Professor Leiber's exuberant but incisive book illuminates the inquiry's beginnings in Plato, in the physiology and psychology of Descartes, in the formal work of Russell and Gödel, and in Wittgenstein's critique of folk psychology.

COMMISSIONER KLAUS VERSEN: Counselors, I want to remind you both of two matters. First, this commission is not bound by the statutes or legal precedents of ...

A. M. Turing has bequeathed us a conceptulary including 'Turing, or Turing-Church, thesis', 'Turing machine', 'universal Turing machine', 'Turing test' and 'Turing structures', plus other unnamed achievements. These include a proof that any formal language adequate to express arithmetic contains undecidable formulas, as well as achievements in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, biology, and cognitive science. Here it is argued that these achievements hang together and have prospered well in the 50 years since Turing's death.

As is well known, Alan Turing drew a line, embodied in the "Turing test," between intellectual and physical abilities, and hence between cognitive and natural sciences. Less familiarly, he proposed that one way to produce a "passer" would be to educate a "child machine," equating the experimenter's improvements in the initial structure of the child machine with genetic mutations, while supposing that the experimenter might achieve improvements more expeditiously than natural selection. On the other hand, in his foundational "On the (...) chemical basis of morphogenesis," Turing insisted that biological explanation clearly confine itself to purely physical and chemical means, eschewing vitalist and teleological talk entirely and hewing to D'Arcy Thompson's line that "evolutionary 'explanations,'" are historical and narrative in character, employing the same intentional and teleological vocabulary we use in doing human history, and hence, while perhaps on occasion of heuristic value, are not part of biology as a natural science. To apply Turing's program to recent issues, the attempt to give foundations to the social and cognitive sciences in the "real science" of evolutionary biology (as opposed to Turing's biology) is neither to give foundations, nor to achieve the unification of the social/cognitive sciences and the natural sciences. (shrink)

Alan Turing draws a firm line between the mental and the physical, between the cognitive and physical sciences. For Turing, following a tradition that went back to D=Arcy Thompson, if not Geoffroy and Lucretius, throws talk of function, intentionality, and final causes from biology as a physical science. He likens Amother [email protected] to the earnest A. I. scientist, who may send to school disparate versions of the Achild machine,@ eventually hoping for a test-passer but knowing that the vagaries of his (...) experimental course are history and accident. (shrink)

Nature's experiments in isolation—the wild boy of Aveyron, Genie, their name is hardly legion—are by their nature illusive. Helen Keller, blind and deaf from her 18th month and isolated from language until well into her sixth year, presents a unique case in that every stage in her development was carefully recorded and she herself, graduate of Radcliffe College and author of 14 books, gave several careful and insightful accounts of her linguistic development and her cognitive and sensory situation. Perhaps because (...) she is masked, and enshrined, in William Gibson's mythic and false Miracle worker, cognitive scientists have yet to come to terms with this richly enlightening, albeit anecdotal, resource. (shrink)

Though Mr. Lin purports to attack “Chomsky's view of language” and to defend the “common sense view of language”, he in fact attacks “views” that are basic and common to linguists, psycholinguists, and developmental psychologists. Indeed, though he cites W. V. O. Quine, L. Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin in his support, they all sharply part company from his views, Austin particularly. Lin's views are not common sense but a set of scholarly and philological prejudices that linguistics disparaged from its (...) inception as an organized science a hundred years ago. Professor [of Philosophy]: I will explain to you the secrets of language in all its wealth and complexity. (shrink)

This spare book amply maintains the distinction of the Bradford Book series. In chapter 1 Cummins argues that the familiar deductive-nomological notion of scientific explanation only covers transitional theories and fails to give an account of explanation through property or system analysis that is pervasive in both the physical and psychological sciences. This inadequacy of the D-N view is supposed particularly injurious in the unrobust and infant science of psychology. Explanation through analysis ranges from decidedly morphological to the decidedly systemic, (...) and from the interpretive to the descriptive. Explanation through analysis is typically an interactive two step: one gives a revealingly helpful component-function or programmatic analysis and one hopes to find an explanatory instantiation of this analysis. Psychological explanation is importantly systemic and its most challenging problem is that of finding isomorphisms between interpretive instantiations and descriptive instantiations-the hope for two-stepping isomorphisms in human psychological explanation is bio-logical, the sorts of structures that genes can determine being the likely candidates for our psychological capacities. (shrink)

This book, by two philosophers at Bradford University, immediately strikes the American reader with two differences in the British philosophical scene. One is the enveloping commitment to "Davidsonian linguistics" which still seems the central topic for many of Oxford's younger philosophers. In this slim volume Davidsonian semantics is thought to provide that some measure of cross-cultural understanding is possible, that humanistic descriptions of human activity are irreplaceable and unrevisable since action explanation is non-nomothetic though often causal and inferential, that collectives (...) may have expressive but not explanatory autonomy, and that social descriptions are not irredeemably value-laden. Who would have thought Davidsonian semantics had so much blood in it? Though the Tarskian T-Convention requirement is outlined in the short introductory chapter, one is hard put to see any real connection between the insistence on model theoretic and extensional approaches and the subsequent chapters. Though the introduction briefly allows that intensional notions are to be ignored, we are later assured that we may safely ascribe one classical logic to primitives and humans generally since "only at the highly advanced level of theoretical physics has it been found necessary to experiment with different logics". Ignored are those who think mathematics itself requires an intuitionist or intensional understanding. Also ignored are the many linguists who have recently held that the vast majority of sentences in everyday speech require intensional or modal analysis. The authors also use the label "functionalism" for the view that a society is something like a biological organism rather than a collection of rational agents. One finds this usage disconcerting. Much more unfortunate is that the authors seem innocent of the rich philosophical and psychological and neurological work on mental states and psychological explanation that has grown up around the more recent usage of the term.--Justin Leiber, University of Houston. (shrink)

Paradoxes are many things. Artificial intelligence views them as viruses of the brain, strange replicators that unexpectedly exploit design possibilities. For the child, they are intellectual cartwheels, an everyday delight. For mathematicians and logicians, they reveal skeletons in the closet of reason. For philosophers and dramatists, they capture the contradictions of experience. The historian of ideas sees that they come in successive waves, surging through Classical Greece, the Renaissance and the twentieth century. Professor Leiber's user-'friendly guide to paradoxes provides an (...) up-to-date survey of an ancient and perennial source of puzzlement. Book jacket. (shrink)

Because both the individual and the state call for simultaneous investigation in social psychology, one could argue that in some sense Serge Moscovici, with the publication of Psychoanalysis, put forward the first systematic large scale empirical study of cognitive representations in, as it happily proved, various blocs of French understandings of psychoanalysis, admitting, characteristically, doubts about the individual, bloc, and the state representations.

This book, by two philosophers at Bradford University, immediately strikes the American reader with two differences in the British philosophical scene. One is the enveloping commitment to "Davidsonian linguistics" which still seems the central topic for many of Oxford's younger philosophers. In this slim volume Davidsonian semantics is thought to provide that some measure of cross-cultural understanding is possible, that humanistic descriptions of human activity are irreplaceable and unrevisable since action explanation is non-nomothetic though often causal and inferential, that collectives (...) may have expressive but not explanatory autonomy, and that social descriptions are not irredeemably value-laden. Who would have thought Davidsonian semantics had so much blood in it? Though the Tarskian T-Convention requirement is outlined in the short introductory chapter, one is hard put to see any real connection between the insistence on model theoretic and extensional approaches and the subsequent chapters. Though the introduction briefly allows that intensional notions are to be ignored, we are later assured that we may safely ascribe one classical logic to primitives and humans generally since "only at the highly advanced level of theoretical physics has it been found necessary to experiment with different logics". Ignored are those who think mathematics itself requires an intuitionist or intensional understanding. Also ignored are the many linguists who have recently held that the vast majority of sentences in everyday speech require intensional or modal analysis. The authors also use the label "functionalism" for the view that a society is something like a biological organism rather than a collection of rational agents. One finds this usage disconcerting. Much more unfortunate is that the authors seem innocent of the rich philosophical and psychological and neurological work on mental states and psychological explanation that has grown up around the more recent usage of the term.--Justin Leiber, University of Houston. (shrink)

Democritus was born at Abdera, about 460 BCE, although according to some 490. His father was from a noble family and of great wealth, and contributed largely towards the entertainment of the army of Xerxes on his return to Asia. As a reward for this service the Persian monarch gave and other Abderites presents and left among them several Magi. Democritus, according to Diogenes Laertius, was instructed by these Magi in astronomy and theology. After the death of his father he (...) traveled in search of wisdom, and devoted his inheritance to this purpose, amounting to one hundred talents. He is said to have visited Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia, and India. Whether, in the course of his travels, he visited Athens or studied under Anaxagoras is uncertain. During some part of his life he was instructed in Pythagoreanism, and was a disciple of Leucippus. After several years of traveling, Democritus returned to Abdera, with no means of subsistence. His brother Damosis, however, took him in. According to the law of Abdera, whoever wasted his patrimony would be deprived of the rites of burial. Democritus, hoping to avoid this disgrace, gave public lectures. Petronius relates that he was acquainted with the virtues of herbs, plants, and stones, and that he spent his life in making experiments upon natural bodies. He acquired fame with his knowledge of natural phenomena, and predicted changes in the weather. He used this ability to make people believe that he could predict future events. They not only viewed him as something more than mortal, but even proposed to put him in control of their public affairs. He preferred a contemplative to an active life, and therefore declined these public honors and passed the remainder of his days in solitude. (shrink)

This book is a clear, judicious, explanatory, and short analysis of the development of linguistics, particularly in this century. While describing the ups and downs of autonomous linguistics, in its structuralist and various generativist phases, and the humanist, Marxist, and sociological opposition, Newmeyer from time to time makes striking points about the strong influence of national political agendas, as expressed in research money, on the waxing or waning of theoretical orientations in linguistics. Mirroring an older British imperialism, the burgeoning of (...) autonomous linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s was underwritten by a United States government anxious to support a scientific access to societies it wished to enlighten and dominate. Indeed, the end of sumptuous Department of Defense funding for MIT linguistics may even have had a hand in the revolt against the Chomskysan orthodoxy. But Newmeyer forms his intellectual history with enough of a characterization of the theoretical advances, arguments, and resolutions to make it clear that his central judgement is that autonomous linguistics is science and is a viable enterprise. (shrink)

In part because he is known through his Meditations, a short pamphlet he wrote, rightly in fear, to conciliate (unsuccessfully) with the church, and because his rationalism is misconstrued when interpreted empirically, Descartes is subject to a variety of misunderstandings. It does not help that he is dogged by a canard invented in the late 1600s and revived by the animal rights movement, a canard that was designed to denigrate the then burgeoning mechanistic new science, discovered cruelly cutting up living (...) animals, while laughingly insisting the writhing animals feel no pain. Descartes maintained that, physically speaking, humans as well as animals are machines, but he also clearly maintained that animals feel pain and hunger, have sensory experiences, etc. As a more abstract level, 20th Century analytic empiricism revivified the attack on rationalist views. But the last half century has seen strong support (though largely unacknowledged) for Descartes’ views about cognition and perception. (shrink)

Philosophers concerned with speech acts, or Wittgenstein's uses of language , mostly fix their attention on actions done by issuing just a phrase or short sentence (in the appropriate circumstances with the proper qualifications, feeling, intent, uptake, etc.). "Five red apples" is Wittgenstein's paradigm example in his Philosophical Investigations . "There's a bittern at the bottom of your garden" plays a similar role in J. L. Austin's most central and ambitious essay, "Other Minds." Indeed, as Wittgenstein points out, a single (...) word or gesture may do the job perfectly well, just as an illiterate man can make a valid contract by marking an "X" on a piece of paper. And, of course, in all relevant philosophical respects, a speech act may be written rather than spoken: in his leitmotiv example, Wittgenstein.. (shrink)

Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided . Victorian Westermarck claimed this as (...) a human adaptation. Evolutionary psychologists have generalized these claims to Pleistocene humans and their ancestors, to primates, and indeed to animals generally. Yet there is surprisingly little evidence for these claims of universal instinctive avoidance. Considerable inbreeding appears among large, territorial primates and may have been so with early humans and with their ancestors. While there is little reliable non-anecdotal evidence about incestuous behavior or the lack of it among humans, what little there is does not fit well with the Westermarck thesis. (shrink)

The notion of moral philosophy that has been dominant in Anglo-American philosophizing since G.E. Moore is peculiar. Reviewing traditional works such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Mill's Utilitarianism, one is tempted to call this new notion of moral philosophy a different subject; and if one does this, it is less peculiar. However, let us accept that this new sort of moral philosophy does belong to the previous tradition; granted this, I shall explain why (...) I think it peculiar through considering the status of the judgement that Hitler was a bad man.Consider the sentential function ‘x is a bad man’. ‘Hitler’ seems an obviously suitable substitution for ‘x, at least in the most important sense. That is, one wants to say that if it is not proper or true to say that ‘Hitler was a bad man’ or ‘Hitler was bad’, it fs never proper or true to issue a sentence of this form, restricting x to human beings. Hitler seems indeed, in this most important sense, to be a paradigm case. One wants to say: if Hitler was not a bad man, who could be? (shrink)

The Wild Child, who lives through much of childhood without exposure to language or culture, is exceedingly rare. I examine three of the most famous and most well authenticated cases: Helen Keller, who was isolated from eighteen months until her seventh year; ‘Victor’, the wild boy of the forest near Aveyron, whom Itard studied; and ‘Genie,’ who was isolated from language from age two until the middle of her thirteenth year. Attention is paid both to the development of these individuals (...) and to the conduct and misconceptions of those who examined and trained them. Various morals are drawn, which might also have application to research on non-human primates. (shrink)

Rachlin's is a dubious melange. Of Aristotle's four basic the scientists and philosophers of the modern era expelled the last, or teleology, from science. Adaptionist evolutionary biologists now sometimes sanction talk of the function or purpose of organisms' structures and behavioral repertoires as a first step because they believe evolution through natural selection makes natural organisms look asif they are purposively designed. But, as Aristotle himself insisted, humans are as much artificial as natural and so teleology is much less appropriate. (...) To the degree that Rachlin's view makes sense it seems to amount to Daniel Dennett's intentional stance or the folk psychology talk of our everyday narrations of ourselves and others. (shrink)

I was first struck by the influence of Fritz’ writing on himself in the summer of 1968. My wife Leslie and I were living in Buffalo. I hadn’t seen my father in a couple of years. Fritz was driving in from Los Angeles to do a science fiction workshop at Clarion College in nearby Pennsylvania. We were to see him at Clarion and then he was to visit us in Buffalo. I had just finished reading Fritz’ A Specter Is Haunting (...) Texas, then serialized in Galaxy Magazine. (shrink)

In his short life, Alan Turing (1912-1954) made foundational contributions to philosophy, mathematics, biology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. He, as much as anyone, invented the digital electronic computer. From September, 1939 much of his work on computation was war-driven and brutally practical. He developed high speed computing devices needed to decipher German Enigma Machine messages to and from U-boats, countering the most serious threat by far to Britain's survival during World War Two. Yet few people have an image of (...) him. (shrink)

Pace Atran, (1) folk physics, (2) folk biology, and (3) folk psychology rest on informationally encapsulated modules that emerge before language: a gifted austic person who can see objects and animals perfectly well can nonetheless be incommunicatively mind blind.