Causation

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers of physics (and philosophers of science more generally) follow Bertrand Russell in arguing that there is no room for causal notions in physics. Causation, as James Woodward has put it, has a ‘human face’, which makes causal notions sit ill with fundamental theories of physics. In this paper I examine a range of anti-causal arguments and show that the human face of causation is the face of scientific representations much more generally. Physics, like other sciences, is deeply (...) permeated with causal reasoning. (shrink)

Despite its ancient heritage, the field of metaphysics has received some of its greatest clarification, defense and development in recent decades from two thinkers with strikingly different backgrounds and interests. European philosopher of science Karl Popper, while attempting to identify how science should be conceived, inadvertently shed much light on metaphysics by concluding that science and metaphysics differ from each other in that the former is empirically falsifiable while the latter is not. This 'Popperian criterion of demarcation' between science and (...) metaphysics helps to explain why the former has managed to correct and improve itself so dramatically in recent centuries through the use of empirical observations and experiments, while the latter does not seem to have derived any similar benefits from empirical sources; this criterion also makes the important practical suggestion that scientific claims should be treated by being subjected to rigorous attempts at empirical falsification to see if they can avoid being overthrown by experience. ;Unfortunately, Popper provided few suggestions as to how metaphysical claims, given their immunity from empirical refutation, should be evaluated. Nevertheless, this 'problem of metaphysics' has recently been addressed by American metaphysician Charles Hartshorne, who has accepted with certain reservations Popper's manner of distinguishing between science and metaphysics and has offered various principles by which the truth or falsity of metaphysical claims can be judged. ;This dissertation constitutes an attempt to appreciate these recent philosophical developments which, despite their significant appearance, have yet to receive much attention in the philosophical world. In particular, we shall examine both Popper's unintentional discovery of the problem of metaphysics and Hartshorne's attempted solution of that problem and utilization of that solution in his own metaphysical speculations. ;Tracing Popper's role in these philosophical developments is important not only because he discovered the problem of metaphysics but because in spite of his personal and doctrinal familiarity with the most vigorously anti-metaphysical thinkers of his age, Popper was able to reaffirm the meaningfulness of metaphysics and to show that a proper assessment of many influential, allegedly scientific doctrines of Marxists, Freudians and others requires that those doctrines be recognized as empirically non-falsifiable and hence metaphysical. . . . UMI. (shrink)