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  1. Extended cognition and intrinsic properties.Teed Rockwell - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (6):741-757.
    The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) has been criticized as committing what is called the coupling?constitution fallacy, but it is the critic's use of this concept which is fallacious. It is true that there is no reason to deny that the line between the self and the world should be drawn at the skull and/or the skin. But the data used to support HEC reveal that there was never a good enough reason to draw the line there in the first (...)
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  2. Beyond Eliminative Materialism: Some Unnoticed Implications of Churchland’s Pragmatic Pluralism.Teed Rockwell - 2011 - Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1):173-189.
    Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as his epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense; cannot (...)
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  3. Minds, intrinsic properties, and madhyamaka buddhism.Teed Rockwell - 2009 - Zygon 44 (3):659-674.
    Certain philosophers and scientists have noticed that there are data that do not seem to fit with the traditional view known as the Mind/Brain Identity theory. This has inspired a new theory about the mind known as the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition. Now there is a growing controversy over whether these data actually require extending the mind out beyond the brain. Such arguments, despite their empirical diversity, have an underlying form. They all are disputes over where to draw the line (...)
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  4.  24
    Processes and Particles.Teed Rockwell - 2008 - Philosophical Topics 36 (1):239-258.
  5. Rorty, Putnam, and the pragmatist view of epistemology and metaphysics.Teed Rockwell - 2003 - Education and Culture 19 (1):3.
  6.  43
    Awareness, mental phenomena, and consciousness: A synthesis of Dennett and Rosenthal.Teed Rockwell - 1996 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (5-6):463-76.
    Both Dennett and his critics believe that the invalidity of the famed Stalinist-Orwellian distinction is a consequence of his multiple drafts model of consciousness . This is not so obvious, however, once we recognize that the question ‘how do you get experience out of meat?’ actually fragments into at least three different questions. How do we get: a unified sense of self, awareness and mental phenomena? In the latter chapters of Consciousness Explained, Dennett shows how MDM has a radical and (...)
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  7. A defense of emergent downward causation.Teed Rockwell - manuscript
    At least one of my professors told me that in order to write a good philosophy paper, one should always try to defend as little territory as possible. The danger of this advice is that although it may make one's points defensible, it may also make them not worth defending. In order to avoid both of these extremes, I am going to defend a relatively modest claim, which appears to be necessary but not sufficient for another more ambitious claim, which (...)
     
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  8.  39
    (1 other version)Mind or mechanism : which came first?Teed Rockwell - 2012 - In Liz Stillwaggon Swan (ed.), Origins of mind. New York: Springer. pp. 243--258.
  9. Commentary by Bernard J. Baars.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    It is remarkable how similar today's mind-body debates are to the philosophical critiques of biological science, such as Henri Bergson's Vitalism at the turn of the last century. Philosophers like Bergson became famous arguing that science could never account for life. One reason was that living creatures could not be decomposed into fundamental units, in spite of the empirical finding that all animate things consist of basic cells with remarkably general properties in a bewildering profusion of variation. Today we know (...)
     
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  10. Commentary on a hard problem thought experiment.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    In the seventh paragraph of the post, you say "This question [which machine, if any or both, is conscious/] seems to be in principle unfalsifiable, and yet genuinely meaningful." (I'm assuming that you mean that any answer to it is unfalsifiable.) My neo-Carnapian intuitions diagnoses the problem right at this point. Forget about attributions of meaningless and all that stuff. Replace it in your statement with more pragmatically-oriented evaluative notions: theoretically fruitless, arbitray without even being helpful for any theoretical, experimental, (...)
     
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  11. Commentary on "the modularity of dynamic systems".Teed Rockwell - unknown
    1. Throughout the paper, and especially in the section called "LISP vs. DST", I worried that there was not enough focus on EXPLANATION. For the real question, it seems to me, is not whether some dynamical system can implement human cognition, but whether the dynamical description of the system is more explanatorily potent than a computational/representational one. Thus we know, for example, that a purely physical specification can fix a system capable of computing any LISP function. But from this it (...)
     
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  12.  61
    Experience and sensation: Sellars and Dewey on the non-cognitive aspects of mental life.Teed Rockwell - 2001 - Education and Culture (Winter) 17 (1):3.
    Sellars and Dewey each isolated and critiqued different aspects of the atomistic epistemology of the logical positivists: Dewey labeled his target "Sensationalistic Empiricism", and Sellars labeled his "the Myth of the Given." The main theme of this paper will be the similarity and differences in their responses to this kind of philosophy, and how both responses can be clarified and strengthened by considering recent discoveries in Cognitive Neuroscience. What we have recently learned about neural architecture accounts for a distinction between (...)
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  13. From: Elizabeth Minnich.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    I should say, before beginning, that I am hearing what you say about Rorty now from the perspective on his work I have (for the time being, at least) as a result of having heard a working paper he presented to the scholars’ workshop of which I was a member at The Getty this winter, and then participating with him in a 4-hour discussion (and following small dinner gathering). I have also recently read his curious rather autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and (...)
     
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  14.  37
    Global workspace or pandemonium?Teed Rockwell - 1997 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (4):334-337.
    Surprisingly, Dennett and Baars have no real quarrel with each other, despite the fact that Dennett wants to escape from the Theatre of Consciousness and Baars is happy to stay there. Both believe that consciousness has structures that can be analysed, and is not just ‘the mysterious glow that no one but me can see’ described by Chalmers and Searle. Both acknowledge that their theories of consciousness are only metaphors, and there is no conflict in saying that Consciousness is both (...)
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  15.  57
    No Gaps, No God?Teed Rockwell - 2009 - Philosophy and Theology 21 (1-2):129-153.
    Darwinian atheists ridicule the “God of the Gaps” argument, claiming that it is theology and/or metaphysics masquerading as science.This is true as far as it goes, but Darwinian atheism relies on an argument which is equally metaphysical, which I call the “No Gaps,No God” argument. This atheist argument is metaphysical because it relies on a kind of conceptual necessity, rather than scientificobservations or experiments. “No Gaps No God” is a much better metaphysical argument than “God of the Gaps,” because the (...)
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  16.  62
    Naturalistic Theism.Teed Rockwell - 2017 - Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 25 (2):209-220.
    Many modern theological debates are built around a false dichotomy between 1) an atheism which asserts that the universe was created by purposeless mechanical processes and 2) acceptance of a religious system which requires both faith in the infallibility of sacred texts and belief in a supernatural God. I propose a form of naturalistic theism, which rejects sacred texts as unjustified, and supernaturalism as incoherent. I argue that rejecting these two elements of traditional organized religion would have a strongly positive (...)
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  17. Reply to Baars.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    My claim that Skinner believed in psychological atoms is actually strengthened by Baars' remark that Skinner 's behaviorist atoms could take a variety of physical forms. Baars is correct that Pavlov, unlike Skinner, thought that psychological atoms were identical to certain physiological items. But Skinner, as a non-reductive atomist, thought he could permit his psychological atoms to have a variety of physical forms. He still believed that even though each S-R connection was not really physical, it could nevertheless be understood (...)
     
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  18. Reply to Clark and Van gelder.Teed Rockwell - manuscript
    Clark ends his appendix with a description of what he calls "dynamic computationalism", which he describes as an interesting hybrid between DST and GOFAI. My 'horseLISP" example could be described as an example of dynamic computationalism. It is clearly not as eliminativist as Van Gelder's computational governor example, for I am trying to come up with something like identities between computational entities and dynamic ones. Thus unlike other dynamicists, I am not doing what Clark calls "embracing a different vocabulary for (...)
     
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  19. Reply to commentaries on thought experiment.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    He describes his position as "neo-Carnapian", i.e. he is claiming that even if the question is meaningful, that doesn't mean it's worth looking into. He's probably right, in the sense that anyone can be right about a personal evaluative choice. And until I started questioning the belief that there is only one kind of physical process that could embody consciousness, I felt the same way myself. But the point about this thought experiment is that the current state of cognitive science (...)
     
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  20. Some different ways to think.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    Daniel Dennett has offered a helpful framework in which to consider the evolution of mind, calling it "the tower of generate and test". On the bottom of the tower there are "Darwinian creatures," whose patterns of behavior result from the effects of natural selection alone. Next come "Skinnerian creatures," whose behaviors continue to be modified during their individual lifetimes by trial, reward and punishment. Third are "Popperian creatures," capable of learning, as well, by trying things out in their heads. Last (...)
     
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  21. The effects of atomistic ontology on the history of psychology.Teed Rockwell - manuscript
    _This article articulates the presuppositions that psychology inherited from logical positivism, and how_ _those presuppositions effected the interpretation of data and research procedures. Despite the efforts of_ _Wundt, his most well known disciples, Titchener and Külpe, embraced an atomistic view of experience which_ _was at_ _least partly responsible for many of their failures. When the behaviorists rejected the_ _introspectionism of Titchener and Külpe, they kept their atomism, using the reflex_.
     
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  22.  24
    The Embodied “We”: The Extended Mind as Cognitive Sociology.Teed Rockwell - 2016 - In Matthias Jung & Roman Madzia (eds.), Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Intersubjectivity to Symbolic Articulation. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 167-184.
  23. The hard problem is dead: Long live the hard problem.Teed Rockwell - manuscript
    I have assumed that consciousness exists, and that to redefine the problem as that of explaining how certain cognitive and behavioral functions are performed is unacceptable. . . .Like many people , I find this premise obvious, although I can no more "prove" it than I can prove that I am conscious. . . .there is no denying that such arguments - on either side - ultimately come down to a bedrock of intuition at some point.
     
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  24. The modularity of dynamic systems.Teed Rockwell - 1998 - Colloquia Manilana 6.
    To some degree, Fodor's claim that Cognitive science divides the mind into modules tells us more about the minds doing the studying than the mind being studied. The knowledge game is played by analyzing an object of study into parts, and then figuring out how those parts are related to each other. This is the method regardless of whether the object being studied is a mind or a solar system. If a module is just another name for a part, then (...)
     
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  25. The varieties of cognitive experience.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    I am grateful to Markate Daly for forcing me to clarify my concept of the relationship between experience and know-how. She may be correct in saying that "None of the passive endurings and sufferings, loves, enjoyments and imaginings of Dewey's conception can be characterized as a part of 'knowing how' as it is currently understood." But I think that there is a similarity between passive experience and active coping that distinguishes them both from the allegedly "objective" sense data that Dewey (...)
     
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  26. Unknown.Teed Rockwell - unknown
    After reading this paper, Richard Rorty sent the following comment: Doubtless in some sense I am doing "epistemology" and for all I know the name will survive as that of something which has little to do with Kant. But I am not convinced that philosophers are making themselves as useful to cognitive science as they claim, or that cognitive science is more than an awkward place-holder for neurology. My hunch is that when neurology comes into its own, notions like "cognition" (...)
     
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  27.  78
    Attractor spaces as modules: A semi-eliminative reduction of symbolic AI to dynamic systems theory. [REVIEW]Teed Rockwell - 2004 - Minds and Machines 15 (1):23-55.
    I propose a semi-eliminative reduction of Fodors concept of module to the concept of attractor basin which is used in Cognitive Dynamic Systems Theory (DST). I show how attractor basins perform the same explanatory function as modules in several DST based research program. Attractor basins in some organic dynamic systems have even been able to perform cognitive functions which are equivalent to the If/Then/Else loop in the computer language LISP. I suggest directions for future research programs which could find similar (...)
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