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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Michael Wheeler: Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step, Leslie Marsh Jan 2007

Michael Wheeler: Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

Michael Wheeler is the latest in a new wave of philosophical theorists that fall within a loose coalition of anti-representationalism (or anti-Cartesianism): Dynamical –, Embodied –, Extended –, Distributed –, and Situated –, theories of cognition (DEEDS an apt acronym). Against this background, cognition for Wheeler is, or should be, a more ecumenical concept. This ecumenical approach would still be amenable to making theoretical distinctions, the central one being the notion of offline and online styles of intelligence, a distinction that makes conceptual space for another closely related notion, that of propositional knowledge (knowing that) and tacit knowledge (knowing how).


Dewey: The First Ghost-Buster?, Leslie Marsh Jan 2006

Dewey: The First Ghost-Buster?, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

Ghost-busting, or less colloquially, anti-Cartesianism or non-representationalism, is a loose and internally fluid coalition (philosophical and empirical) comprising Dynamical, Embodied, Extended, Distributed, and Situated (DEEDS) theories of cognition. Gilbert Ryle – DEEDS’ anglophonic masthead [1] – supposedly exorcised the Cartesian propensity to postulate mind as an apparition-like entity somehow situated in the body. Ryle’s behaviouristic recommendation was, that just as we don’t see the wind blowing but only see the trees waving, so too should we conceive intelligence as manifest though action. The Cartesian ghost of old has mutated, taking the form of the ‘Machine in the Machine’, the brain …


Review Of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles To A Science Of Consciousness, Leslie Marsh Jan 2005

Review Of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles To A Science Of Consciousness, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

The question of how a physical system gives rise to the phenomenal or experiential (olfactory, visual, somatosensitive, gestatory and auditory), is considered the most intractable of scientific and philosophical puzzles. Though this question has dominated the philosophy of mind over the last quarter century, it articulates a version of the age-old mind–body problem. The most famous response, Cartesian dualism, is on Daniel Dennett’s view still a corrosively residual and redundant feature of popular (and academic) thinking on these matters. Fifteen years on from his anti-Cartesian theory of consciousness (Consciousness Explained, 1991), Dennett’s frustration with this tradition is still palpable. This …


Who's Afraid Of Multiple Realizability?: Functionalism, Reductionism, And Connectionism, Justin Schwartz Dec 1991

Who's Afraid Of Multiple Realizability?: Functionalism, Reductionism, And Connectionism, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Philosophers have argued that on the prevailing theory of mind, functionalism, the fact that mental states are multiply realizable or can be instantiated in a variety of different physical forms, at least in principle, shows that materialism or physical is probably false. A similar argument rejects the relevance to psychology of connectionism, which holds that mental states are embodied and and constituted by connectionist neural networks. These arguments, I argue, fall before reductios ad absurdam, proving too much -- they apply as well to genes, which are multiply realizable, but the reduction of which to DNA is one the core …