Links
Brown's aim, narrowly, is to engage Ron Giere's claim that distributed cognition counts as cognitive in virtue of having individual doxastic states among its outputs. His argument, by way of Wilfred Sellars and Paul Churchland, is to argue that the model of individual doxastic states itself elides all the material and social distribution that necessarily contribute to doxastic states.
In my own work, I've argued for a thin conception of d-cog according to which "an activity is d-cog if (1) the task is such that it would count as cognition if it were carried out entirely in a single mind or brain, and (2) the process by which the task is carried out is not enclosed within the boundary of a single organism."
Brown's argument seems to open up this objection to my conception: Belief and knowledge are never and could never be entirely in a single mind or brain. As such, it seems false that they would "would count as cognition if... carried out entirely in a single mind or brain". At best, it's undefined as to whether they would.
I find both my own conception and Brown's argument plausible. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
[ 1 comment ] ( 8961 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Janet Stemwedel is now a contributor at Forbes on topics of ethics and the social structure of science.
Janet started her blog "Adventures in Ethics and Science" back in 2005. It moved to the professional Science Blogs network and then to Scientopia. Her blog "Doing Good Science" ran at Scientific American until they changed the editorial vision for their blog network at the end of last year.
2005 was an auspicious year to begin a philosophy blog. *ahem* And her previous blogs had cool banners.
[ add comment ] ( 2689 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Another scrap uncovered while moving.
Vocatively, you can use "dude" to a woman because it's in this weird in-between space.
[ add comment ] ( 2442 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Another scrap of paper unearthed by the process of moving.
All of the fictional parts of this story are made up, because that is what it means to be fictional. All of the true parts correctly describe the world as it really is, because that is what it means to be true. What more would you expect? These are words, and they mean what they mean.
Things are never so simple (one might object) because meanings themselves are complex things produced by the give-and-take of language. Meanings are produced by talk and by books, as much as talk and books depend on language. What words mean depend on how we use them. Reality is not like that -- what a stone is and how much it weighs do not depend on how we use it.
I'm not sure when I wrote this, exactly. Perhaps it's a section of Philosophical Investigations in the possible world where Wittgenstein was a novelist.
[ add comment ] ( 2518 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
I'm in the process of moving, which means that I'm sorting through scraps of paper that accumulated in my office. Some of these are short ideas which I kept because I'm fond of them. Rather than throw them away or retain them as clutter in the new office, I'm sticking a pin in them by posting them here.
It's as if, every time someone drew a picture of their father, they drew Ronald McDonald without realizing that there were other options.
Years ago, I was thinking about writing a paper about the then-ubiquitous computer font Comic Sans. I was not going to complain that it's ugly, because some people have bad taste and so disagree. Instead, I was going to argue that Comic Sans reflected a kind of alienation. People use a standard font like Times or Helvetica when they want to be serious and official. When they use a handwriting font or something else non-standard, they mean to be injective levity and personality into the thing they're typing up. But Comic Sans, precisely because it's ubiquitous, is not personal or expressive at all.
The invitation to Das Man's birthday party is written in Comic Sans.
[ add comment ] ( 2746 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
<<First <Back | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | Next> Last>>