scholarly journals Internalism and syntax

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matjaž Potrč
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Syntactic Position

The article criticizes the internalist approach to the philosophy of mind. First, it uses Popper's evolutionary grounded thought experiment, to claim that the study of intentional mental states should proceed by accounting far evidence from the surroundings of the organism. Then, the syntactic position in psychological research is presented as being compatible with internalism, as the view that research should be centered on the processes in the organism only. It is then argued that processes inside the organism crucially depend on external factors.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF THE MENTALISTIC LOGIC

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-43
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Petik
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
General Structure ◽  
Formal System ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rational Behavior

Paper deals with philosophical problems of mentalistic logic. Mentalistic logic is a formal system that concentrates on underpinning processes of mental life instead of certain elements of extrinsic rational behavior as most of existing logics (like BDI calculi) do. The project is compared to the existing logics of actions. Mentalistic logic is patually a formal system and partually phenomenological study of human mind. We presume formal signs such as propositions and modal operators refer to mental states and can describe the general structure of mental activity. That is purely the approach of classical phenomenology – the study of experience and its structures. On the other hand the usage of formal logic is a classic analytic philosophy of mind. So the things are getting more complicated when taking in consideration that the initial framework of a study is analytic philosophy and not continental phenomenology. Phenomenology is of different intellectual and methodological tradition than any type of analytic philosophy including analytic philosophy of mind. From that stanpoint it may be said that paper is also interesting as a purely methodological project – it tries to find bridges between phenomenology and philosophy of mind. As for the action logics, mentalistic logic also studies rational behavior but does it on the other lever and often with a different purpose. The main problem in this case is philosophical interpretation of modality. Minor problems include shared content, many leveled self-referential structures and vagueness. The paper also studies brain in a vatt thought experiment as a methodological concept. The research will have implications for philosophy of logic, artificial intelligence and theory of reference.

Interactive Experience and Identification as Predictors of Attributing Responsibility in Video Games

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Nathan Walter ◽  
Yariv Tsfati
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Theoretical Expectation ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
Attributions Of Responsibility ◽  
Violent Video Game ◽  
Grand Theft Auto Iv ◽  
Interactive Experience

Abstract. This study examines the effect of interactivity on the attribution of responsibility for the character’s actions in a violent video game. Through an experiment, we tested the hypothesis that identification with the main character in Grand Theft Auto IV mediates the effect of interactivity on attributions of responsibility for the main character’s antisocial behavior. Using the framework of the fundamental attribution error, we demonstrated that those who actually played the game, as opposed to those who simply watched someone else playing it, identified with the main character. In accordance with the theoretical expectation, those who played the game and came to identify with the main character attributed the responsibility for his actions to external factors such as “living in a violent society.” By contrast, those who did not interact with the game attributed responsibility for the character’s actions to his personality traits. These findings could be viewed as contrasting with psychological research suggesting that respondents should have distanced themselves from the violent protagonist rather than identifying with him, and with Iyengar’s (1991) expectation that more personalized episodic framing would be associated with attributing responsibility to the protagonist.

Dehumanization and Mentalizing Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.J. Kasperbauer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phenomenal States

This chapter applies the psychological account from chapter 3 on how we rank human beings above other animals, to the particular case of using mental states to assign animals moral status. Experiments on the psychology of mental state attribution are discussed, focusing on their implications for human moral psychology. The chapter argues that attributions of phenomenal states, like emotions, drive our assignments of moral status. It also describes how this is significantly impacted by the process of dehumanization. Psychological research on anthropocentrism and using animals as food and as companions is discussed in order to illuminate the relationship between dehumanization and mental state attribution.

Psychology and the New Private Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Law And Economics ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
Normative Models

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the most promising contributions of psychological methods and insights for private law. It focuses on two related domains of psychological research: cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes, which one might shorthand as “thinking.” Social psychology asks about the role of other people—actual, implied, or imagined—on mental states and human behavior. The chapter is oriented around five core psychological insights: calculation, motivation, emotion, social influence, and moral values. Legal scholarship by turns tries to explain legal decision-making, tries to calibrate incentives, and tries to justify its values and its means. Psychology speaks to these descriptive, prescriptive, and normative models of decision-making. The chapter then argues that psychological analysis of legal decision-making challenges the work that the idea of choice and preference is doing in private law, especially in the wake of the law and economics movement.

Materialism in the philosophy of mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
Physical Relation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Mind

Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the ‘raw feel’ of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; ‘aboutness’ seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense. There have been three ways of approaching these problems. The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no ‘raw feels’, no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false. Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour. Finally, the materialist may accept the reality and irreducibility of mind, but claim that it depends on matter in such an intimate way – more intimate than mere causal dependence – that materialism is not threatened by the irreducibility of mind. The first two approaches can be called ‘hard materialism’, the third ‘soft materialism’. The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation. Reductionism’s main difficulty is that there seems to be more to consciousness than its contribution to behaviour: a robotic machine could behave as we do without thinking or feeling. The soft materialist has to explain supervenience in a way that makes the mind not epiphenomenal without falling into the problems of interactionism.

Complexity is a cue to the mind

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-586
Author(s):  
George Kampis
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Dynamical Behavior ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Target Article ◽  
The Mind

The relevance of chaotic itinerancy and other types of exotic dynamical behavior described by Tsuda (2001) certainly goes beyond the scope of his target article. These concepts of dynamics may offer a general framework for the understanding of complexity, which could help to restructure the analysis and conceptualization of mental states in novel ways, providing insights for the philosophy of mind.

Metaphysics of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darragh Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

Philosophy of mind addresses fundamental questions about mental or psychological phenomena. The question held by many to be most fundamental of all is a metaphysical one, often labeled the “mind-body problem,” which concerns the relation between minds and material or physical phenomena. Physicalists (and/or materialists) contend that mental phenomena are physical, or at least that they may be accounted for in terms of physical phenomena (brains, for example). Dualists deny this, maintaining that mental phenomena have fundamentally nonphysical natures, so that to account for minds we must assume the existence of nonphysical substances or properties. Nowadays physicalism is more widely espoused than dualism, but physicalists differ over which physical states/properties should be considered relevant, and over the precise nature of the relation between physical and mental phenomena. This is one of four bibliography entries on the philosophy of mind, and this particular entry concentrates on this metaphysical issue of the relation between mental and physical/material phenomena. Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap between this and topics covered in the other three entries. For example, this entry includes authors who attack physicalism by arguing that it cannot account for the distinctive phenomenal qualities of conscious experiences; but that line of antiphysicalist argument features even more prominently in the entry on consciousness. Moreover, the other entries feature various issues that might perfectly properly be categorized as concerning the metaphysics of mind: for example, the debate between internalists—philosophers who hold that propositional attitudes (mental states such as beliefs and desires, which have representational contents) are intrinsic properties of minds/brains—and externalists, who think of certain attitudes as extrinsic or relational, is surely a question about the metaphysics of mind: but this is discussed in the entry on intentionality instead of here.

Use and misuse of neuroscience in the philosophy of religion

Methodus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-108
Author(s):  
Dieter Birnbacher
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Anthropology Of Religion ◽  
Imaging Studies ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Unconscious Processes ◽  
Intentional Consciousness ◽  
Initial Hypothesis ◽  
Andrew Newberg

The article elucidates in what way neuroscience and in particular neuroimaging can contribute to the clarification and empirical underpinning of theories in the philosophy of mind and the anthropology of religion. Its initial hypothesis is that there are two principal ways in which neuroscientific data are relevant to philosophy, exhibiting the unconscious processes in the generation of phenomenal and intentional consciousness, and complementing semantic and phenomenological approaches in the analysis of complex mental phenomena. Whereas the first kind of relevance is widely recognised, contributions of neuroscientific data to the analysis of complex mental phenomena are often rejected as involving a kind of "category mistake." The article argues that imaging studies can in fact contribute to a better understanding of the nature of certain complex mental states and processes and exemplifies this by recent brain imaging studies on religious experience. Finally, theories like those of Andrew Newberg are taken to task for misrepresenting "neurotheology" as a new form of theology.

Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental Contents

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gualtiero Piccinini
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Inferential Role ◽  
Functional Relations ◽  
Popular View ◽  
Functional Role Semantics ◽  
Mental Contents

Almost no one cites Sellars, while reinventing his wheels with gratifying regularity. (Dennett 1987, 349)In philosophy of mind, there is functionalism about mental states and functionalism about mental contents. The former — mental State functionalism — says that mentalstatesare individuated by their functional relations with mental inputs, Outputs, and other mental states. The latter — usually called functional or conceptual or inferential role semantics — says that mentalcontentsare constituted by their functional relations with mental inputs, Outputs, and other mental contents (and in some versions of the theory, with things in the environment). If we add to mental State functionalism the popular view that mental states have their content essentially, then mental state functionalism may be seen as a form of functional role semantics and a solution to theproblem of mental content,namely, the problem of giving a naturalistic explanation of mental content. According to this solution, the functional relations that constitute contents are physically realized — in a metaphysically unmysterious way — by the functional relations between mental inputs, outputs, and the mental states bearing those contents.

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