Philosophy of Mind

03 Oct 1994 12:02

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The academic discpline formerly known as philosophical psychology. Not quite the same thing as cognitive science, or neuroscience, or even artificial intelligence; unless the philosopher of mind decides that it is, and polemicizes accordingly.

See also: Connectionism; Dynamics and Cognition

Recommended:
• David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind [Revision of his doctoral thesis, which is online someplace]
• Daniel Dennett, especially Consciousness Explained
• Clark Glymour
  • "Silicon Reflections", phil-sci/141
  • "A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste", Philosophy of Science 66 (1999): 455--471 [An entertaining, and pretty strong, attack on large swathes of contemporary philosophy of mind, by way of a review of Kim's Mind in a Physical World. Concludes: "whether the mechanisms underlying conscious mental states are separable from the mechanisms of purposive action is what matters to our conception of ourselves, and that is an empirical, not a metaphysical, question." PDF reprint]
• Carsten Griesel, "The Type-Token Distinction and the Mind and Brain Sciences", phil-sci/3860
• David Hume
• William James, Principles of Psychology [Online]
• Pete Mandik and Andy Clark, "Selective Representing and World-Making,", Minds and Machines 12 (2002): 383--395 [PDF. I've commented on this paper in my blog.]
• Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories [To be honest, I'm not quite finished with it yet, but unless it takes a drastic turn for the worse in the last few chapters, this is excellent]
• Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy
• Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [While thoroughly wrong-headed in opposing non-behavioristic psychology and mechanistic accounts of the mind, it's at the very least useful to think against, and quite well-written.]

To read:
• Phil Agre, Computation and Human Experience
• Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie, "Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness", Synthese 159 (2007): 475--491 ["an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production."]
• Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction
• Radu J. Bogdan
  • Interprreting Minds
  • Minding Minds: Evolving a Reflexive Mind by Interpreting Others [Blurb]
• Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind [Blurb. "Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. ... [A]rgues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in this ... examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue."]
• Sue Campbell, Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings
• William J. Clancey, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations
• Andy Clark, Being There
• Murray Clarke, Reconstructing Reason and Representation [Blurb]
• Rodney Cotterill, Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers [Blurb]
• Stanislas Dehaene (ed.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind
• Owen Flanagan
  • Self-Expressions
  • The Problem of the Soul
• Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • Complexity and the Function of the Mind in Nature
  • "Enviromental Complexity and the Evolution of Cognition" [Summary of Complexity and the Function of the Mind; PDF]
  • "Model-Based Science and the Representational Theory of Mind" [PDF]
• Steven Harnad, "The Symbol Grounding Problem", cs/9906002
• Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages
• Tiago V. Maia and Axel Cleeremans, "Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 397--404 ["Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective attention, working memory and cognitive control involve competition between widely distributed representations. This competition is biased by top-down projections (notably from prefrontal cortex), which can selectively enhance some representations over others. This view has now been implemented in several connectionist models. In this review, we emphasize the relevance of these models to understanding consciousness. Interestingly, the models we review have striking similarities to others directly aimed at implementing 'global workspace theory'. All of these models embody a fundamental principle that has been used in many connectionist models over the past twenty years: global constraint satisfaction."]
• Drew V. McDermott, Mind and Mechanism
• Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
• Ruth Garrett Millikan
  • A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More Mama, more milk, and more mouse
  • Varieties of Meaning
  • White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice
• Thomas W. Polger, Natural Minds [Blurb]
• Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science
• William J. Rapaport, "How Hellen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room", Minds and Machines 16 (2006): 381--436
• Matthias Scheutz, "When Physical Systems Realize Functions...", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 161--196 ["I argue that standard notions of computation together with a 'state-to-state correspondence view of implementation' cannot overcome difficulties posed by Putnam's Realization Theorem and that, therefore, a different approach to implementation is required. The notion 'realization of a function', developed out of physical theories, is then introduced as a replacement for the notional pair, 'computation-implementation'. After gradual refinement, taking practical constraints into account, this notion gives rise to the notion 'digital system' which singles out physical systems that could be actually used, and possibly even built."]
• Kim Sterelny
  • The Representational Theory of Mind: An Introduction
  • Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition
• Patrick Suppes, "Voluntary Motion, Biological Computation, and Free Will", in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling and H. K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, Philosophical Naturalism (Univiersity of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 452--467
• Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind