Universal Grammar and Philosophy of Mind

2016 ◽  
pp. 36-60
Author(s):  
Wolfram Hinzen
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Anomalous Monism ◽  
Eliminative Materialism ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship between universal grammar and the philosophy of mind. It first provides an overview of the philosophy of mind, focusing on its basic metaphysical orientation as well as its concern with mental states. It then considers some basic paradigms in the philosophy of mind and what generative grammar had to contribute to these paradigms, which include behaviourism, eliminative materialism, anomalous monism, instrumentalism, and functionalism. It also discusses what we might call the ‘philosophy of generative grammar,’ and especially foundational assumptions in generative grammar, and examines what the linguistic contribution to the philosophy of mind has been. The article concludes by reflecting on the future and outlining current visions for where and how linguistics might prove to have a transformative influence on philosophy.

Naturalizzazione, mente e conoscenza

2009 ◽  
pp. 151-186
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Zanet
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
Anomalous Monism ◽  
Proper Consideration ◽  
The Way

- A controversial issue regarding Quine's naturalised epistemology is that it may involve some form of reductionism. This article focuses on one of these forms, analysing the interplay of his philosophy of mind and epistemology. It aims to show that if we take into proper consideration the way in which the version of anomalous monism embraced affects his conception of mental states like sensations and propositional attitudes, Quine's philosophy of mind should be regarded as anti-reductionist. Through a discussion of his theory of perception, I try to argue that what is entailed by it is, in a sense only partially accepted by Quine himself, that neither perception nor observational language can be strictly reduced to their stimulatory conditions. By pointing out the relevance that Quine attributes to the mechanism of empathy as a means for ascribing propositional attitudes, a further interesting argument is provided to underline that, within a naturalized epistemology, there is room for a non-reductive description of mind in some ways close to the results of the hermeneutic tradition.

Who’s Afraid of Supervenient Laws?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Mcintyre
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Anomalous Monism ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Epistemological Break ◽  
The Many ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Shed Light

OVER THE LAST FEW decades there has been much debate in the philosophy of science over the attractiveness–and potential costs–of supervenience. As philosophers well know, supervenience burst onto the scene as the “Davidson debate” in the philosophy of mind began to raise some provocative questions over whether it was desirable to think of mental events as in some way irreducible to physical events, while still being firmly rooted in material dependence. After some initial misunderstanding over the question of whether supervenience was committing us to a sort of ontological break between the mental and the physical, it was finally settled that the autonomy one was after need not be metaphysical; an epistemological break would do just fine. After this the merits of supervenience could be clearly considered, for it allowed one to have it “both ways” in the dispute over mental states: mental explanations could be epistemically autonomous from physical ones (and thus probably not reducible to them), even while one preserved the notion of the ontological dependence of the mental on the physical (thus avoiding any embarrassing entanglements in supernatural or other spiritually based accounts of causal influence). Davidson himself, of course, never really bought into the non-reductive materialist craze that he started, preferring to champion his own idiosyncratic view of anomalous monism, which allowed the mental to continue to exist as irreducible, even while he gave it no causal or explanatory work to do. Since then Jaegwon Kim—the person who has done most to shed light on Davidson’s view and demonstrate how the concept of supervenience could recast it as a more legitimate contender among the many proposals on the merits of non-reductive materialism—has appeared to repudiate his own earlier views about explanation and now wholeheartedly endorses a type of physicalist-based account that is even more conservative than Davidson’s. In his recent work, Kim has argued not only for the elimination of any mentally based causal descriptions (or laws) of human behavior, but also seems to call into question the very idea that in pursuing scientific explanation we need to pay much attention to secondary-level descriptions.

scholarly journals The dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience: what does philosophy of mind say?

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elie Cheniaux ◽  
Carlos Eduardo de Sousa Lyra
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Eliminative Materialism ◽  
Brain States ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Objective: To briefly review how the main monist and dualist currents of philosophy of mind approach the mind-body problem and to describe their association with arguments for and against a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.Methods: The literature was reviewed for studies in the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.Results: Some currents are incompatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neurosciences: interactionism and psychophysical parallelism, because they do not account for current knowledge about the brain; epiphenomenalism, which claims that the mind is a mere byproduct of the brain; and analytical behaviorism, eliminative materialism, reductive materialism and functionalism, because they ignore subjective experiences. In contrast, emergentism claims that mental states are dependent on brain states, but have properties that go beyond the field of neurobiology.Conclusions: Only emergentism is compatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

A Meta-Analysis of Interviews and Cognitive Ability

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip L. Roth ◽  
Allen I. Huffcutt
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Incremental Validity ◽  
Employment Interviews ◽  
Moderator Analysis ◽  
The Future ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
The Relationship

The topic of what interviews measure has received a great deal of attention over the years. One line of research has investigated the relationship between interviews and the construct of cognitive ability. A previous meta-analysis reported an overall corrected correlation of .40 ( Huffcutt, Roth, & McDaniel, 1996 ). A more recent meta-analysis reported a noticeably lower corrected correlation of .27 ( Berry, Sackett, & Landers, 2007 ). After reviewing both meta-analyses, it appears that the two studies posed different research questions. Further, there were a number of coding judgments in Berry et al. that merit review, and there was no moderator analysis for educational versus employment interviews. As a result, we reanalyzed the work by Berry et al. and found a corrected correlation of .42 for employment interviews (.15 higher than Berry et al., a 56% increase). Further, educational interviews were associated with a corrected correlation of .21, supporting their influence as a moderator. We suggest a better estimate of the correlation between employment interviews and cognitive ability is .42, and this takes us “back to the future” in that the better overall estimate of the employment interviews – cognitive ability relationship is roughly .40. This difference has implications for what is being measured by interviews and their incremental validity.

Using the alveograph in developing requirements for the quality of flour for wafer sheet production

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (12) ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
E.P. Meleshkina ◽  
◽  
S.N. Kolomiets ◽  
A.S. Cheskidova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Rheological Properties ◽  
Quality Indicators ◽  
Wheat Flour ◽  
Mathematical Statistics ◽  
Intended Purpose ◽  
The Future ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Objectively and reliably determined indicators of rheological properties of the dough were identified using the alveograph device to create a system of classifications of wheat and flour from it for the intended purpose in the future. The analysis of the relationship of standardized quality indicators, as well as newly developed indicators for identifying them, differentiating the quality of wheat flour for the intended purpose, i.e. for finished products. To do this, we use mathematical statistics methods.

Editor’s Pick: Regulatory and Ethical Issues in the New Era of Radiomics and Radiogenomics

EMJ Radiology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Pesapane
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Medical Images ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Innovative Technology ◽  
New Era ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
Disease Characteristics ◽  
The Future ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

Radiomics is a science that investigates a large number of features from medical images using data-characterisation algorithms, with the aim to analyse disease characteristics that are indistinguishable to the naked eye. Radiogenomics attempts to establish and examine the relationship between tumour genomic characteristics and their radiologic appearance. Although there is certainly a lot to learn from these relationships, one could ask the question: what is the practical significance of radiogenomic discoveries? This increasing interest in such applications inevitably raises numerous legal and ethical questions. In an environment such as the technology field, which changes quickly and unpredictably, regulations need to be timely in order to be relevant.  In this paper, issues that must be solved to make the future applications of this innovative technology safe and useful are analysed.

The role and relationship of mindreading and social attunement in HRI – position statements of interdisciplinary researchers. Workshop HRI'20

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio & Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.

Considering Others’ Mental States Causally Increases Feelings of Social Bonding and Information Sharing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Baek ◽  
Diana Tamir ◽  
Emily B. Falk
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Health News ◽  
Brain Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Share Information ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Mentalizing System

Information sharing is a ubiquitous social behavior. What causes people to share? Mentalizing, or considering the mental states of other people, has been theorized to play a central role in information sharing, with higher activity in the brain’s mentalizing system associated with increased likelihood to share information. In line with this theory, we present novel evidence that mentalizing causally increases information sharing. In three pre-registered studies (n = 400, 840, and 3500 participants), participants who were instructed to consider the mental states of potential information receivers indicated higher likelihood to share health news compared to a control condition where they were asked to reflect on the content of the article. Certain kinds of mentalizing were particularly effective; in particular, considering receivers’ emotional and positive mental states, led to the greatest increase in likelihood to share. The relationship between mentalizing and sharing was mediated by feelings of closeness with potential receivers. Mentalizing increased feelings of connectedness to potential receivers, and in turn, increased likelihood of information sharing. Considering receivers’ emotional, positive, and inward-focused mental states was most effective at driving participants to feel closer with potential receivers and increase sharing. Data provide evidence for a causal relationship between mentalizing and information sharing and provide insight about the mechanism linking mentalizing and sharing. Taken together, these results advance theories of information sharing and shed light on previously observed brain-behavior relationships.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document