON SUN
Cognitive science meets multi-agent systems

• Abstract: In the current research on multi-agent systems (MAS), many theoretical issues related to sociocultural processes have been touched upon. These issues are in fact intellectually profound and should prove to be significant for MAS. Moreover, these issues should have equally significant impact on cognitive science, if we ever try to understand cognition in the broad context of sociocultural environments in which cognitive agents exist. Furthermore, cognitive models as studied in cognitive science can help us in a substantial way to better probe multi-agent issues, by taking into account essential characteristics of cognitive agents and their various capacities. In this paper, we systematically examine the interplay among social sciences, MAS, and cognitive science. We try to justify an integrated approach for MAS, which incorporates different perspectives. We show how a new cognitive model CLARION can embody such an integrated approach through a combination of autonomous learning and assimilation.

BYRON CUNNINGHAM
Capturing qualia: Higher-order concepts and connectionism

• Abstract: Antireductionist philosophers have argued for higher-order classifications of qualia that locate consciousness outside the scope of conventional scientific explanations, viz., by classifying qualia as intrinsic, basic, or subjective properties, antireductionists distinguish qualia from extrinsic, complex, and objective properties, and thereby distinguish conscious mental states from the possible explananda of functionalist or physicalist explanations. I argue that, in important respects, qualia are intrinsic, basic, and subjective properties of conscious mental states, and that, contrary to antireductionists' suggestions, these higher-order classifications are compatible with qualia reduction. I demonstrate this compatibility by examining the putative higher-order properties of qualia and comparing them to the higher-order properties characteristic of connectionist models of cognitive processes. I contend that the higher-order properties characteristic of connectionist networks approximate (in intertheoretic terms) the putative higher-order properties of qualia sufficiently well to conclude that qualia reductionism can (1) accommodate claims that qualia are intrinsic, basic, and subjective properties, and (2) explain the motivating intuitions for those claims generated by inverted, absent, and alien qualia thought experiments. In this way I argue that (approximate versions of) the putative higher-order classifications of qualia not only fail to defeat qualia reduction but, ironically, turn out to support it.

KEN AIZAWA & FRED ADAMS
The bounds of cognition

• Abstract: Recent work in cognitive science has suggested that there are actual cases in which cognitive processes extend in the physical world beyond the bounds of the brain and the body. We argue that, while transcranial cognition may be both a logical and a nomological possibility, no case has been made for its current existence. In other words, we defend a form of contingent intracranialism about the cognitive.

RICHARD GRAY
Cognitive modules, synaesthesia, and functional explanation

• Abstract: Fodor (1983) claims that cognitive modules can be thought of as constituting a psychological natural kind in virtue of their possession of most or all of nine specified properties. The challenge to this considered here comes from synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a type of cross-modal association: input to one sensory modality reliably generates an additional sensory output that is usually generated by the input to a distinct sensory modality. The most common form of synaesthesia manifests Fodor's nine specified properties of modularity, and hence, according to Segal (1997), it should be understood as involving an extra module. Many psychologists believe that synaesthesia involves a breakdown in modularity. After outlining how both theories can explain the manifestation of the nine alleged properties of modularity in synaesthesia, I discuss the two concepts of function which initially motivate the respective theories. I argue that only a teleological concept of function is properly able to adjudicate between the two theories. The upshot is a further application of so-called externalist considerations to mental phenomena.

JUSTIN LEIBER
Turing and the fragility and insubstantiality of evolutionary explanations: A puzzle about the unity of Turing's work with some larger implications

• Abstract: As is well known, Alan Turing drew a line, embodied in the "Turing test," between intellectual and physical abilities, and hence between cognitive and natural sciences. Less familiarly, he proposed that one way to produce a "passer" would be to educate a "child machine," equating the experimenter's improvements in the initial structure of the child machine with genetic mutations, while supposing that the experimenter might achieve improvements more expeditiously than natural selection. On the other hand, in his foundational "On the chemical basis of morphogenesis," Turing insisted that biological explanation clearly confine itself to purely physical and chemical means, eschewing vitalist and teleological talk entirely and hewing to D'Arcy Thompson's line that "evolutionary 'explanations,'" are historical and narrative in character, employing the same intentional and teleological vocabulary we use in doing human history, and hence, while perhaps on occasion of heuristic value, are not part of biology as a natural science. To apply Turing's program to recent issues, the attempt to give foundations to the social and cognitive sciences in the "real science" of evolutionary biology (as opposed to Turing's biology) is neither to give foundations, nor to achieve the unification of the social/cognitive sciences and the natural sciences.

Discussion: The Ontology of Pain

TERRY DARTNALL
The pain problem

• Abstract: How can a pain wake you up? You were not dreaming, nor did any bodily stimuli filter into your consciousness. You did not just wake up and realize you were in pain, as you might wake up and realize it is Saturday. You were deeply, dreamlessly asleep, and suddenly you were awake, and in pain. How is this possible? If pain exists only inasmuch as it is experienced, it seems that the pain did not exist when you were asleep, and so could not have woken you up. I shall argue that you were woken by a pain sensation that you did not know you had, so that the distinction between what is and what is known holds even for the contents of consciousness. This illuminates the relationship between consciousness and attention, and casts light on the Classical Empiricist tradition that identifies the foundations of knowledge with direct experience.

JAY L. GARFIELD
Pain deproblematized

• Abstract: In this paper I demonstrate that the "pain problem" Dartnall claims to have discovered is in fact no problem at all. Dartnall's construction of the apparent problem, I argue, relies on an erroneous assumption of the unity of consciousness, an erroneous assumption of the simplicity of pain as a phenomenon ignoring crucial neurophysiological and neuroanatominal information, a mistaken account of introspective knowledge according to which introspection gives us inner episodes veridically and in their totality and a model of consciousness that depicts the mind as an attic of inner objects towards which attention might or might not be directed. Once these errors are dispelled, no problem remains. None the less, given the seductiveness of these errors, and the havoc they wreak in cognitive science, dispelling them is a worthwhile exercise.

TERRY DARTNALL
The pain problem: Reply to Garfield

• Abstract: I am grateful for Garfield's comments, which clarify my position. He says, for example, that I am a phenomenalist. I am not a phenomenalist. I say that there can be contents of consciousness that we are not aware of, in the same sense that there really is a chair next door and a gorilla outside my window-a real, live gorilla, with big teeth and no conditional statements. His other comments are equally illuminating.

Book Reviews:

DOMINIC MURPHY
Review of VALERIE G. HARDCASTLE's Where biology meets psychology: Philosophical essays

JAMES GARSON
Review of PAUL THAGARD's Mind readings

JONATHAN COHEN
Reviews of ALEX BYRNE & DAVID R. HILBERT's Readings on color; C.L. HARDIN & LUISA MAFFI's Color categories in thought and language; WERNER G.K. BACKHAUS, REINHOLD KLIEGL & JOHN S. WERNER's Color vision: Perspectives from different disciplines

DANIEL J. MORAN
Review of BRUCE THYER's The philosophical legacy of behaviorism

ALEJANDRO ROSAS
Review of ELLIOT SOBER & DAVID S. WILSON's Unto others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior