Converging data from different disciplines are showing the role of classical conditioning processes in the elaboration of human and animal behavior to be larger than previously supposed. Restricted views of classically conditioned responses as merely secretory, reflexive, or emotional are giving way to a broader conception that includes problem-solving, and other rule-governed behavior thought to be the exclusive province of either operant conditiońing or cognitive psychology. These new views have been accompanied by changes in the way conditioning is conducted and (...) evaluated. Data from a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena such as relapse to drug abuse by postaddicts, the placebo effect, and the immune response appear to involve classical conditioning processes. Classical conditioning, moreover, has been found to occur in simpler and simpler organisms and recently even demonstrated in brain slices and in utero. This target article will integrate the several research areas that have used the classical conditioning process as an explanatory model; it will challenge teleological interpretations of the classically conditioned CR and offer some basic principles for testing conditioning in diverse areas. (shrink)

Abstract Meeting the eliminativist challenge to folk psychology requires showing that beliefs have explanatory virtues unlikely to be duplicated by non?cognitive accounts of behavior. The explanatory power of beliefs is rooted in their intentionality. That beliefs have a distinctive kind of intentionality is shown by the distinctive intensionality of the sentences which report them. Contrary to Fodor, the fundamental explanatory virtues of beliefs are not to be found in their capacity to make causally inactive properties relevant to the explanation of (...) behavior. Rather, the distinctive intentionality of beliefs provides the best explanation of the fact that fully intelligent behavior displays a selectivity of response to properties of the perceptual environment. (shrink)

Much of the contemporary research in cognitive psychology presupposes an information processing or computational model of human cognitive processes. On this view cognitive states are characterized as relations to internally inscribed representations. Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn have argued that those representations have a combinatorial syntax and a compositional semantics, and Fodor has argued that the individuation of representations according to semantic type corresponds, roughly, to individuation according to syntactic type. ;I investigate whether this computational model requires us to appeal, (...) directly or indirectly, to the semantic properties of representations when we explain cognitive behavior. I first discuss the requirements of scientific explanation in general, and the constraints of "materialism" and "physicalism" in particular. Then I outline how it is possible for semantic entities to be involved in cognitive explanations, and how Fodor and Pylyshyn think they are involved in explanations on the computational model. I consider whether, given the computational model, references to representations are necessary to explain cognitive processes or whether references to representations can be eliminated in favor or references to uninterpreted formulae. Finally I criticize the argument, suggested by both Fodor and Pylyshyn, that it is our ability to respond to nonnomic or nonprojectable properties of stimuli that requires explanation in terms of the semantic properties of representations. (shrink)