Functionalism

This paper contains two sections. In the first one, some ideas on human mind Dennett presents in his book Consciousness Explained are sketched. In the second section, a critical review is made on Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory. It is concluded that some of its proposals do not find enough experimental support from research on Cognitive Neuroscience. Even though there is no cardinal point in the brain, both functional and anatomical criteria can be found to distinguish conscious and unconscious information processing (...) in the human brain. (shrink)

Is determinism compatible with the freedom required for moral responsibility? If so, we need an account of mind which shows how the conditions necessary for self-determined, responsible action can be realized in the mental states of agents--even when these states are causally determined. Functionalism satisfies this requirement. ;Donald Davidson rightly distinguishes between the physical and the mental levels of description of events. But he fails to justify and explain our intuitions about the freedom required for moral responsibility; he argues that (...) a causally determined event may be a free action because that event is not causally determined under a mental description. This claim reflects reluctance to construe mental events as real causes of behavior. ;Daniel Dennett argues that certain events may have both a physical and an intentional explanation, and that having an intentional explanation is a necessary condition for that event to be one for which the relevant agent is responsible. But this account fails to take seriously the incompatibilist challenge that, if determinism is true, mental events must be determined causes of behavior. ;My realist, functional version of compatibilism draws from Aristotle's theory of responsibility and functionalism. Aristotle's view is: That the self-determination required for human responsibility resides in the capacity for effective deliberation. Highly complex computing machines are deterministic systems capable of realizing internal processes that are best described, at the functional level, as effective deliberation. This gives us reason to believe that more complex structures, e.g., persons, are capable of effective deliberation. An Aristotelian account of responsibility in terms of counterfactuals about the capacity for effective deliberation relies on a functionalist theory of deliberation. ;Two "could-have-done-otherwise" versions of compatibilism have been proposed: the conditional and the possible worlds analyses. They, too, rely on a functional account of the causal mechanisms that realize the ability to do otherwise. The explicit addition of a functional account of deliberation of such views meets the criticism s of question-begging typically aimed at them. (shrink)

Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique of connectionism has posed a challenge to connectionists: Explain such cognitive regularities as systematicity and productivity without postulating a LOT architecture. Some connectionists took the challenge seriously. They developed some models that purport to show that they can explain the regularities without becoming classical. The key to their claim is that their models can and do provide non-concatenatively realized syntactically complex representations that can also be processed in a structure sensitive way. Surprisingly, Fodor and McLaughlin seem (...) to agree: such models are non-classical. I develop an abstract notion of syntax and of what it is to be structure sensitive that classicism is essentially committed to. Consequently, I argue that implementation of this minimal abstract notion is enough to explain the cognitive regularities that had prompted to postulate a LOT in the first place. Any model that satisfies a formal system in this abstract sense ought to be seen as a classical LOT model. I show that concatenative or non-concatenative realization of complex representations is an implementation level issue and as such is irrelevant for an essentialist defense of the LOTH. ;I also criticize Stich's Syntactic theory of Mind, and show that the STM has nothing to do with syntax when the notion of syntax is properly understood. First, I argue that if Stich is right in his claim that content-based psychologies have the disadvantages he enumerates, then STM-style theories have exactly the parallel problems; so it is false that the STM framework is scientifically superior to content-based psychologies as Stich claims. Secondly, I argue that the STM as a version of a narrow causal individuation scheme cannot type-individuate abstract syntactic objects onto which the brain states, according to Stich, are supposed to be mapped. Thirdly, I show that the STM-theorist, at any rate, is committed to intentional vocabulary at some stage of theory construction. ;I argue that since a NCA of typing Mentalese expressions is bankrupt, the only individuation scheme is semantic and a molecularist one at that: I criticize Fodor's purely denotational semantics. I also discuss how this provides the right perspective in answering one troublesome question for intentional psychology: if psychological processes are computational, how can psychological laws be intentional? (shrink)

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part . . . The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass.

dilemma, a dilemma concerning the individuation of psychological states that explain behavior. Beliefs are individuated by most functionahsts in terms of that 'that'-clauses; functional states are individuated 'narrowly' (i.e.

Shapiro has suggested that the empirical plausibility of the multiple realizability of human-like minds is dubious, because a contrary thesis, the Mental Constraint Thesis, enjoys positive empirical evidence. The Mental Constraint Thesis states that, given the actual physical laws, there is only one way to realize a human-like mind. I will suggest, however, that the Mental Constraint Thesis is not a contrary to the empirical multiple realizability thesis relevant to psychological reduction or autonomy and, as a consequence, has no bearing (...) on those classificatory issues. (shrink)

Beenfeldt assesses Dennett's approach to the philosophical problem of consciousness.

I consider the broad perspectives in biology known as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’, as well as a modern version of functionalism, ‘adaptationism’. I do not take a position on which of these perspectives is preferable; my concern is with the prior question, how should they be understood? Adapting van Fraassen’s argument for treating materialism as a stance, rather than a factual belief with propositional content, in the first part of the paper I offer an argument for construing functionalism and structuralism as (...) stances also. The argument draws especially on Gould’s insights concerning functionalism and structuralism, in particular their apparent historical continuity from the pre-Darwinian period through to today. In the second part of the paper I consider Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between empirical and explanatory adaptationism, and suggest that while the former is an empirical scientific hypothesis, the latter is closely related to the functionalist stance. (shrink)

Proper Functionalism ‘Proper Functionalism’ refers to a family of epistemological views according to which whether a belief was formed by way of properly functioning cognitive faculties plays a crucial role in whether it has a certain kind of positive epistemic status (such as being an item of knowledge, or a … Continue reading Proper Functionalism →.

Proper Functionalism ‘Proper Functionalism’ refers to a family of epistemological views according to which whether a belief was formed by way of properly functioning cognitive faculties plays a crucial role in whether it has a certain kind of positive epistemic status (such as being an item of knowledge, or a … Continue reading Proper Functionalism →.

One of Daniel Dennett's most sophisticated arguments for his eliminativism about phenomenological properties centers around the color phi phenomenon. He attempts to show that there is no phenomenological fact of the matter concerning the phenomenon of apparent motion because it is impossible to decide between two competing explanations. I argue that the two explanations considered by Dennett are both based on the assumption that a realist account of the phenomenon must include a neat mapping between phenomenological time and objective time. (...) Since this assumption is false, Dennett's argument is unsuccessful. Like most eliminativist arguments, Dennett's arguments may indicate that the subjective character of experience is different from how it is often described, but this leaves plenty of room for alternative models of consciousness. (shrink)

The independence problems for functionalism stem from the worry that if functional properties are defined in terms of their causes and effects then such functional properties seem to be too intimately connected to these purported causes and effects. I distinguish three different ways the independence problems can be filled out – in terms of necessary connections, analytic connections and vacuous explanations. I argue that none of these present serious problems. Instead, they bring out some important and over-looked features of functionalism.

Is it true that if zombies---creatures who are behaviorally indistinguishable from us, but no more conscious than a rock-are logically possible, the computational conception of mind is false? Are zombies logically possible? Are they physically possible? This paper is a careful, sustained argument for affirmative answers to these three questions.

Baars affirms Crick and Koch's position that the timidity most cognitive scientists show in the face of consciousness is ridiculous. Unfortunately, all three succumb to a variation on the timidity they deprecate. Furthermore, Baars' own method, ``contrastic analysis,'' is at odds with the computational conception of mind that dominates contemporary cognitive science.

With mind-brain identity theories no longer dominant in philosophy of mind in the late 1950s, scientific materialists turned to functionalism, the view that the identity of any mental state depends on its function in the cognitive system of which it is a part. The philosopher Hilary Putnam was one of the primary architects of functionalism and was the first to propose computational functionalism, which views the human mind as a computer or an information processor. But, in the early 1970s, Putnam (...) began to have doubts about functionalism, and in his masterwork _Representation and Reality_, he advanced four powerful arguments against his own doctrine of computational functionalism. In Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism, Jeff Buechner systematically examines Putnam's arguments against functionalism and contends that they are unsuccessful. Putnam's first argument uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to refute the view that there is a computational description of human reasoning and rationality; his second, the "triviality argument," demonstrates that any computational description can be attributed to any physical system; his third, the multirealization argument, shows that there are infinitely many computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state; his fourth argument buttresses this assertion by showing that there cannot be local computational reductions because there is no computable partitioning of the infinity of computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state into a single package or small set of packages. Buechner analyzes these arguments and the important inferential connections among them -- for example, the use of both the Gödel and triviality arguments in the argument against local computational reductions -- and argues that none of Putnam's four arguments succeeds in refuting functionalism. _ Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism_ will inspire renewed discussion of Putnam's influential book and will confirm Representation and Reality as a major work by a major philosopher. Jeff Buechner is Director of the Bioethics Institute and Lecturer in Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark. (shrink)

In his seminal work, Representation and Reality and elsewhere in publications throughout the 1980's and 1990's, Hilary Putnam attempts an ingenious refutation of computational functionalism. His refutation centers upon three main pillars: the use of the Godel incompleteness theorems, his precise articulation of a triviality thesis and his argument that there can be no local computational reductions . ;We argue that each pillar is riddled with severe problems. His rescue of the Godel incompleteness theorems from the logical error committed by (...) J. R. Lucas and Roger Penrose comes only at the expense of his argument succumbing to a paradox. His triviality theorem commits a modal error and faces a Kripke-Wittgenstein problem. We also show that both John Searle's metaphysics of computation and current triviality arguments fail to respect theorems of computability and computational complexity theory. We demonstrate, by a relative consistency proof, that computational ism is not committed to metaphysical realism and escapes Quinean indeterminacy and ontological relativity. The demonstration is relative to the success of Putnamian epistemic semantics. We argue that Putnam's no-local-computational-reduction claim amounts to nothing more than a claim that inductive reasoning cannot be formalized, that it erroneously saddles computationalism with radical Quinean meaning holism and that he fails to take into account well-known work in mathematical logic, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In this dissertation I challenge the functionalist theory of mental states, which asserts that mental types such as "pain" are "multiply realizable" causal relations. ;I begin by providing historical and theoretical background which is necessary for one to fully appreciate functionalism. I show why formerly fashionable theories of mind have fallen out of favor, review Davidson's arguments that reasons are causes, and give a brief account of "folk psychology." ;In discussing functionalism proper, I distinguish between two forms of the thesis: (...) Folk functionalism holds that, e.g., the concept "pain" is the concept of something occupying a causal role. Psychofunctionalism claims that pain is a causal state, whether or not the word "pain" means this. ;Both versions are false. In criticizing folk functionalism I argue that many mind concepts are not concepts of states occupying a causal role. I also argue that the type-token distinction is deeply flawed. Finally, as a theory of mental types, functionalism is committed to the mistaken proposition that all mental particulars of a certain type such as pain have something in common. ;Psychofunctionalism is likewise false. What psychofunctionalists offer as examples of causal roles type identifying mental states are not in fact multiply realizable, and a functionalist theory of multiply realizable mental states would be hopelessly vague. Second, psychofunctionalism masquerades as a scientific hypothesis when in fact it is unable to advance a scientific claim, being neither verifiable nor falsifiable by scientific means. Finally, I show that, though the highly-acclaimed inverted spectrum and absent qualia arguments fail to defeat functionalism, there exists a qualia objection which does defeat it. (shrink)

In this article I argue that two received accounts of belief and assertion cannot both be correct, because they entail mutually contradictory claims about Moore's Paradox. The two accounts in question are, first, the Action Theory of Belief, the functionalist view that belief must be manifested in dispositions to act, and second, the Belief Account of Assertion, the Gricean view that an asserter must present himself as believing what he asserts. It is generally accepted also that Moorean assertions are absurd, (...) and that BAA explains why they are. I shall argue that ATB implies that some Moorean assertions are, in some fairly ordinary contexts, well justified. Thus BAA and ATB are mutually inconsistent. In the concluding section I explore three possible ways of responding to the dilemma, and what implications they have for the nature of the constitutive relationships linking belief, assent and behavioural dispositions. (shrink)

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is here criticized from the perspective of a more naturalistic and less compromising form of materialism. Parallels are explored between the problem of cognitive activity and the somewhat more settled problem of vital activity. The lessons drawn suggest that functionalism in the philosophy of mind may be both counterproductive as a research strategy, and false as a substantive position.

I analyse a tension at the core of the mechanistic view of computation, generated by its joint commitment to the medium-independence of computational vehicles, and to computational systems possessing teleological functions to compute. While computation is individuated in medium-independent terms, teleology is sensitive to the constitutive physical properties of vehicles. This tension spells trouble for the mechanistic view, suggesting that there can be no teleological functions to compute. I argue that, once considerations about the relevant function-bestowing factors for computational systems (...) are brought to bear, the tension dissolves: physical systems can have the teleological function to compute. (shrink)

Palmer's strategy of saving functionalism by constraining spectrum inversions cannot succeed because (1) there remain many nontrivial transformations not ruled out by Palmer's constraints, and (2) the constraints involved are due to the contingent makeup of our visual systems, and are therefore not available for use by functionalists.

Straipsnyje tiriamos dvi XX a. viduryje iðplëtotos funkcionalistinio sàmonës aiðkinimo kryptys: D. Armstrongo ir D. Lewiso analitinis funkcionalizmas ir H. Putnamo komputacinis funkcionalizmas. Siekiamaparodyti, kad ðios dvi kryptys ið esmës sutampa metodologiniu poþiûriu, taèiau jø atstovai suteikiasavøjø teorijø metodologiniam pagrindui skirtingas ontologines interpretacijas. Sutardami, kad fizikinio bûvio ir funkcinio bûvio sàvokos skiriasi, jie nesutaria dël to, ar funkcinio bûvio sàvokà reikialaikyti iðskirianèia atskirà ontologinæ bûviø kategorijà, ar ði sàvoka iðreiðkia tik skirtingà tø paèiø fizikiniø bûviø identifikavimo realiame pasaulyje bûdà. Ðiame (...) nesutarime ið esmës uþsimezga ðiuolaikineisàmonës filosofijai bûdinga kontroversija klausimu: savybiø ontologija turi bûti rekonstruojama intensiniu ar ekstensiniu pagrindu?Pagrindiniai þodþiai: funkcionalizmas, materializmas, ávairiopa realizacija, reduktyvistinës sàmonës teorijos. (shrink)

What I find particularly valuable in the juxtaposition of these three essays on my book is the triangulation made possible by their different versions of much the same story. I present my view as a product of cognitive science, but all three express worries that it may involve some sort of ominous backsliding towards the evils of behaviorism. I agree with Baars and McGovern when they suggest that philosophy has had some baleful influences on psychology during this century. Logical positivism (...) at its best was full of subtle softenings, but behaviorist psychologists bought the tabloid version, and sold it to their students in large quantities. George Miller's account of those dreary days is not an exaggeration, and the effects still linger in some quarters. (Philosophers are often amused--but they should really be disconcerted--to note that the only living, preaching logical positivists today are to be found in psychology departments.). (shrink)

In Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), G. A. Cohen has developed a distinctively functionalist interpretation of historical materialism. In this paper I outline Cohen's novel reconstruction of Marx and subject it to two independent internal criticisms. I first argue that explanations cannot conform to Cohen's functionalist model. I then suggest that even if there could be explanations having the structure he has proposed, they would fail to be helpful in illuminating the causal kernel of Marx's theory. Finally (...) I sketch a neglected but more promising approach to clarifying historical materialism, due to Geoffrey Hellman. (shrink)