Functionalism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)
| Abstract | Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesKathleen V. Wilkes (1981). Functionalism, Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind. Philosophical Topics 12 (1):147-67.
Elliott Sober (1990). Putting the Function Back Into Functionalism. In William G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition. Blackwell.
Sydney Shoemaker (1981). Some Varieties of Functionalism. Philosophical Topics 12 (1):93-119.
Paul M. Livingston (2005). Functionalism and Logical Analysis. In David Woodruff Smith & Amie L. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Michael Wheeler (2010). In Defence of Extended Functionalism. In Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind. Mit Press.
William G. Lycan (1979). A New Lilliputian Argument Against Machine Functionalism. Philosophical Studies 35 (April):279-87.
Ned Block (1996). What is Functionalism? In Donald M. Borchert (ed.), [Book Chapter]. MacMillan.
Ned Block (1980). Functionalism. In Ned Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology.
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