What do plants and bacteria want? Commentary on Carrie Figdor ' s _Pieces of mind_

Mind and Language 35 (5):677-686 (2020)
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Abstract

In Pieces of mind, Figdor examines how to interpret psychological predicates that scientists assign to entities that commonsensically do not have a mind such as neurons and plants. She claims that these predicates are used literally to refer to the same structures in humans and non‐human entities. I argue on the contrary that most uses of this kind are merely the extension of preexisting, possibly behaviorist senses of the relevant psychological predicates.

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Edouard Machery
University of Pittsburgh

References found in this work

Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior.Mark Wilson - 2006 - Oxford, GB: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1997 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edited by Richard Rorty & Robert Brandom.
Scientists’ Concepts of Innateness: Evolution or Attraction?E. Machery, P. Griffiths, S. Linquist & K. Stotz - 2019 - In Richard Samuels & Daniel A. Wilkenfeld (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 172-201.

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