Externalism about the mind holds that the explanation of our representational capacities requires appeal to mental states that are individuated by reference to features of the environment. Externalists claim that ‘narrow’ taxonomies cannot account for important features of psychological explanation. I argue that this claim is false, and offer a general argument for preferring narrow taxonomies in psychology.

A great deal of philosophical work has addressed the question of whether Man’s computational theory of early vision is individualistic. Burge and Davies have argued that, according to Marr’s theory, visual states are individuated non-individualistically. Segal has denied that Marr’s theory has these non-individualistic implications. More recently, Shapiro has argued that the entire debate has been misguided. I argue that Shapiro is mistaken in a fairly deep way, attention to which allows us to raise and clarify several important issues involved (...) in discussions of individualism. Contrary to Burge and Davies, and by a route rather different from Segal’s, I defend the claim that Man’s theory offers no reason to think that visual states are individuated non-individualistically. (shrink)

The property of being the implementation of a computational structure has been argued to be vacuously instantiated. This claim provides the basis for most antirealist arguments in the field of the philosophy of computation. Standard manoeuvres for combating these antirealist arguments treat the problem as endogenous to computational theories. The contrastive analysis of computational and other mathematical representations put forward here reveals that the problem should instead be treated within the more general framework of the Newman problem in structuralist accounts (...) of mathematical representation. It is argued that purely structuralist and purely functionalist accounts of implementation are inadequate to tackle the problem. An extensive evaluation of semantic accounts is provided, arguing that semantic properties are, unlike structural and functional ones, suitable to restrict the intended domain of implementation of computational properties in such a way as to block the Newman problem. The semantic hypothesis is defended from a number of recent objections. (shrink)