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Keith Butler [22]Keith Lawrence Butler [1]
  1. Externalism, internalism, and knowledge of content.Keith Butler - 1997 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (4):773-800.
    Externalism holds, and internalism denies, that the individuation of many of an individual's mental states (e.g., thoughts about the physical world) depends necessarily on relations that individual bears to the physical and/or social environment. Many philosophers, externalists and internalists alike, believe that introspection yields knowledge of the contents of our thoughts that is direct and authoritative. It is not obvious, however, that the metaphysical claims of externalism are compatible with this epistemological thesis. Some (e.g., Burge, 1988; Falvey and Owens (F&O), (...)
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  2.  15
    Internal Affairs: Making Room for Psychosemantic Internalism.Keith Butler - 1998 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    What is it about you in virtue of which you are having the thoughts you are now having? The answer will no doubt make some appeal to the state your brain is now in. Most philosophers, however, claim that this is only part of the answer; many of the facts that determine your thoughts lie outside your skin. This view is called externalism, and in this book Keith L. Butler argues that, contrary to widespread philosophical opinion, externalism is very implausible. (...)
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  3.  63
    Towards a connectionist cognitive architecture.Keith Butler - 1991 - Mind and Language 6 (3):252-72.
  4.  39
    Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds: Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind.Keith Butler - 1995 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (3):723-726.
    This book is an extended discussion of individualism in the philosophy of mind.
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  5.  54
    Connectionism, classical cognitivism and the relation between cognitive and implementational levels of analysis.Keith Butler - 1993 - Philosophical Psychology 6 (3):321-33.
    This paper discusses the relation between cognitive and implementational levels of analysis. Chalmers (1990, 1993) argues that a connectionist implementation of a classical cognitive architecture possesses a compositional semantics, and therefore undercuts Fodor and Pylyshyn's (1988) argument that connectionist networks cannot possess a compositional semantics. I argue that Chalmers argument misconstrues the relation between cognitive and implementational levels of analysis. This paper clarifies the distinction, and shows that while Fodor and Pylyshyn's argument survives Chalmers' critique, it cannot be used to (...)
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  6. Content, computation, and individuation.Keith Butler - 1998 - Synthese 114 (2):277-92.
    The role of content in computational accounts of cognition is a matter of some controversy. An early prominent view held that the explanatory relevance of content consists in its supervenience on the the formal properties of computational states (see, e.g., Fodor 1980). For reasons that derive from the familiar Twin Earth thought experiments, it is usually thought that if content is to supervene on formal properties, it must be narrow; that is, it must not be the sort of content that (...)
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  7.  37
    Content, computation, and individualism in vision theory.Keith Butler - 1996 - Analysis 56 (3):146-154.
  8.  97
    Neural constraints in cognitive science.Keith Butler - 1994 - Minds and Machines 4 (2):129-62.
    The paper is an examination of the ways and extent to which neuroscience places constraints on cognitive science. In Part I, I clarify the issue, as well as the notion of levels in cognitive inquiry. I then present and address, in Part II, two arguments designed to show that facts from neuroscience are at a level too low to constrain cognitive theory in any important sense. I argue, to the contrary, that there are several respects in which facts from neurophysiology (...)
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  9.  52
    Content, context, and compositionality.Keith Butler - 1995 - Mind and Language 10 (1-2):3-24.
    This paper addresses the question of whether mental representations are compositional. Several researchers have claimed recently that there are empirical data that show mental representations to be context-sensitive in a way that threatens compositionality. Some have then gone on to claim that connectionist encoding schemes are well suited to accommodate such noncom-positionality. I argue here that the data do not show that mental representations are noncompositional, and that there are significant problems with the suggested interpretations of connectionist encoding schemes.
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  10.  90
    Individualism and Marr’s Computational Theory of Vision.Keith Butler - 1996 - Mind and Language 11 (4):313-37.
    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 (...)
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  11. Content, causal powers, and context.Keith Butler - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (1):105-14.
    Owens (1993) argues that one cannot accept the anti-individualistic conclusions of arguments inspired by Twin Earth thought experiments and still maintain that folk psychological states causally explain behavior. Saidel (1994) has argued that Owens' argument illegitimately individuates the contents of folk psychological states widely and causal powers narrowly. He suggests that causal powers may well be wide, and that the conditions that militate in favor of wide content also militate in favor of wide causal powers; mutatis mutandis for narrow content (...)
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  12.  44
    The Moral Status of Smoking.Keith Butler - 1993 - Social Theory and Practice 19 (1):1-26.
  13.  46
    The physiology of desire.Keith Butler - 1992 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 13 (1):69-88.
    I argue, contrary to wide-spread opinion, that belief-desire psychology is likely to reduce smoothly to neuroscientific theory. I therefore reject P.M. Churchland's eliminativism and Fodor's nonreductive materialism. The case for this claim consists in an example reduction of the desire construct to a suitable construct in neuroscience. A brief account of the standard view of intertheoretic reduction is provided at the outset. An analysis of the desire construct in belief-desire psychology is then undertaken. Armed with these tools, the paper moves (...)
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  14.  12
    “Acid bath” effects on storage and retrieval PI.Keith Butler & Richard Chechile - 1976 - Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 8 (5):349-352.
  15.  82
    Externalism and skepticism.Keith Butler - 1998 - Dialogue 37 (1):13-34.
    The argument that has inspired much of the recent discussion of the logical relationship between these views is found in Putnam : If externalism is true, then if S were a brain in a vat, S’s utterances of the sentence “I am a brain in a vat” would not express the proposition that S is a brain in a vat. S’s use of the words “brain” and “vat” would not refer to a real brain or vat, just as, in a (...)
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  16. On Clark on systematicity and connectionism.Keith Butler - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (1):37-44.
  17.  97
    Problems for semantic externalism and A Priori refutations of skeptical arguments.Keith Butler - 2000 - Dialectica 54 (1):29-49.
    SummaryA familiar sort of argument for skepticism about the external world appeals to the evidential similarity between what is presumed to be the normal case and the case where one is a brain in a vat . An argument from Putnam has been taken by many to provide an a priori refutation of this sort of skeptical argument. The question I propose to address in this paper is whether Putnam's argument affords us an a priori refutation of skeptical arguments that (...)
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  18. Representation and computation in a deflationary assessment of connectionist cognitive science.Keith Butler - 1995 - Synthese 104 (1):71-97.
    Connectionism provides hope for unifying work in neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive psychology. This promise has met with some resistance from Classical Computionalists, which may have inspired Connectionists to retaliate with bold, inflationary claims on behalf of Connectionist models. This paper demonstrates, by examining three intimately connected issues, that these inflationary claims made on behalf of Connectionism are wrong. This should not be construed as an attack on Connectionism, however, since the inflated claims made on its behalf have the look (...)
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  19.  33
    The Scope of Psychology.Keith Butler - 1994 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994:428 - 436.
    Descartes' conception of the mind as a private entity, separable (in various ways) from the body and the world around it, has come under increasingly vigorous attack in recent years. A new and very different sort of expansion of the scope of psychology has recently been advanced by John Haugeland, who argues quite ingeniously that the Cartesian divisions between mind, body, and world are psychologically otiose. I demur, citing several traditional individuative criteria that are immune to Haugeland's case.
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  20. Compositionality in cognitive models: The real issue. [REVIEW]Keith Butler - 1995 - Philosophical Studies 78 (2):153-62.
  21.  30
    Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds. [REVIEW]Keith Butler - 1998 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3):723-726.
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