least this was his later view. He had begun with the more obvious but more naive view that need was the key to the process and that removal of the need ...

But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.

According to the Generality Constraint, mental states with conceptual content must be capable of recombining in certain systematic ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from cognitive science, I argue that so-called analog magnitude states violate this recombinability condition and thus have nonconceptual content. I further argue that this result has two significant consequences: it demonstrates that nonconceptual content seeps beyond perception and infiltrates cognition; and it shows that whether mental states have nonconceptual content is largely an empirical matter determined by the (...) structure of the neural representations underlying them. (shrink)

`This is an exceptionally good textbook. It covers an unusually wide range of issues in an up-to-date and balanced fashion, and is clearly written. It would be invaluable for all students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, who take a genuine interest in the nature of psychology and the theoretical issues it faces' - Professor Graham Richards, Director, British Psychological Society History of Psychology Centre Psychology is understood by many as the `science of the mind', but what is `mind' and what have (...) modern psychology and philosophy to say about its nature? What is `science' and what is a scientific approach to mind? This thoroughly revised edition o the classic textbook explores a wide range of problems in psychology, philosophy, cognitive and brains sciences identifying the major topics, debates and controversies and presenting them in a balanced and accessible manner for students. Key features of this Second Edition include: } A new, ten chapter structure making it ideal for a lecture course; } Contains new content on advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, including neural networks, dynamics systems and situated cognition; } Final chapter focuses on `hot issues' at the interface of psychology and philosophy - making attempts to look forward. } Pedagogical features including chapter summaries and further readings. Brought fully up-to-date with advances in computational, cognitive and neuroscience work on the one hand, and links with philosophy on the other, this book is essential reading for all students needing an understanding of these issues. (shrink)

Philosophy of Psychology: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that includes classic and contemporary readings from leading philosophers. Addressing in depth most major topics within philosophy of psychology, the editor has carefully selected articles under the following headings: pictures of the mind commonsense psychology representation and cognitive architecture Articles by the following philosophers are included: Blackburn, Churchland, Clark, Cummins, Dennett, Davidson, Fodor, Kitcher, Lewis, Lycan, McDowell, McLeod, Rey, Segal, Stich. Each section is includes a helpful introduction by the editor which (...) aims to guide the student gently into the topic. The book is highly accessible and provides a broad-ranging exploration of the subject, including discussion of the leading philosophers in the field. Ideal for any student of philosophy of psychology or philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Philosophy of Psychology i s an introduction to philosophical problems that arise in the scientific study of cognition and behavior. Jose; Luis Bermúdez introduces the philosophy of psychology as an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature and mechanisms of cognition. He charts out four influential "pictures of the mind" and uses them to explore central topics in the philosophical foundations of psychology, covering all the core concepts and themes found in undergraduate courses in philosophy and psychology, including: · Models of psychological (...) explanation · The nature of commonsense psychology · Arguments for the autonomy of psychology · Fuctionalist approaches to cognition · Computational models of the mind · Neural network modeling · Rationality and mental causation · Perception, action and cognition · The language of thought and the architecture of cognition Philosophy of Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction is a very clear and well-structured textbook from one of the leaders in the field. (shrink)

What is the mind? How does it work? How does it influence behavior? Some psychologists hope to answer such questions in terms of concepts drawn from computer science and artificial intelligence. They test their theories by modeling mental processes in computers. This book shows how computer models are used to study many psychological phenomena--including vision, language, reasoning, and learning. It also shows that computer modeling involves differing theoretical approaches. Computational psychologists disagree about some basic questions. For instance, should the mind (...) be modeled by digital computers, or by parallel-processing systems more like brains? Do computer programs consist of meaningless patterns, or do they embody (and explain) genuine meaning? (shrink)

Investigations into inter-level relations in computer science, biology and psychology call for an *empirical* turn in the philosophy of mind. Rather than concentrate on *a priori* discussions of inter-level relations between 'completed' sciences, a case is made for the actual study of the way inter-level relations grow out of the developing sciences. Thus, philosophical inquiries will be made more relevant to the sciences, and, more importantly, philosophical accounts of inter-level relations will be testable by confronting them with what really happens (...) in science. Hence, close observation of the ever-changing reduction relations in the developing sciences, and revision of philosophical positions based on these empirical observations, may, in the long run, be more conducive to an adequate understanding of inter-level relations than a traditional *a priori* approach. (shrink)

What is the relationship between common-sense, or 'folk', psychology and contemporary scientific psychology? Are they in conflict with one another? Or do they perform quite different, though perhaps complementary, roles? George Botterill and Peter Carruthers discuss these questions, defending a robust form of realism about the commitments of folk psychology and about the prospects for integrating those commitments into natural science. Their focus throughout the book is on the ways in which cognitive science presents a challenge to our common-sense self-image (...) - arguing that our native conception of the mind will be enriched, but not overturned, by science. The Philosophy of Psychology is designed as a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate students in philosophy and cognitive science, but as a text that not only surveys but advances the debates on the topics discussed, it will also be of interest to researchers working in these areas. (shrink)

The philosophers of the Hellenistic schools in ancient Greece and Rome (Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Academics, Cyrenaics) made important contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. This volume, which contains the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum, describes and analyses their contributions on issues such as: the nature of perception, imagination and belief; the nature of the passions and their role in action; the relationship between mind and body; freedom and determinism; the role of pleasure as a (...) goal; the effects of poetry on belief and passion. Written with a high level of historical and philosophical scholarship, the essays are intended both for classicists and for specialists interested in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I INTRODUCTION WITTGENSTEIN'S CONCEPTION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY What did Wittgenstein understand by the philosophy of psychology? ...

Translation of: Geist, Gehirn, Verhalten.

Peter Carruthers, a leading philosopher of mind, provides a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, it will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind.

There is a long tradition in philosophy where philosophers attend to the nature, limits, and aspirations of science in general. The increased specialization of scientists themselves, however, has precipitated a parallel development in the philosophy of science. Thus, in addition to general philosophy of science research, it is now common to find philosophers investigating the foundations of particular sciences. Three sciences — physics, biology, and psychology — have received the most attention, as the philosophical issues within these fields have crystallized (...) in a particularly challenging and intriguing way. This is a course in the philosophy of psychology. The aim is not to tell psychologists how to conduct their research, but rather to situate psychology within the wider fabric of intellectual inquiry. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are concerned with the psychology of moral agency. They focus on moral feelings and moral motivation, and seek to understand the operations and origins of these phenomena as rooted in the natural desires and emotions of human beings. An important feature of the essays, and one that distinguishes the book from most philosophical work in moral psychology, is the attention to the writings of Freud. Many of the essays draw on Freud's ideas about conscience and (...) morality, while several explore the depths and limits of Freud's theories. An underlying theme of the volume is a critique of influential rationalist accounts of moral agency. John Deigh shows that one can subject the principles of morality to rational inquiry without thereby holding that reason alone can originate action. (shrink)

MYSTICISM, FREUDIANISM AND SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER I MYSTICISM The term mysticism and its cognate terms mystical and mystic have in popular usage a ...

Repression continues to be controversial. One insight crystallized by the commentaries is that there is a serious semantic problem, partly resulting from a long silence in psychology on repression. In this response, narrow views (e.g., that repression needs always be unconscious, must yield total amnesia) are challenged. Broader conceptions of repression, both biological and social, are considered, with a special stress on repression of meanings (denial). Several issues – generilizability, falsifiability, personality factors, the interaction of repression with cognitive channel (e.g., (...) recall vs. dreams), and false-memory as repression – are discussed. (shrink)

In this commentary, we challenge the claim that Freud's thinking anticipated Bartlettian reconstructive theories of remembering. Erdelyi has ignored important divergences that demonstrate it is not the case that “The constructions and reconstructions of Freud and Bartlett are the same but for motive” (target article, sect. 5).

In this paper, I ask feminist philosophers and science studies scholars to consider the goals of developing critical analyses of evolutionary psychology. These goals can include development of scholarship in feminist philosophy and science studies, mediation of the uptake of evolutionary psychology by other academic and lay communities, and improvement of the practices and products of evolutionary psychology itself. I evaluate ways that some practices of feminist philosophy and science studies facilitate or hinder meeting these goals, and consider the merits (...) of critical engagement with some of the scientists themselves. Finally, I describe a community of feminist evolutionary psychologists with whom it might be both fruitful and interesting to engage, and identify ways that these interactions may benefit the science and the study of the science. (shrink)

Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction ELLEN M. MARKMAN, 1989, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, x+250 pp. Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development FRANK C. KEIL, 1989, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, xv+328 pp.

Approaches to the Study of Man In this chapter we shall distinguish two broad approaches to the study of human behaviour, the natural scientific, ...

Prologue: Toward a new Enlightenment -- From bounded to relational being -- Bounded being -- In the beginning is the relationship -- The relational self -- The body as relationship : emotion, pleasure and pain -- Relational being in everyday life -- Multi-being and the adventure of everyday life -- Bonds, barricades, and beyond -- Relational being in practice -- Knowledge as co-creation -- Education in a relational key -- Therapy as relational recovery -- Organizing : the precarious balance -- (...) From the moral to the sacred -- Beyond moral pluralism -- All our relations, approaching the sacred -- Epilogue: The coming of relational consciousness. (shrink)

Th e con fusion a nd b arren ness o f psycho logy is no t to be e xplain ed b y calling it a “yo ung science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the oth er case, con cep tual co nfusion and m ethod s of pro of.) (...) The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems that trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. (PI p. 232). (shrink)

P. M. S. Hacker 1. The ‘confusion of psychology’ On the concluding page of what is now called ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote..

This paper critiques the rise of scientific approaches to central questions in the humanities, specifically questions about human nature, ethics, identity, and experience. In particular, I look at how an increasing number of philosophers are turning to evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as sources of answers to philosophical problems. This approach constitutes what I term a biological turn in the humanities. I argue that the biological turn, especially its reliance on evolutionary psychology, is best understood as an epistemology of ignorance that (...) contributes to a climate of hostility and intolerance regarding feminist insights about gender, identity, and the body. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION If there is one underlying implication in the following essays it is the inadequacy of the information-processing model for cognitive ...

Horgan and Tienson do a wonderful job of explicating the dynamical system perspective and contrasting that view with classical AI approaches. However, their arguments for replacing a classical conception of connectionism with system dynamics rely on philosophical distinctions that do not make a difference. In particular, (1) their generalized version of Man's three levels of analysis collapses into itself; (2) their description of attractor dynamics works better than their metaphor of forces; and (3) their versions of “soft laws” and physical (...) laws amount to the same thing. (shrink)

This paper serves to introduce the papers from the symposium by the same title, by describing the sort of work done in philosophy of psychology conceived as a branch of the philosophy of science, distinguishing it from other discussions of psychology in philosophy, and criticizing the claims to set limits on scientific psychology in the largely psychologically uninformed literatures concerning "folk psychology' and "wide" and "narrow" content. Philosophy of psychology as philosophy of science takes seriously and analyzes the explanatory structures, (...) conceptual problems, and evidentiary practices of extant scientific psychology. (shrink)

Donald Olding Hebb, referred to by American Psychologist as one of "the 20th century's most eminent and influential theorists in the realm of brain function and behavior," contributes greatly to the understanding of mind and thought in Essays on Mind. His objective was to learn about thought which he considered "the central problem of psychology -- but also, not less important, to learn how to think clearly about thought, which is philosophy." The volume is written for advanced undergraduates, graduates, professionals, (...) and lay people interested in or studying the mind. Hebb offers an increased understanding of the mind from a biological perspective that affects long-standing philosophical and psychological problems. "Psychology and Philosophy were divorced some time ago but, like other divorced couples, they still have problems in common," writes Hebb. The first three chapters establish the methodological and philosophical basis for his biologically centered theory of behavior, including the evolution of the mind, nature versus nurture, the origination and status of cell-assembly theory, and infant thought and language development. He concludes with a discussion of the workings of scientific thought from a practical rather than theoretical perspective. (shrink)

The pre-eminent 19th century British ethicist, Henry Sidgwick once said: "All important ethical notions are also psychological, except perhaps the fundamental antitheses of 'good' and 'bad' and 'wrong', with which psychology, as it treats of what is and not of what ought to be, is not directly concerned" (quoted in T.N. Tice and T.P. Slavens, 1983). Sidgwick's statement can be interpreted to mean that psychology is relevant for ethics or that psychological knowledge contributes to the construction of an ethical reality. (...) This interpretation serves as the basic impetus to this book, but Sidgwick's statement is also analyzed in detail to demonstrate why a current exposition on the relevance of psychology for ethical reality is necessary and germane. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this book is to document the pervasive ramifications of the compositional problem (the discipline's historical inability to define or ...

This volume presents one possible conceptual analysis of the task of constructing a model of psychological reality, so that psychology's pluralistic state can ...

i Performing Psychology /i consists of essays and stage plays by and about Fred Newman, the controversial American philosopher, psychotherapist, playwright and ...

In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition.

Connectionism was explicitly put forward as an alternative to classical cognitive science. The questions arise: how exactly does connectionism differ from classical cognitive science, and how is it potentially better? The classical “rules and representations” conception of cognition is that cognitive transitions are determined by exceptionless rules that apply to the syntactic structure of symbols. Many philosophers have seen connectionism as a basis for denying structured symbols. We, on the other hand, argue that cognition is too rich and flexible to (...) be simulable by the exceptionless representation-level rules that classicism requires. However, this very richness of cognition requires syntactically structured representations—what philosophers call a language of thought. The natural mathematical characterization of neural networks comes from the theory of dynamical systems. We propose that the mathematics of dynamical systems, not the mathematics of algorithms, holds the key to how cognitive structure and cognitive processes can be realized in the physical structure and processes of a network. (shrink)

Offering a model of mentality that sets psychology and philosophy on common footing, this book eliminates the breach between the sciences and the humanities.

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.

Jaques provides a general theory that gives a dynamic scientific foundation for the understanding of all living behavior.

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

Functional reductionism concerning mental properties has recently been advocated by Jaegwon Kim in order to solve the problem of the 'causal exclusion' of the mental. Adopting a reductionist strategy first proposed by David Lewis, he regards psychological properties as being 'higher-order' properties functionally defined over 'lower-order' properties, which are causally efficacious. Though functional reductionism is compatible with the multiple realizability of psychological properties, it is blocked if psychological properties are subdivided or crosscut by neurophysiological properties. I argue that there is (...) recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience that shows that this is the case for the psychological property of fear. Though this may suggest that some psychological properties should be revised in order to conform to those of neurophysiology, the history of science demonstrates that this is not always the outcome, particularly with properties that play an important role in our folk theories and are central to human concerns. (shrink)

An introduction to the workings of constructivism, Psychological Knowledge is an insightful introduction to the history of psychology and the recent philosophy of mind.

In the 1890's, when fields such as psychology and philosophy were just emerging, turf wars between the disciplines were common-place. Philosophers widely discounted the possibility that psychology's claim to empirical truth had anything relevant to offer their field. And psychologists, such as the crazed and eccentric Otto Weinegger, often considered themselves philosophers. Freud, it is held, was deeply influenced by his wife, Martha's, uncle, who was also a philosopher. The tension between the fields persisted, until the two fields eventually matured (...) and grew apart. Until the publication of Martin Kursch's masterly work Psychologism , few philosophers and psychologists have attended to their originally unhappy, turn-of-the-century engagement. Martin Kusch explores the origins of psychologism in Germany and fin de siecle Vienna by examining two major figures of twentieth century philosophy: Frege and Husserl. As one of the few serious works on Frege, Kusch trenchantly and clearly reconstructs the debate and the context in which it flourished. Psychologism will prove to be a key work of intellectual history on a subject which has largely been overlooked and, above all, understudied. (shrink)

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...) However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics. (shrink)

Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: the psychological underpinnings of performing pretense and (...) of recognizing pretense, the cognitive capacities involved in imaginative engagement with fictions, and the real-world impact of make-believe. In the final section, we discuss more briefly a number of other mental activities that arguably involve imagining, including counterfactual reasoning, delusions, and dreaming. (shrink)

Philosophy of psychology takes various forms. Some philosophers of psychology use psychological findings and theories to develop new answers to traditional philosophical issues. A smaller number of philosophers of psychology take their cue from the philosophy of science. They describe and evaluate the discovery heuristics, theories, and explanatory practices endorsed by psychologists. Finally, much philosophy of psychology can be characterized as psychological theorizing. Just like psychologists, philosophers propose empirical theories of specific aspects of our mind, trying to explain relevant psychological (...) phenomena. Focusing mostly on this aspect of the philosophy of psychology, I will consider philosophers’ contribution to the theoretical development of psychology in four areas: cognitive architecture and modularity (§2); situated, embodied and extended cognition (§3); concepts (§4), and mindreading (§6). 1 Before doing this, however, I will discuss philosophers’ and psychologists’ views and arguments about the distinctive character of psychology—its mentalistic nature (§1). (shrink)

In F. Allhoff (Ed.), Philosophy of the Special Sciences. SUNY Press.

In this lively book, John Macnamara shows how a number of important thinkers through the ages have approached problems of mental representation and the ...

The 20^th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been (...) devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20^th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five sections, each focusing on an important theme in 20^th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

This anthology focuses on the extraordinary contributions Wittgenstein made to several areas in the philosophy of psychology - contributions that extend to psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology. To bring them a richly-deserved attention from across the language barrier, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock has translated papers by eminent French Wittgensteinians. They here join ranks with more familiar renowned specialists on Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology. While revealing differences in approach and interests, this coming together of some of the best minds on the subject discloses a (...) surprising degree of consensus, and gives us the clearest picture yet of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of psychology. (shrink)

As is well known, Wittgenstein pointed out an asymmetry between first- and third-person psychological statements: the first, unlike the latter, involve observation or a claim to knowledge and are constitutionally open to uncertainty. In this paper, I challenge this asymmetry and Wittgenstein's own affirmation of the constitutional uncertainty of third-person psychological statements, and argue that Wittgenstein ultimately did too. I first show that, on his view, most of our third-person psychological statements are noncognitive; they stem from a subjective certainty: a (...) certainty which, though not the result of an epistemic process, is not invulnerable to error in that it is a kind of assumption. I then trace Wittgenstein's realization that some third-person psychological certainties are not merely subjective but 'objective' (which means, as he uses the word, that they are logically indubitable): in some cases, we can be as logically certain that someone else is in pain than we are about ourselves being in pain. This positively reinforces Wittgenstein's rebuttal of other mind scepticism. I conclude with a response to objections about the legitimacy of calling an assurance that is logical (i.e., that does not have uncertainty or doubt on its flipside) a 'certainty', by suggesting that the flipside is to be found in pathological cases, and most pertinently here, in cases of dyssemia: a rare disorder affecting the ability to properly express or recognize basic physical expressions of feeling. (shrink)

This essential book provides a comprehensive explanation of the key topics and debates arising in the philosophy of psychology. In editors William O'Donohue and Richard Kitchener's thoughtful examination, philosophy and psychology converge on several themes of great importance such as the foundations of knowledge, the nature of science, rationality, behaviorism, cognitive science, folk psychology, neuropsychology, psychoanalysis, professionalism, and research ethics. The Philosophy of Psychology also provides an in-depth discussion of ethics in counseling and psychiatry while exploring the diverse topics listed (...) above. The internationally renowned group of contributors to this volume both stimulating and informative. The Philosophy of Psychology will be invaluable for students and academics in theories and systems in psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of the mind, and related courses. (shrink)

Since social skills are highly significant to the evolutionary success of humans, we should expect these skills to be efficient and reliable. For many Evolutionary Psychologists efficiency entails encapsulation: the only way to get an efficient system is via information encapsulation. But encapsulation reduces reliability in opaque epistemic domains. And the social domain is darkly opaque: people lie and cheat, and deliberately hide their intentions and deceptions. Modest modularity [Currie and Sterelny (2000) Philos Q 50:145–160] attempts to combine efficiency and (...) reliability. Reliability is obtained by placing social skills in un-encapsulated central cognition; efficiency by having the social system sensitive to encapsulated socially tagged cues. In this paper, I argue that this approach fails. I focus on eye-gaze as a plausible example of a socially significant encapsulated cue. I demonstrate contra modest modularity that eye-gaze is subject to influence from central cognition. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

The 20th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been (...) devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five sections, each focusing on an important theme in 20th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

Current psychology of human reasoning is divided into several different approaches. For instance, there is a major dispute over the question whether human beings are able to apply norms of the formal models of rationality such as rules of logic, or probability and decision theory, correctly. While researchers following the “heuristics and biases” approach argue that we deviate systematically from these norms, and so are perhaps deeply irrational, defenders of the “bounded rationality” approach think not only that the evidence for (...) this conclusion is problematic but also that we should not, at least not very often, use formal norms in reasoning. I argue that while the evidence for heuristics and biases is indeed questionable, the bounded rationality approach has its limits too. Most especially, we should not infer that formal norms play no role in a comprehensive theory of rationality. Instead, formal and bounded rules of reasoning might even be connected in a more comprehensive theory of rationality. (shrink)

In the 1930s, Carnap set out to incorporate psychology into the unity of science, by showing that all cognitively meaningful sentences of psychology can be translated into the language of physics. I will argue that Carnap, relying on his notion of protocol languages, defends a physicalistic philosophy of psychology that shows due appreciation to 'introspection' as a strictly subjective, but reliable way to verify sentences about one’s own mind. Second, I will point out that Carnap’s philosophy of psychology not only (...) takes into account overt behaviour, but must comprise neurophysiological processes as well. Last, I will show that Carnap aims to develop a philosophy of psychology that does justice to the ongoing changeability of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Closely paralleling the history of psychology is the history of its critics, their theories, and their contributions. The Critique of Psychology is the first book to trace this alternate history, from a unique perspective that complements the many existing empirical, theoretical, and social histories of the field. Thomas Teo cogently synthesizes major historical and theoretical narratives to describe two centuries of challenges to—and the reactions of—the mainstream. Some of these critiques of content, methodology, relevance, and philosophical worldview have actually influenced (...) and become integrated into the canon; others pose moral questions still under debate. All are accessibly presented so that readers may judge their value for themselves: - Kant’s critique of rational and empirical psychology at the end of the 18th century - The natural-scientific critique of philosophical psychology in the 19th century - The human-scientific critique of natural-scientific psychology - The Marxist traditions of critique - Feminist and postmodern critiques and the contemporary mainstream - Postcolonial critiques and the shift from cross-cultural to multicultural psychology This is not a book of critique for critique’s sake: Teo defines the field as a work in progress with goals that are evolving yet constant. In emphasizing ethical and political questions faced by psychology as a discipline, this visionary book points students, academics, and practitioners toward new possibilities for their shared future. (shrink)

Psychology is the study of thinking, and cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence that also includes philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. In these investigations, many philosophical issues arise concerning methods and central concepts. The Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science contains 16 essays by leading philosophers of science that illuminate the nature of the theories and explanations used in the investigation of minds. Topics discussed include representation, mechanisms, reduction, perception, consciousness, language, emotions, (...) neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Key Features - Comprehensive coverage of philosophy of psychology and cognitive science - Distinguished contributors: leading philosophers in this area - Contributions closely tied to relevant scientific research. (shrink)

In line with her hopes, Philosophical Psychology outlines a vision that seeks to do justice to the complexity of the human person.

Uttal has written 9 LEA titles over the past 25 yrs. The audience will be the same people who bought Uttal's past work, as well as people teaching courses in THEORY & METHODS of PSYCH.,those w/interests in THEORETICAL PSYCH & the HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF.

This comprehensive and up-to-date textbook gives a clear account of the different philosophical and theoretical approaches to psychology and discusses major philosophical questions such as free will and the relation between mind and body.

We clarify the arguments in Neural organization: Structure, function, and dynamics, acknowledge important contributions cited by our critics, and respond to their criticisms by charting directions for further development of our integrated approach to theoretical and empirical studies of neural organization. We first discuss functional organization in general (behavior versus cognitive functioning, the need to study body and brain together, function in ontogeny and phylogeny) and then focus on schema theory (noting that schema theory is not just a top-down theory (...) and discussing the transition from action-oriented perception to cognition). We then turn to dynamical organization, with a focus first on neural modeling and dynamics (clarifying the multiple functions of neurons and brain regions, and looking further at various forms of dynamics) and second on learning, development, and self-organization (looking at monoaminergic systems, reinforcement, self-organization, postnatal development, and disease). We close with a brief philosophical discussion of postmodernism and reductionism. (shrink)

This essay investigates the influences that led J.B. Watson to change from being a student in an introspectionist laboratory at Chicago to being the founder of systematic (or radical) behaviourism. Our focus is the crucial period, 1913-1914, when Watson struggled to give a convincing behaviourist account of mental imaging, which he considered to be the greatest obstacle to his behaviourist programme. We discuss in detail the evidence for and against the view that, at least eventually, Watson rejected outright the very (...) existence of mental images. We also discuss in detail whether or not Knight Dunlap was the crucial influence on his eventual rejection of mental images. Finally we consider whether Watson's rejection of mental images was bolstered by some personal incapacity as regards imaging or whether his rejection was more like a form of 'ideological blindness'. (shrink)

A more complete and balanced theoretical framework for social psychology, as recommended in the target article, must include functional explanations of processes – moving beyond enumerations of processes and their properties. These functional explanations are at a different, but complementary, level from process descriptions. The further advancement of social psychology relies on the incorporation of such multilevel explanations.

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against (...) more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In their account of learning and behavior, the authors define an interactor as emitted behavior that operates on the environment, which excludes Pavlovian learning. A unified neural-network account of the operant-Pavlovian dichotomy favors interpreting neurons as interactors and synaptic efficacies as replicators. The latter interpretation implies that single-synapse change is inherently Lamarckian.

In his classic introduction to the subject, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, Aaron Beck observes that “the philosophical underpinnings” of cognitive therapy’s (CT) approach to the emotional disorders “go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics, who considered man’s conceptions (or misconceptions) of events rather than the events themselves as the key to his emotional upsets” (Beck 1976, 3). But beyond acknowledging that the stoics anticipated the central insight of CT, Beck has very little to (...) say about the philosophical underpinnings of CT, content it would seem for it to be an empirically grounded system of psychological principles and therapeutic methods. Yet even this little .. (shrink)

Imitation research has been hindered by (1) overly molecular analyses of behaviour that ignore hierarchical structure, and (2) attempts to disqualify observational evidence. Program-level imitation is one of a range of cognitive skills for scheduling efficient novel behaviour, in particular, enabling an individual to purloin the organization of another's behaviour for its own. To do so, the individual must perceive the underlying hierarchical schedule of the fluid action it observes and must understand the local functions of subroutines within the overall (...) goal-directed process. Action-level imitation, copying strings of actions linearly without any such understanding, is less valuable for acquiring complex behaviour and may often have other, social functions. At present, we lack a mechanistic understanding of the abilities underlying program-level imitation that make it possible for the underlying structure of complex actions to be dissected visually and recreated in behaviour. (shrink)

The past 25 years have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of cognitive control in the regulation of complex behavior. It now sits alongside attention, memory, language, and thinking as a distinct domain within cognitive psychology. At the same time it permeates each of these sibling domains. This introduction reviews recent work on cognitive control in an attempt to provide a context for the fundamental question addressed within this topic: Is cognitive control to be understood as resulting from the (...) interaction of multiple distinct control processes, or are the phenomena of cognitive control emergent? (shrink)

Oaksford & Chater (O&C) aim to provide teleological explanations of behavior by giving an appropriate normative standard: Bayesian inference. We argue that there is no uncontroversial independent justification for the normativity of Bayesian inference, and that O&C fail to satisfy a necessary condition for teleological explanations: demonstration that the normative prescription played a causal role in the behavior's existence.

One new tradition that has emerged from early research on autonomous robots is embodied cognitive science. This paper describes the relationship between embodied cognitive science and a related tradition, synthetic psychology. It is argued that while both are synthetic, embodied cognitive science is antirepresentational while synthetic psychology still appeals to representations. It is further argued that modern connectionism offers a medium for conducting synthetic psychology, provided that researchers analyze the internal representations that their networks develop. The paper then provides a (...) detailed example of the synthetic approach by showing how the construction (and subsequent analysis) of a connectionist network can be used to contribute to a theory of how humans solve Piaget's classic balance scale task. (shrink)

This review essay critically discusses Andre Kukla's Methods of theoretical psychology. It is argued that Kukla mistakenly tries to build his case for theorizing in psychology as a separate discipline on a dubious distinction between theory and observation. He then argues that the demise of empiricism implies a return of some form of rationalism, which entails an autonomous role for theorizing in psychology. Having shown how this theory-observation dichotomy goes back to traditional and largely abandoned ideas in epistemology, an alternative (...) is presented in the guise of the pragmatist or functionalist tradition, where the interdependence of theory, observation and action is emphasized and the positivist dichotomy of pure observations and pure theory is rejected. Furthermore, we show how recent work on "active" perception supports the functionalist approach. Although the authors agree with Kukla that theory has a legitimate place in psychology, it is suggested that he needlessly limits its scope to autonomous domain-neutral theorizing, and that broadening its perspective to analyzing the presuppositions and implications of empirical work is a more fruitful approach. In fact, the attempt to find the epistemological and philosophical implications of empirical work in perception that is sketched in this review essay is, in the authors' view, a case of theorizing in psychology. (shrink)

Back and forth swings the pendulum. It is remarkable that Baars can claim that “many scientists now feel that radical behaviorists tossed out the baby with the bathwater” while not being able to see that his own efforts threaten to be an instance of the complementary overshooting–what we might call covering a nice clean baby with dualistic dirt . Yes indeed, radical behaviorism of Skinner’s variety fell from grace some years ago, with the so-called cognitive revolution, to be replaced by (...) a sort of cognitivistic behaviorism that has plenty of room for inner processes, for talking to yourself, for mental imagery, for hunches, feelings, pains, dreams, beliefs and hopes and expectations, but only so long as these are understood to be physical (“informational” or “computational”) processes that could be accomplished by the machinery of the brain. It is an interesting speculative question whether William James would have been a wholehearted cognitivist, or whether he would have insisted that what he meant by the stream of consciousness had to be sharply distinguished from the streams of mere information-manipulation discernible in the activities of cortical subsystems, etc., etc. Making a home for consciousness in the brain, for a distinction between unconscious information-transformations and conscious ones, for instance, is now the work of many hands in many fields (See, e.g., Dennett, 2001, and the other essays in the special issue of Cognition devoted to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness). The main methodological principle of this research is one shared with the radical behaviorists: only intersubjectively accessible data are to be admitted in this natural science of consciousness. If that allegiance, by itself , counts as ‘behaviorism,” then we should all be behaviorists, and indeed the very researchers Baars cites (Singer, Ericsson and Simon, Hilgard, Crick, and Edelman) scrupulously and unapologetically are behaviorists in this minimal sense. They interview their subjects, under controlled conditions, and take their reports seriously–but not as infallible guides to their subjects’ subjectivity.. (shrink)

Cognitive therapies are among the most popular forms of psychotherapy in the United States (e.g., Robins, Gosling & Craik 1999). It goes without saying that those seeking psychotherapeutic treatment are best served by a profession whose representatives thoughtfully examine their methods of choice. Giuseppe Butera’s article on cognitive therapy and Thomistic psychology is truly thoughtful, as he gives careful philosophical consideration to the basic premises of Aaron Beck’s cognitive approach to therapy. Accordingly, Butera’s work is a valuable contribution to the (...) fields of psychology and psychiatry. Butera carries out his analyses in a manner that is at once conscientious, circumspect, and quite generous. The .. (shrink)

In this new book, Mary Lynne Ellis and Noreen O'Connor move to the heart of 21st century intertwining of psychoanalytical and philosophical critical reflections ...

Abstract Freud's theory of slips of the tongue has been extensively criticized by Adolf Grunbaum and Edward Erwin. They argue that in an effort to make the theory plausible Freud relied on examples of speech errors that do not conform to his theoretical characterization of slips of the tongue. These examples have contributed to the impression that Freud's theory relies on a broader evidential base than it in fact does. Furthermore they argue that Freud has not established the existence of (...) a causal connection between repressed ideation and slips of the tongue. I argue that both of these criticisms are ill?founded because they are demonstrably based on misinterpretations of Freud's view and misreadings of the relevant texts. Grunbaum and Erwin have consistently mistaken the epistemic structure of Freud's view. I am less interested in defending Freud's view than in clarifying the relationships between assertion and evidence in Freud's theory of parapraxes. To this end I conclude with an argument to show that within Freud's theory there is no criterion for telling that any particular thought has previously been repressed, and that in the absence of such a criterion a fundamental assumption of the theory is unsupported. (shrink)

Byrne & Russon argue that the action and program levels of imitation form two discrete categories, with no intermediate steps. A Piagetian view enlarges our understanding of human and ape imitation by showing the developmental paths that imitation takes in the sensory-motor period of intelligence. It is clear from Piaget's (1945/1962) analysis that the action level of imitation is richly varied and that intermediate steps do occur between the action and program levels.