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Mind and Cognition: An Anthology
This volume represents a vital resource - a new edition of the highly successful collection of classic and contemporary articles in philosophy of mind and cognition.
630 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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127 people want to read
About the author
William G. Lycan
21 books8 followersWilliam G. Lycan is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was formerly the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 22, 2024
AN EXCELLENT COLLECTION OF WRITINGS ON MIND/BODY ISSUES
Editor William G. Lycan (born 1945) is an American philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina and the University of Connecticut; he has written other books such as 'Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction,' 'Consciousness and Experience,' 'Consciousness,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, "In the past thirty years, the philosophy of mind has seen a massive shift of doctrine, of method, and of perspective. Characteristic of this shift is the unprecedented attention of philosophers of mind to science: not only to psychology and linguistics, but to computer science, evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy as well. As a result, the mind-body problem is now better understood than at any previous point in human history...
"The essays and excerpts collected here are themselves predominantly philosophical... The volume's most distinguished predecessor is Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I/Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II." (Pg. ix) Writings are included by philosophers such as J.B. Watson; Rudolf Carnap; Hilary Putnam; Daniel Dennett; Stephen Stich; Paul Feyerabend; Paul Churchland; Jerry Fodor; Ned Block, as well as Lycan himself.
In the excerpt from Watson's Behaviorism, he states, "The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves. The evidence for this view is largely theoretical but it is the one theory so far advanced which explains thought in terms of natural science." (Pg. 14)
U.T. Place argues in his essay, "The thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dismissed on logical grounds alone. The conditions under which two sets of observations are treated as observations of the same process, rather than as observations of two independent correlated processes, are discussed. It is suggested that we can identify consciousness with a given pattern of brain activity, if we can explain the subject's introspective observations by reference to the brain processes with which they are correlated. It is argued that the problem of providing a physiological explanation of introspective observations is made to seem more difficult than it really is by the 'phenomenological fallacy,' the mistaken idea that descriptions of the appearances of things are descriptions of the actual state of affairs in a mysterious internal environment." (Pg. 29)
Elliott Sober notes, "Functionalism began as a reaction against the identity theory. Functionalism's negative insight was that psychological properties are not type-identical with physical properties. Psychological state types are multiply realizable... But this claim about what psychological states are not had to be supplemented with some positive account of what the nature of psychological states is."
Paul M. Churchland [author of books such as 'The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain'] summarizes, "Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conceptions of psychological phenomena constitute a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience..." (Pg. 206)
Frank Jackson admits, "I am what is sometimes known as a 'qualia freak.' I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes... There are many qualia freaks, and some of them say that their rejection of Physicalism is an unargued intuition. I think that they are being unfair to themselves. They have the following argument. Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose, for instance. Therefore, Physicalism is false." (Pg. 469)
This is an EXTREMELY useful collection, that will be "must reading" for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, or perhaps for those primarily interested in related issues (e.g., cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.)
Editor William G. Lycan (born 1945) is an American philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina and the University of Connecticut; he has written other books such as 'Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction,' 'Consciousness and Experience,' 'Consciousness,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, "In the past thirty years, the philosophy of mind has seen a massive shift of doctrine, of method, and of perspective. Characteristic of this shift is the unprecedented attention of philosophers of mind to science: not only to psychology and linguistics, but to computer science, evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy as well. As a result, the mind-body problem is now better understood than at any previous point in human history...
"The essays and excerpts collected here are themselves predominantly philosophical... The volume's most distinguished predecessor is Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I/Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II." (Pg. ix) Writings are included by philosophers such as J.B. Watson; Rudolf Carnap; Hilary Putnam; Daniel Dennett; Stephen Stich; Paul Feyerabend; Paul Churchland; Jerry Fodor; Ned Block, as well as Lycan himself.
In the excerpt from Watson's Behaviorism, he states, "The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves. The evidence for this view is largely theoretical but it is the one theory so far advanced which explains thought in terms of natural science." (Pg. 14)
U.T. Place argues in his essay, "The thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dismissed on logical grounds alone. The conditions under which two sets of observations are treated as observations of the same process, rather than as observations of two independent correlated processes, are discussed. It is suggested that we can identify consciousness with a given pattern of brain activity, if we can explain the subject's introspective observations by reference to the brain processes with which they are correlated. It is argued that the problem of providing a physiological explanation of introspective observations is made to seem more difficult than it really is by the 'phenomenological fallacy,' the mistaken idea that descriptions of the appearances of things are descriptions of the actual state of affairs in a mysterious internal environment." (Pg. 29)
Elliott Sober notes, "Functionalism began as a reaction against the identity theory. Functionalism's negative insight was that psychological properties are not type-identical with physical properties. Psychological state types are multiply realizable... But this claim about what psychological states are not had to be supplemented with some positive account of what the nature of psychological states is."
Paul M. Churchland [author of books such as 'The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain'] summarizes, "Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conceptions of psychological phenomena constitute a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience..." (Pg. 206)
Frank Jackson admits, "I am what is sometimes known as a 'qualia freak.' I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes... There are many qualia freaks, and some of them say that their rejection of Physicalism is an unargued intuition. I think that they are being unfair to themselves. They have the following argument. Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose, for instance. Therefore, Physicalism is false." (Pg. 469)
This is an EXTREMELY useful collection, that will be "must reading" for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, or perhaps for those primarily interested in related issues (e.g., cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.)
August 8, 2014
I found this incredibly hard. That's all I have to say.
September 24, 2015
A useful if prolonged starting point of classical treatments in the philosophy of consciousness. Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews