Volume 19 (2006), Issue 1
Manuscripts:
John Biro
A point of view on points of view
A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivist's case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does.
Justin Leiber
Turing’s Golden: How Well Turing’s Work Stands Today
A. M. Turing has bequeathed us a conceptulary including “Turing, or Turing-Church, thesis,” “Turing Machine,” “Universal Turing Machine,” “Turing Test,” and “Turing Structures,” plus other unnamed achievements, including a proof that any formal language adequate to express arithmetic contains undecidable formulas, and also achievements in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, biology, and cognitive science. Here it is argued that these achievements hang together and have prospered well in the fifty years since Turing’s death. Key Words: Turing Thesis, Turing Machines, Turing’s Test, Turing Structures, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, unification of the sciences, minds and machines, materialism.
Athanassios Raftopoulos
Defending Realism on the Proper Ground
‘Epistemological constructivism’ holds that vision is mediated by background preconceptions and is theory-laden. Hence, two persons with differing theoretical commitments see the world differently and they could agree on what they see only if they both espoused the same conceptual framework. This, in its turn, undermines the possibility of theory testing and choice on a common theory-neutral empirical basis. In this paper, I claim that the cognitive sciences suggest that a part of vision may be only indirectly penetrated by cognition in a way that does not threaten retrieval of information from a visual scene in a bottom-up way. That blocks the constructivist epistemological thesis. However, since spatial attention, which can be cognitively driven, seems to permeate all stages of visual processes, one is led to conclude that there is no part of vision immune to direct cognitive interference. Against this, I elaborate on the role of spatial attention and argue that it does influence vision in a top-down manner, but it does so only in an indirect way. I then argue that the existence of visual processes that are only indirectly penetrated by cognition undermines the epistemological conclusions of constructivism.
Robert N. McCauley & Joseph Henrich
Susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer Illusion, Theory-Neutral Observation, and the Diachronic Penetrability of the Visual Input System
Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions - especially the Müller-Lyer illusion -- as a principal form of evidence for the informational encapsulation of modular input systems. Fodor proposed that these modules' stereotypical deliverances about how the world appears could serve as a theory-neutral observational foundation for (scientific) knowledge. For a variety of reasons Fodor rejected Paul Churchland's putative counter-examples to these mental modules' cognitive impenetrability. Fodor's discussions suggest that demonstrating modules' cognitive penetrability would hinge on showing that because subjects either (a) acquire some explicit theory or (b) gain wider perceptual experience, they would, in the synchronic case, very quickly cease to experience the illusion or, at any rate, experience a mitigated version of it. Diachronic penetration, by contrast, would involve processes that deliver one of these outcomes over a decidedly longer period. Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits' (1966) research across seventeen cultures shows that culturally influenced differences in visual experience during the first two decades of life substantially affect how people experience the Müller-Lyer stimuli. In some of the societies most people were virtually immune to the illusion. Such findings call Fodor's showcase evidence for the cognitive impenetrability of the visual input system into question and, thereby, threaten to block the path to the theory-neutral, observational consensus that he scouts.
Review Essay:
Jan Slaby, Graham Katz, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, & Achim Stephan
Embodied Targets, or the Origins of Mind-Tools
Review Essay on:
Hugh Clapin (Ed.)
Philosophy of Mental Representation
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002.
332 pages, ISBN: 0198250525 (pbk); $35.00
Book Reviews:
Dominic Murphy
Review of Paul Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics
Shannon M. Pruden, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, & Julia Parish
Review of David H. Rakison & Lisa M. Oakes (Eds.), Early Category and Concept Development: Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion