78 found
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  1. (1 other version)The Modularity of Mind.Robert Cummins & Jerry Fodor - 1983 - Philosophical Review 94 (1):101.
  2. Functional analysis.Robert E. Cummins - 1975 - Journal of Philosophy 72 (November):741-64.
  3. The Nature of Psychological Explanation.Robert Cummins - 1983 - MIT Press.
    In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelligible to professionals and their (...)
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  4. Meaning and Mental Representation.Robert Cummins - 1989 - MIT Press.
    Looks at accounts by Locke, Fodor, Dretske, and Millikan concerning the nature of mental representation, and discusses connectionism and representation.
  5. Representations, Targets, and Attitudes.Robert Cummins - 1996 - MIT Press.
  6. Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology.André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press.
  7. Reflection on Reflective Equilibrium.Robert C. Cummins - 1998 - In Michael Raymond DePaul & William M. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 113-128.
    As a procedure, reflective equilibrium is simply a familiar kind of standard scientific method with a new name. A theory is constructed to account for a set of observations. Recalcitrant data may be rejected as noise or explained away as the effects of interference of some sort. Recalcitrant data that cannot be plausibly dismissed force emendations in theory. What counts as a plausible dismissal depends, among other things, on the going theory, as well as on background theory and on knowledge (...)
     
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  8. Meaning and Mental Representation.Robert Cummins - 1989 - Mind 99 (396):637-642.
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  9. "How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 2000 - In Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation. MIT Press.
    In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion.
     
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  10. Programs in the explanation of behavior.Robert Cummins - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (June):269-87.
    The purpose of this paper is to set forth a sense in which programs can and do explain behavior, and to distinguish from this a number of senses in which they do not. Once we are tolerably clear concerning the sort of explanatory strategy being employed, two rather interesting facts emerge; (1) though it is true that programs are "internally represented," this fact has no explanatory interest beyond the mere fact that the program is executed; (2) programs which are couched (...)
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  11. Neo-teleology.Robert Cummins - 2002 - In André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its function. (...)
     
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  12. Why there is no symbol grounding problem?Robert C. Cummins - 1996 - In Robert Cummins (ed.), Representations, Targets, and Attitudes. MIT Press.
  13. Inexplicit information.Robert C. Cummins - 1986 - In Myles Brand (ed.), The Representation Of Knowledge And Belief. Tucson: University Of Arizona Press.
    A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.
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  14.  48
    The Philosophical Problem of Truth-Of.Robert Cummins - 1975 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5 (1):103 - 122.
    There is a certain view abroad in the land concerning the philosophical problems raised by Tarskian semantics. This view has it that a Tarskian theory of truth in a language accomplishes nothing of interest beyond the definition of truth in terms of satisfaction, and, further, that what is missing — the only thing that would yield a solution to the philosophical problem of truth when added to Tarskian semantics — is a reduction of satisfaction to a non-semantic relation. It seems (...)
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  15. Systematicity.Robert Cummins - 1996 - Journal of Philosophy 93 (12):591-614.
  16.  76
    Connectionism, computation, and cognition.Robert C. Cummins & Georg Schwarz - 1991 - In Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 60--73.
  17.  57
    The World in the Head.Robert Cummins - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Robert Cummins presents a series of essays motivated by the following question: Is the mind a collection of beliefs and desires that respond to and condition our feeling and perceptual experiences, or is this just a natural way to talk about it? What sort of conceptual framework do we need to understand what is really going on in our brains?
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  18. Systematicity and the Cognition of Structured Domains.Robert Cummins, James Blackmon, David Byrd, Pierre Poirier, Martin Roth & Georg Schwarz - 2001 - Journal of Philosophy 98 (4):167 - 185.
    The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the (...)
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  19. Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanation.Denise D. Cummins & Robert C. Cummins - 1999 - Cognition 73 (3):B37-B53.
    It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...)
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  20. (1 other version)Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method.Donald Gillies, Robert Cummins & John Pollock - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4):610-612.
     
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  21. Representation and unexploited content.James Blackmon, David Byrd, Robert C. Cummins, Alexa Lee & Martin Roth - 2006 - In Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays. New York: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    In this paper, we introduce a novel difficulty for teleosemantics, viz., its inability to account for what we call unexploited content—content a representation has, but which the system that harbors it is currently unable to exploit. In section two, we give a characterization of teleosemantics. Since our critique does not depend on any special details that distinguish the variations in the literature, the characterization is broad, brief and abstract. In section three, we explain what we mean by unexploited content, and (...)
     
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  22.  67
    The Lot of the Casual Theory of Mental Content.Robert Cummins - 1997 - Journal of Philosophy 94 (10):535.
    The thesis of this paper is that the causal theory of mental content (hereafter CT) is incompatible with an elementary fact of perceptual psychology, namely, that the detection of distal properties generally requires the mediation of a “theory.” I shall call this fact the nontransducibility of distal properties (hereafter NTDP). The argument proceeds in two stages. The burden of stage one is that, taken together, CT and the language of thought hypothesis (hereafter LOT) are incompatible with NTDP. The burden of (...)
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  23. Meaning and Content in Cognitive Science.Robert Cummins & Martin Roth - 2012 - In Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 365-382.
    What are the prospects for a cognitive science of meaning? As stated, we think this question is ill posed, for it invites the conflation of several importantly different semantic concepts. In this paper, we want to distinguish the sort of meaning that is an explanandum for cognitive science—something we are going to call meaning—from the sort of meaning that is an explanans in cognitive science—something we are not going to call meaning at all, but rather content. What we are going (...)
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  24. Representation and indication.Robert C. Cummins & Pierre Poirier - 2004 - In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Elsevier. pp. 21--40.
    This paper is about two kinds of mental content and how they are related. We are going to call them representation and indication. We will begin with a rough characterization of each. The differences, and why they matter, will, hopefully, become clearer as the paper proceeds.
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  25.  58
    On an Argument for Truth-Functionality.Robert C. Cummins & Dale Gottlieb - 1972 - American Philosophical Quarterly 9 (3):265 - 269.
    Quine argued that any context allowing substitution of logical equivalents and coextensive terms is truth functional. We argue that Quine's proof for this claim is flawed.
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  26.  44
    Traits have not evolved to function the way they do because of a past advantage.Robert Cummins & Martin Roth - 2009 - In Francisco José Ayala & Robert Arp (eds.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of biology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 72--88.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Functional Attribution: Meeting the Explanatory Constraint Functional Attribution: Normativity Postscript: Counterpoint Notes References.
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  27. Conceptual role semantics and the explanatory role of content.Robert Cummins - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 65 (1-2):103-127.
    I've tried to argue that there is more to representational content than CRS can acknowledge. CRS is attractive, I think, because of its rejection of atomism, and because it is a plausible theory of targets. But those are philosopher's concerns. Someone interested in building a person needs to understand representation, because, as AI researchers have urged for some time, good representation is the secret of good performance. I have just gestured in the direction I think a viable theory of representation (...)
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  28. The role of mental meaning in psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In Brian P. McLaughlin (ed.), Dretske and his critics. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
  29.  40
    Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanation.Denise Dellarosa Cummins & Robert Cummins - 1999 - Cognition 73 (3):B37-B53.
    It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other ”nearby’ traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...)
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  30. The role of representation in connectionist explanation of cognitive capacities.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. M. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 91--114.
  31. Interpretational semantics.Robert Cummins - 1994 - In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader. Cambridge, USA: Blackwell.
    This is a condensed version of the material in chapters 8-10 in Meaning and Mental Representation (MIT, 1989). It is an explanation and defence of a theory of content for the mind considered as a symbolic computational process. It is a view i abandoned shortly thereafter when I abandoned symbolic computatioalism as a viable theory of cognition.
     
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  32. Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanations.Robert Cummins - 1995 - Philosophical Perspectives 9:105-25.
  33.  30
    Berkeley.Robert Cummins - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (2):299.
  34. Two tales of functional explanation.Martin Roth & Robert Cummins - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (6):773-788.
    This paper considers two ways functions figure into scientific explanations: (i) via laws?events are causally explained by subsuming those events under functional laws; and (ii) via designs?capacities are explained by specifying the functional design of a system. We argue that a proper understanding of how functions figure into design explanations of capacities makes it clear why such functions are ill-suited to figure into functional-cum-causal law explanations of events, as those explanations are typically understood. We further argue that a proper understanding (...)
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  35. Methodological reflections on belief.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 53--70.
  36. Epistemological strata and the rules of right reason.Robert C. Cummins, Pierre Poirier & Martin Roth - 2004 - Synthese 141 (3):287 - 331.
    It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemology is that normative assessment (...)
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  37. Truth and meaning.Robert C. Cummins - 2002 - In Joseph Keim-Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics. Seven Bridges Press. pp. 175-197.
    D O N A L D D AV I D S O N’S “ Meaning and Truth,” re vo l u t i o n i zed our conception of how truth and meaning are related (Davidson    ). In that famous art i c l e , Davidson put forw a rd the bold conjecture that meanings are satisfaction conditions, and that a Tarskian theory of truth for a language is a theory of meaning for that language. (...)
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  38. Why it doesn’t matter to metaphysics what Mary learns.Robert Cummins, Martin Roth & Ian Harmon - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):541-555.
    The Knowledge Argument of Frank Jackson has not persuaded physicalists, but their replies have not dispelled the intuition that someone raised in a black and white environment gains genuinely new knowledge when she sees colors for the first time. In what follows, we propose an explanation of this particular kind of knowledge gain that displays it as genuinely new, but orthogonal to both physicalism and phenomenology. We argue that Mary’s case is an instance of a common phenomenon in which something (...)
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  39.  93
    Intention, meaning and truth-conditions.Robert Cummins - 1979 - Philosophical Studies 35 (4):345 - 360.
    In this paper, I sketch a revision of jonathan bennett's "meaning-Nominalist strategy" for explaining the conventional meanings of utterance-Types. Bennett's strategy does not explain sentence-Meaning by appeal to sub-Sentential meanings, And hence cannot hope to yield a theory that assigns a meaning to every sentence. I revise the strategy to make it applicable to predication and identification. The meaning-Convention for a term can then be used to fix its satisfaction conditions. Adapting a familiar trick of tarski's, We can then determine (...)
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  40.  38
    What Can Be Learned from B rainstorms?Robert Cummins - 1981 - Philosophical Topics 12 (1):83-92.
  41. The missing shade of blue.Robert Cummins - 1978 - Philosophical Review 87 (October):548-565.
  42.  77
    Analysis and subsumption in the behaviorism of Hull.Robert Cummins - 1983 - Philosophy of Science 50 (March):96-111.
    The background hypothesis of this essay is that psychological phenomena are typically explained, not by subsuming them under psychological laws, but by functional analysis. Causal subsumption is an appropriate strategy for explaining changes of state, but not for explaining capacities, and it is capacities that are the central explananda of psychology. The contrast between functional analysis and causal subsumption is illustrated, and the background hypothesis supported, by a critical reassessment of the motivational psychology of Clark Hull. I argue that Hull's (...)
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  43.  83
    (1 other version)Radical connectionism.Robert Cummins & Georg Schwarz - 1987 - Southern Journal of Philosophy Supplement 26 (S1):43-61.
  44.  78
    Dispositions, States and Causes.Robert Cummins - 1974 - Analysis 34 (6):194 - 204.
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  45.  55
    Reply to Millikan.Robert Cummins - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):113-127.
  46.  80
    Truth and logical form.Robert C. Cummins - 1975 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 4 (1):29 - 44.
  47. The internal manual model of psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 1982 - Cognition and Brain Theory 5:257-68.
  48.  82
    Two troublesome claims about qualities in Locke's essay.Robert Cummins - 1975 - Philosophical Review 84 (3):401-418.
    In book two, Chapter eight of the essay, Locke claims that primary qualities, Unlike secondary qualities, Are really in objects and are resemblances of our ideas. The idioms of containment and of resemblance are explained as formulations of what jonathan bennett calls the analytic thesis and the causal thesis. It is argued that locke was concerned to distinguish primary qualities from what he calls secondary qualities because he thought the latter were not really qualities at all but mere powers and (...)
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  49. Explanation and Subsumption.Robert C. Cummins - 1978 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978:163 - 175.
    The thesis that subsumption is sufficient for explanation is dying out, but the thesis that it is necessary is alive and well. It is difficult to attack this thesis: non-subsumptive counter-examples are declared incomplete, or mere promissory notes. No theory, it is thought, can be explanatory unless it resorts to subsumption at some point. In this paper I attack this thesis by describing a theory that (1) would explain every event it could describe, (2) does not explain by subsumption, and (...)
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  50. Innate modules vs innate learning biases.Denise D. Cummins & Robert C. Cummins - 2005 - Cognitive Processing.
    Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and “quasi-independent” from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are required in order to describe and explain how evolution shaped the mind.
     
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