The Elm and the Expert

The Elm and the Expert

Author: Jerry A. Fodor

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1995-08-28

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9780262560931

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Written in a highly readable, irreverent style, The Elm and the Expert provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. Bound to be widely read and much discussed, The Elm and the Expert, written in Jerry Fodor's usual highly readable, irreverent style, provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. The book extends and revises a view of the relation between mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book, The Language of Thought. There is a general consensus among philosophers that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. Fodor has himself espoused this view in previous publications, and it is widespread (if tacit) throughout the cognitive science community. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus. Fodor concludes that these considerations are far less decisive than has been supposed. He offers a theory sketch in which psychological explanation is intentional, psychological processes are computational, and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential. Connections with the problem of "naturalizing" intentionality are also explored. The four lectures in The Elm and the Expert were originally delivered in Paris in the spring of 1993 to inaugurate the Jean Nicod Lecture series. The Jean Nicod Lectures are delivered annually by a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The 1993 lectures marked the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1931). The lectures are sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as part of its effort to develop the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science in France. Jean Nicod series


What's Within?

What's Within?

Author: Fiona Cowie

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2003-01-30

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780195159783

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This work reconsiders the influential nativist position towards the mind. It claims that the view that certain skills are hardwired into the brain is mistaken, arguing that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different - and probably inconsistent - theses.


Fodor

Fodor

Author: Mark J. Cain

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0745665969

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Jerry Fodor is one of the most important philosophers of mind in recent decades. He has done much to set the agenda in this field and has had a significant influence on the development of cognitive science. Fodor's project is that of constructing a physicalist vindication of folk psychology and so paving the way for the development of a scientifically respectable intentional psychology. The centrepiece of his engagement in this project is a theory of the cognitive mind, namely, the computational theory of mind, which postulates the existence of a language of thought. Fodor: Language, Mind and Philosophy is a comprehensive study of Fodor's writings. Individual chapters are devoted to each of the major issues raised by his work and contain extensive discussion of his relationships to key developments in cognitive science and to the views of such philosophical luminaries as Dennett, Davidson and Searle. This accessible book will appeal to advanced level undergraduate students of philosophy and related disciplines. It will also be of great interest to professional philosophers and cognitive scientists.


Proceedings

Proceedings

Author: Michel Verleysen

Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 2875870157

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Programming Elm

Programming Elm

Author: Jeremy Fairbank

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

Published: 2019-07-02

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1680507176

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Elm brings the safety and stability of functional programing to front-end development, making it one of the most popular new languages. Elm's functional nature and static typing means that run-time errors are nearly impossible, and it compiles to JavaScript for easy web deployment. This book helps you take advantage of this new language in your web site development. Learn how the Elm Architecture will help you create fast applications. Discover how to integrate Elm with JavaScript so you can update legacy applications. See how Elm tooling makes deployment quicker and easier. Functional programming offers safer applications with decreased runtime errors, but functional solutions that are type safe and easy to use have been hard to find, until the Elm language. Elm has the benefits of functional languages while compiling to JavaScript. This book provides a complete tutorial for the Elm language, starting with a simple static application that introduces Elm syntax, modules, and the virtual DOM, to exploring how to create a UI using functions. See how Elm handles the issues of state in functional languages. You'll continue to build up larger applications involving HTTP requests for communication. Integrate your Elm applications with JavaScript so you can update legacy applications or take advantage of JavaScript resources. Elm also provides built-in tooling to alleviate the tooling creep that's so common in JavaScript. This book covers Elm's deployment and testing tools that ease development confusion. Dive into advanced concepts including creating single-page applications, and creating performance improvements. Elm expert Jeremy Fairbank brings his years of web development experience to teaching how to use Elm for front-end development. Your web UIs will be faster, safer, and easier to develop with Elm and this tutorial. What You Need: You will need the latest version of Elm, 0.19, along with a browser to run the examples in this book.


Reading McDowell

Reading McDowell

Author: Nicholas Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 113461604X

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Internationally renowned contributors analyse and discuss John McDowell's challenging Mind and World. Concludes with responses from McDowell himself. An important contribution to analytic philosophy and the broader philosophical debate.


Mental Symbols

Mental Symbols

Author: P. Novak

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9401156328

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Mental Symbols is an essay on mind and meaning, on the biological implementation of mental symbols, on the architecture of mind, and on the correct construal of logical properties and relations of symbols, including implication and inference. The book argues against the main contemporary trends in the cognitive sciences, preferring rather the classical early-modern tradition. The author looks at some logical paradoxes in the light of that tradition, and offers a novel answer to the problem of the biological implementation of the mind in the brain.


Consciousness Revisited

Consciousness Revisited

Author: Michael Tye

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-08-19

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0262516632

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Four major puzzles of consciousness philosophical materialism must confront after rejecting the phenomenal concept strategy. We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called "the phenomenal-concept strategy," which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences. In Consciousness Revisited, the philosopher Michael Tye, until now a proponent of the the phenomenal-concept strategy, argues that the strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. Tye points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? Tye presents solutions to these puzzles—solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal-concept strategy. In doing so, he discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists.


Seeing and Saying

Seeing and Saying

Author: Berit Brogaard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 019088018X

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Imagine you are sitting at Starbuck glancing at the blue coffee mug in front of you. The mug is blue on the outside, white on the inside. It's large for a mug. And it's nearly full of freshly made coffee. In the envisaged case, you see all those aspects of the scene in front of you, but it remains a question of ferocious debate whether the visual experience that makes up your seeing is a direct “perceptual” relation between you and your environment or a psychology state that has a content that represents the mug. If your experience involves an external “perceptual” relation to an external, mind-independent object, it is unlike familiar mental states such as belief and desire states, which are widely considered psychological states with a representational content that stands between you and the external world. Your belief that the coffee mug in front of you is blue has a content that represents the coffee mug as being blue. Your desire that the coffee in the mug is still hot has a content that represents a state of affairs that may or may not in fact obtain, namely the state of affairs that the coffee in the mug is still hot. In this book, Brit Brogaard defends the view that visual experience is like belief in having a representational content. Her defense differs from most previous defenses of this view in that it begins by looking at the language of ordinary speech. She provides a linguistic analysis of what we say when we say that things look a certain way or that the world appears to us to be a certain way. She then argues that this analysis can be used to argue for the view that visual experience has a representation content that mediates between you and the world when you visually perceive.