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135 pages

English

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Analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists have long argued that the mind is a computer-like syntactical engine, and that all human mental capacities can be described as digital computational processes. This book presents an alternative, naturalistic view of human thinking, arguing that computers are merely sophisticated machines. Computers are only simulating thought when they crunch symbols, not thinking. Human cognition - semantics, de re reference, indexicals, meaning and causation - are all rooted in human experience and life. Without life and experience, these elements of discourse and knowledge refer to nothing. And without these elements of discourse and knowledge, syntax is vacant structure, not thinking.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Philosophy of mind

Artificial intelligence

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	17 juin 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845405861
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1124€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title page
The Structure of Thinking
A Process-Oriented Account of Mind
Laura E. Weed

Copyright page
Copyright © Laura E. Weed, 2003
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
other titles of interest:
www.imprint-academic.com

Introduction
In the introduction to Reclaiming Cognition, Raphael Núñez and Walter J. Freeman claim that a revolution is taking place in the understanding of what a human mind is and how it works. Núñez and Freeman observe:
We believe that the cognitive sciences have reached a situation in which they have been frozen into one narrow form by the machine metaphor. There is a need to thaw that form and move from a reductionist, atemporal, disembodied, static, rationalist, emotion- and culture-free view, to fundamentally richer understandings that include the primacy of action, intention, emotion, culture, real-time constraints, real-world opportunities, and the peculiarities of living bodies. [1]
The Structure of Thinking is a book dedicated to developing some aspects of the fundamentally richer philosophy of thinking that Núñez and Freeman are seeking.
This book has had a very long genesis. The oldest section is chapter ten, ‘The Third Man’, which originated as my master’s thesis, supervised by Dr. José Benardete at Syracuse University in 1979. That chapter was re-written and folded into my doctoral dissertation, which also included the rest of the chapters, except for the current chapter four, ‘Cognitive Science on Kausation Rather Than Causation’ which is completely new. I received the doctorate from Syracuse University in 1992, under the direction of Dr. Stuart Thau, to whom I owe many thanks for his guidance and assistance. But chapters nine, ‘The Relation between X-type and Y-type Thinking Processes’, and eleven, ‘Is Platonic Heaven all that Pure?’ have been substantially re-written, as well, and are more new than recycled.
Despite the age of some of the arguments in The Structure of Thinking, I suspect that most of the Imprint Academic audience will still not have seen either them or anything like them. This is so because the form of philosophical inquiry, driven by the machine metaphor, to which Núñez and Freeman referred in my opening quotation, has completely dominated philosophical inquiry, at least in the prestigious universities and journals in the United States, for all of the time period over which these arguments have been in existence. I believe it is important to publish these arguments at this time, and I am most grateful to Keith Sutherland at Imprint Academic for giving me the opportunity to do so, for at least three reasons.
First, I believe the arguments in this book indicate that the twentieth century underpinnings of the logical and mechanical reductivist program in philosophy are basically unsound. The arguments from philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Carl Hempel, J.L. Mackie, Rudolph Carnap, Alan Turing and Gottlob Frege, and from behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, on which dominant philosophers at the end of the century, such as W.V.O. Quine, Daniel Dennett and Fred Dretske have been relying and expanding are basically flawed in their underpinning premises. And even in cases in which the early twentieth century philosophers had it right, their late century followers took some of their arguments in directions that were unsupported by the earlier claims on which they were based. Across the analytical tradition there is a general assumption that a small number of principles, limited to the tools of symbolic logic, computational mathematics, and experimental science, (construed on an early-twentieth century paradigm), are adequate to explain all that exists, and that any purported existents that are not analyzable in terms compatible with those few methods of analysis are fictitious and dispensable entities. Blindness to the need for first-person experience to understand reality, even in science, math and logic, let alone in respects such as language use and understanding of brains and minds has resulted from this devout reverence for too few principles of understanding. The arguments in this book point out some of the flaws and multiple areas of blindness of the dominant but narrow philosophical methodology in the United States, today.
Second, and more specifically, the mechanistic notion of causation with which the dominant tradition has intellectually shackled itself is preventing productive advances in a number of areas of inquiry which I find particularly important - such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion and philosophical inquiry into understanding the social behavior of human beings in politics and economics.
Third, I believe now is a good time to bring the philosophical arguments in The Structure of Thinking to the foreground in public intellectual life, because the extensive research on the brain and in the neurosciences that is taking place at present is indicating that the flaws in the logical and mechanical reductivist methodology that I pointed out, starting more than twenty years ago, are seriously hampering the development of new understandings about humans and our world. The genesis of the Journal of Consciousness Studies , the importance of David Chalmers’ arguments in favour of panpsychism, and the recent development of research methodologies for studying first and second person experience, all indicate that the time is ripe for an intellectual re-examination of the experiential roots of human intellectual life. This book undertakes that task.
I would like to thank my many mentors without whose guidance, assistance and advice this book would not have come to fruition. First of all, I would like to thank my parents, Peter and Loretta Van Buren, for their patience, support and encouragement with my philosophical obsession, which they never quite understood. In addition, I would like to thank my many mentors at Syracuse University, but especially, Stuart Thau, and José Benardete, who mentored me through my dissertation and master’s thesis, respectively, and Clyde Hardin, and Ted Denise, of the Philosophy Department who also served on my dissertation committee. I would also like to thank my colleagues and mentors at SUNY Empire State College, especially John Spissinger, Dora Ingolfsdottir, Mike Andolina, and Mike Fortunato, and my colleagues at the College of St. Rose, especially, Bruce Johnston, Jeannie Wiley, Jeffrey Marlett, Steve Strazza, Kate Cavanaugh, Ben Clansy Melissa Clarke and David McCarthy.
The administration of the College of St. Rose, especially President Mark Sullivan and Vice President Bill Lowe deserve special thanks for supporting my sabbatical leave for the 2002-2003 academic year. And, of course, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Keith Sutherland at Imprint Academic, for his suggestions, edits and patience in the preparation of this text for publication.
Laura Weed
The College of St. Rose
September, 2002

1 Raphael Núñez and Walter J. Freeman, eds., Reclaiming Cognition, the primacy of action, intention and emotion. Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK, 1999, p. ix.

1: Mental Activity and Computation
Marking off the areas of mental activity for which a computational analysis is not appropriate
Argument for the Need for a Non-Computational Analysis of Sensory, Experiental and Existential Phenomena
Among cognitive scientists and researchers in artificial intelligence are some who still argue for what John Searle calls ‘strong AI’. [1] This is a strong thesis that claims that the workings of a computer constitute a model of the workings of a mind, and that a mind is just a biochemical computer. According to this thesis, brain ‘wet ware’ and computer hardware are the same type of thing, which can be instantiated in either a biochemical or silicon chip medium.
For these claims to be true, the brain’s operations must parallel the structure of the symbolic logic system with which computers are programmed, and must have many of the same functional and operational properties as a logical system. For example, the brain must be primarily a computational device that calculates mathematical and symbolic functions, if strong AI is to maintain its claims. While I think that artificial intelligence research has brought impressive insights and progress to recent study about the mind, there are certain features of mental operation that I think can be better explained. Certainly, much of the operation of a mind is computational and does operate as a symbol manipulator, in the way that advocates of strong AI claim. But I shall argue in this book that there are many key features of thinking that can be better understood in another way.
At the outset, I might indicate the direction that my analysis will take by pointing out that I think that the proponents of strong AI are concentrating on the products of thinking; the propositionally structured mental representations that might be said to be the objects of a knower’s knowledge. I will concentrate, instead, on the processes whereby knowledge is generated by a knower. Thinking is, after all, an activity.
I propose an analysis of thinking that considers its structure to be that of an interactive relationship between a knower and his or her world. Since Aristotle’s time, a