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Shit Happens
- Pete Mandik
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In this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.
3 - The Introspectibility of Brain States as Such
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- By Pete Mandik, William Paterson University
- Edited by Brian L. Keeley, Pitzer College, Claremont
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- Paul Churchland
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- 05 June 2012
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- 10 October 2005, pp 66-87
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Summary
Paul Churchland has defended various bold theses throughout his career. Of particular interest to the current chapter is what I shall call Churchland's Introspection Thesis.
A person with sufficient neuroscientific education can introspect his or her brain states as brain states.
Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn't obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn't follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn't follow immediately from the mere fact that some distant object is identical to a horse that we can perceive it as a horse. Further, it isn't obvious that any amount of education would suffice to make some distant speck on the horizon seem like a horse. It may very well be the case that no matter how well we know that some distant speck is a horse; as long as we are sufficiently distant from it we will only be able to see it as a speck. Analogously then, it may very well be the case that no matter how well we know that our mental states are brain states, we will only be able to introspect them as irreducibly mental.
Introduction
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- By Andrew Brook, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Pete Mandik, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator, Cognitive Science Lab, William Paterson University
- Edited by Andrew Brook, Carleton University, Ottawa, Kathleen Akins, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
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- Book:
- Cognition and the Brain
- Published online:
- 02 February 2010
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- 12 September 2005, pp 1-24
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Summary
A small movement dedicated to applying neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and using philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience began 20–25 years ago and has been gaining momentum ever since. The central thought behind it is that certain basic questions about human cognition, questions that have been studied in many cases for millennia, will be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of what contemporary neuroscience is teaching us about how the human brain processes information.
The evidence for this proposition is now overwhelming. The philosophical problem of perception has been transformed by new knowledge about the vision systems in the brain. Our understanding of memory has been deepened by knowing that two quite different systems in the brain are involved in short- and long-term memory. Knowing something about how language is implemented in the brain has transformed our understanding of the structure of language, especially the structure of many breakdowns in language. And so on. On the other hand, a great deal is still unclear about the implications of this new knowledge of the brain. Are cognitive functions localized in the brain in the way assumed by most recent work on brain imaging? Does it even make sense to think of cognitive activity being localized in such a way? Does knowing about the areas active in the brain when we are conscious of something hold any promise for helping with long-standing puzzles about the nature and role of consciousness? And so on.
8 - Action-Oriented Representation
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- By Pete Mandik, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator, Cognitive Science Lab, William Paterson University
- Edited by Andrew Brook, Carleton University, Ottawa, Kathleen Akins, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
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- Book:
- Cognition and the Brain
- Published online:
- 02 February 2010
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2005, pp 284-306
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Summary
Introduction
Often, sensory input underdetermines perception. One such example is the perception of illusory contours. In illusory contour perception, the content of the percept includes the presence of a contour that is absent from the informational content of the sensation. (By “sensation” I mean merely information-bearing events at the transducer level. I intend no further commitment, such as the identification of sensations with qualia.) I call instances of perception underdetermined by sensation “underdetermined perception.”
The perception of illusory contours is just one kind of underdetermined perception (see Figure 8.1). The focus of this chapter is another kind of underdetermined perception: what I shall call “active perception.” Active perception occurs in cases in which the percept, while underdetermined by sensation, is determined by a combination of sensation and action. The phenomenon of active perception has been used by several to argue against the positing of representations in explanations of sensory experience, either by arguing that no representations need be posited or that far fewer than previously thought need be posited. Such views include, but are not limited to, those of J. Gibson (1966, 1986), P. S. Churchland et al. (1994), T. Jarvilehto (1998), and J. O'Regan and A. Noë (2001). In this chapter, I argue for the contrary position that active perception is actually best accounted for by a representational theory of perception. Along the way, this will require a relatively novel conception of what to count as representations.