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Psychological Nominalism
Psychological nominalism is the view advanced in Wilfrid Sellars' 1956 paper "Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" (EPM) that explains psychological concepts in terms of public language use. Sellars describes psychological nominalism as the view that “all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness…is a linguistic affair.” Judging solely from the mention in EPM, psychological nominalism would seem to be a form of verbal behaviorism, which holds that ascriptions of psychological states are definitionally equivalent to predictions about behavior. For example, the verbal behaviorist holds that a statement like "John is scared of thunderstorms" is meaningful only insofar as it can be parsed into predictions concerning the sorts of things John is likely to say and/or do in the event of a thunderstorm (i.e. "John will say, or have a propensity to say, "I am scared" when he hears thunder" or "John will hide, or have a propensity to hide, his face when he see ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan (BA, 1933), the University at Buffalo, and Oriel College, Oxford (1934–1937), where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During World War II, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa (1938–1946), the University of Minnesota (1947–1958), Yale University (1958–1963), and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977. He was a founder of the journal ''Philosophical Studies''. Sella ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verbal Behavior
''Verbal Behavior'' is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with terminology invented for the analysis - ''echoics, mands, tacts, autoclitics'' and others - as well as carefully defined uses of ordinary terms such as ''audience''. Origins The origin of ''Verbal Behavior'' was an outgrowth of a series of lectures first presented at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s and developed further in his summer lectures at Columbia and William James lectures at Harvard in the decade before the book's publication. Research Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior drew heavily on methods of literary analysis. This tradition has continued. The book ''Verbal Behavior'' is almost entirely theoretical, involving little experimental research in the work itself. Many research papers and applied extensions based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Falsifiability
Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the Philosophy of science, philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (1934). He proposed it as the cornerstone of a solution to both the problem of induction and the demarcation problem, problem of demarcation. A Scientific theory, theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if it can be ''logically'' contradicted by an empirical test that can potentially be executed with existing technologies. Popper insisted that, as a logical criterion, it is distinct from the related concept "capacity to be proven wrong" discussed in #Falsificationism, Lakatos' falsificationism. Even being a logical criterion, its purpose is to make the theory predictive power, predictive and Testability, testable, thus useful in practice. Popper opposed falsifiability to the intuitively similar concept of Verifiability (science), verifiability. Verifying ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemological Theories
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas: # The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification # Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony # The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs # Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theory Of Mind
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others' mental states may be different from one's own states and include beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts. Possessing a functional theory of mind is considered crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. People use such a theory when analyzing, judging, and inferring others' behaviors. The discovery and development of theory of mind primarily came from studies done with animals and infants. Factors including drug and alcohol consumption, language development, cognitive delays, age, and culture can affect a person's capacity to display theory of mind. It has been proposed that deficits in theory of mind can occur in people with autism (although this is contentious), anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, dysphoria, attention deficit hyperactiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
