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The Intentional Stance
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution. Dennett and intentionality Dennett (1971, p. 87) states that he took the concept of "intentionality" from the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano. When clarifying the distinction between mental phenomena (viz., mental activity) and physical phenomena, Brentano (p. 97) argued that, in contrast with physical phenomena, the "distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena" was "the reference to something as an object" – a characteristic he called "''intentional inexistence''". Dennett constantly speaks of the "'' aboutness''" of ''intentionality''; for example: "the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosopher
A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (6th century BCE).. In the Classics, classical sense, a philosopher was someone who lived according to a certain way of life, focusing upon resolving Meaning of life, existential questions about the human condition; it was not necessary that they discoursed upon Theory, theories or commented upon authors. Those who most arduously committed themselves to this lifestyle would have been considered ''philosophers''. In a modern sense, a philosopher is an intellectual who contributes to one or more branches of philosophy, such as aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, social theory, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. A philosopher may also be someone who has worked in the hum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instrumentalism
In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting phenomena. According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. Scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict ''observations'' in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow ''explain'' these laws. Instrumentalism is a perspective originally introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906.Roberto Torretti, ''The Philosophy of Physics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)pp. 242–43 "Like Whewell and Mach, Duhem was a practicing scientist who devoted an important part of his adult life to the history and philosophy of p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Stich
Stephen P. Stich (born May 9, 1943) is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, ''From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief'', received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book ''Deconstructing the Mind''. Education and career Stich was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania from 1960–1964 where he was a member of the Philomathean Society. He received his BA in 1964 (''Summa Cum Laude'' with distinction in Philosophy). He did graduate work at Princeton University from 1964–1968, receiving his PhD in 1968 under the direction of Paul Benacerraf and Gilbert Harman. He has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfect Rationality
The term ''Homo economicus'', or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively defined ends optimally. It is a word play on ''Homo sapiens'', used in some economic theories and in pedagogy. In game theory, ''Homo economicus'' is often modelled through the assumption of perfect rationality. It assumes that agents always act in a way that maximize utility as a consumer and profit as a producer, and are capable of arbitrarily complex deductions towards that end. They will always be capable of thinking through all possible outcomes and choosing that course of action which will result in the best possible result. The rationality implied in ''Homo economicus'' does not restrict what sort of preferences are admissible. Only naive applications of the ''Homo economicus'' model assume that agents know what is best for their long-term physical and mental health. For example, an agent's u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qualia
In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '' quālis'' () meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific this particular apple now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of ''pain'' of a headache, the ''taste'' of wine, as well as the ''redness'' of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that ''qualia'' was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical Zombie
A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have consciousness, conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience. Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and Functionalism (philosophy of mind), functionalism. These arguments aim to resist the possibility of any physicalist solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, What is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blockhead Argument
Blockhead is the name of a theoretical computer system invented as part of a thought experiment by philosopher Ned Block, which appeared in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism". Block did not name the computer in the paper. Overview In "Psychologism and Behaviorism," Block argues that the internal mechanism of a system is important in determining whether that system is intelligent and claims to show that a non-intelligent system could pass the Turing test. Block asks us to imagine a conversation lasting any given amount of time. He states that given the nature of language, there are a finite number of syntactically- and grammatically-correct sentences that can be used to start a conversation. Consequently, there is a limit to how many "sensible" responses can be made to the first sentence, then to the second sentence, and so on until the conversation ends. Block then asks the reader to imagine a computer which had been programmed with all the sentences in theory, if not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hard And Soft Science
Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity. Roughly speaking, the formal sciences & natural sciences are considered "hard", whereas the social sciences are usually described as "soft". Precise definitions vary, but features often cited as characteristic of hard science include producing testable predictions, performing controlled experiments, relying on quantifiable data and mathematical models, a high degree of accuracy and objectivity, higher levels of consensus, faster progression of the field, greater explanatory success, cumulativeness, replicability, and generally applying a purer form of the scientific method. A closely related idea (originating in the nineteenth century with Auguste Comte) is that scientific disciplines can be arranged into a hierarchy of hard to soft on the basis of factors such as rigor, "development", and whether they are basic or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Marr (neuroscientist)
David Courtenay Marr (19 January 1945 – 17 November 1980) from the ''International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences'', by Shimon Edelman and Lucia M. Vaina; published 2001-01-08; archived at ; retrieved 2021-07-21 was a British and physiologist. Marr integrated results from , |
Zenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn (; 25 August 1937–6 December 2022) was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He also continued to develop his visual indexing theory (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. Early life and education Pylyshyn was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He obtained a degree in Engineering Physics (BEng 1959) from McGill University and in control systems (MSc 1960) and experimental psychology (PhD 1963), both from the Regina Campus, University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. Ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Newell
Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert A. Simon). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition. Early studies Newell completed his Bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford in 1949. He was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1949–1950, where he did mathematics. Due to his early exposure to an unknown field known as game theory and the experiences from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer a combination of exper ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence. History Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
