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Phenomenal Concept Strategy
The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) is an approach within philosophy of mind to provide a physicalist response to anti-physicalist arguments like the explanatory gap and philosophical zombies. The name was coined by Daniel Stoljar. As David Chalmers put it, PCS "locates the gap in the relationship between our ''concepts'' of physical processes and our ''concepts'' of consciousness, rather than in the relationship between physical processes and consciousness themselves." The idea is that if we can explain why we ''think'' there's an explanatory gap, this will defuse the motivation to question physicalism. Overview PCS advocates typically subscribe to what Chalmers has called "type-B materialism", which holds that there is an epistemic but not ontological gap between physics and subjective experience. PCS maintains that our concepts are dualistic, but reality is monistic, in a similar way as "heat" and "molecular motion" are two different concepts that refer to the same property. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophy Of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.Siegel, S.: ''The Contents of Visual Experience''. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.Macpherson, F. & Haddock, A., editors, ''Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body. Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly. * Duali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Papineau
David Papineau (; born 1947) is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several years at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Robinson College. Biography Papineau received a BSc in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Ian Hacking. He has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is naturalist and realist. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a solution to the problem of intentionality which derives the intentional content of our beliefs from their biological purpose. He is also a defender of the ''a posteriori'' physicalist solution to the mind–body problem. Papineau was elected president of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophy Of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.Siegel, S.: ''The Contents of Visual Experience''. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.Macpherson, F. & Haddock, A., editors, ''Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body. Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly. * Duali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arguments In Philosophy Of Mind
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical perspective. In logic, an argument is usually expressed not in natural language but in a symbolic formal language, and it can be defined as any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others through deductively valid inferences that preserve truth from the premises to the conclusion. This logical perspective on argument is relevant for scientific fields such as mathematics and computer science. Logic is the study of the forms of reasoning in arguments and the development of standards and criteria to evaluate arguments. Deductive arguments can be valid, and the valid ones can be sound: in a valid argument, premisses necessitate the conclusion, even if one or more of the premises is false and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 shop ... [...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 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. 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-it's-like-ness). Proponents of philosophical zomb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Use–mention Distinction
The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of analytic philosophy, according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between a word (or phrase) and it.Devitt and Sterelny (1999) pp. 40–1W.V. Quine (1940) p. 24 Many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention". The distinction can sometimes be pedantic, especially in simple cases where it is obvious. The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated with the word ''cheese'': * ''Use'': Cheese is derived from milk. * ''Mention'': 'Cheese' is derived from (the Anglian variant of) the Old English word ''ċēse'' (). The first sentence is a statement about the substance called "cheese": it ''uses'' the word 'cheese' to refer to that substance. The second is a statement about the word 'cheese' as a signifier: it ''mentions'' the word without ''using'' it to refer to anything other than itself. Note the quotation marks. Grammar In written language, ''menti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Type–token Distinction
The type–token distinction is the difference between naming a ''class'' (type) of objects and naming the individual ''instances'' (tokens) of that class. Since each type may be exemplified by multiple tokens, there are generally more tokens than types of an object. For example, the sentence " A rose is a rose is a rose" contains three word types: three word tokens of the type ''a'', three word tokens of the type ''rose'', and two word tokens of the type ''is''. The distinction is important in disciplines such as logic, linguistics, metalogic, typography, and computer programming. Overview The type–token distinction separates ''types'' (abstract descriptive concepts) from ''tokens'' (objects that instantiate concepts). For example, in the sentence "''the bicycle is becoming more popular''" the word ''bicycle'' represents the abstract concept of bicycles, and is thus a type, whereas in the sentence "''the bicycle is in the garage''", it represents a particular object, and is ther ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Carruthers (philosopher)
Peter Carruthers (; born 16 June 1952) is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, an associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, and a member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences. Education Before he moved to the University of Maryland in 2001, Carruthers was professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where he founded and directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies and prior to that was a lecturer at University of Essex, Queen's University of Belfast, University of St. Andrews, and University of Oxford. He was educated at the University of Leeds before studying for his D.Phil at University of Oxford under Michael Dummett. Philosophical work Carruthers' primary research interests are in philosophy of mind, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pathetic Fallacy
The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. The British cultural critic John Ruskin coined the term in the third volume of his work ''Modern Painters'' (1856). History of the phrase Ruskin coined the term ''pathetic fallacy'' to attack the sentimentality that was common to the poetry of the late 18th century, and which was rampant among poets including Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Wordsworth supported this use of personification based on emotion by claiming that "objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them . . . but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects." However Tennyson, in his own poetry, began to refine and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knowledge Argument
The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual human perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color. The experiment is intended to argue against physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical. The debate that emerged following its publication became the subject of an edited volume—''There's Something About Mary'' (2004)—which includes replies from such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, and Paul Churchland. Thought experiment Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Physicalist
In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" ( dualism) or "many-substance" ( pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with advancements of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law). According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers, but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. Neuroplasticity has been used as an argument in support of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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