27 found
Order:
Disambiguations
Robert C. Cummins [27]Robert Charles Cummins [1]
  1. Reflection on Reflective Equilibrium.Robert C. Cummins - 1998 - In Michael Raymond DePaul & William M. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 113-128.
    As a procedure, reflective equilibrium is simply a familiar kind of standard scientific method with a new name. A theory is constructed to account for a set of observations. Recalcitrant data may be rejected as noise or explained away as the effects of interference of some sort. Recalcitrant data that cannot be plausibly dismissed force emendations in theory. What counts as a plausible dismissal depends, among other things, on the going theory, as well as on background theory and on knowledge (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   131 citations  
  2. "How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 2000 - In Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation. MIT Press.
    In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   109 citations  
  3. Why there is no symbol grounding problem?Robert C. Cummins - 1996 - In Robert Cummins (ed.), Representations, Targets, and Attitudes. MIT Press.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   92 citations  
  4. Inexplicit information.Robert C. Cummins - 1986 - In Myles Brand (ed.), The Representation Of Knowledge And Belief. Tucson: University Of Arizona Press.
    A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  5.  76
    Connectionism, computation, and cognition.Robert C. Cummins & Georg Schwarz - 1991 - In Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 60--73.
  6. Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanation.Denise D. Cummins & Robert C. Cummins - 1999 - Cognition 73 (3):B37-B53.
    It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  7. Representation and unexploited content.James Blackmon, David Byrd, Robert C. Cummins, Alexa Lee & Martin Roth - 2006 - In Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays. New York: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    In this paper, we introduce a novel difficulty for teleosemantics, viz., its inability to account for what we call unexploited content—content a representation has, but which the system that harbors it is currently unable to exploit. In section two, we give a characterization of teleosemantics. Since our critique does not depend on any special details that distinguish the variations in the literature, the characterization is broad, brief and abstract. In section three, we explain what we mean by unexploited content, and (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  8.  58
    On an Argument for Truth-Functionality.Robert C. Cummins & Dale Gottlieb - 1972 - American Philosophical Quarterly 9 (3):265 - 269.
    Quine argued that any context allowing substitution of logical equivalents and coextensive terms is truth functional. We argue that Quine's proof for this claim is flawed.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  9. Representation and indication.Robert C. Cummins & Pierre Poirier - 2004 - In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Elsevier. pp. 21--40.
    This paper is about two kinds of mental content and how they are related. We are going to call them representation and indication. We will begin with a rough characterization of each. The differences, and why they matter, will, hopefully, become clearer as the paper proceeds.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  10. The role of mental meaning in psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In Brian P. McLaughlin (ed.), Dretske and his critics. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
  11. The role of representation in connectionist explanation of cognitive capacities.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. M. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 91--114.
  12. Methodological reflections on belief.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 53--70.
  13. Epistemological strata and the rules of right reason.Robert C. Cummins, Pierre Poirier & Martin Roth - 2004 - Synthese 141 (3):287 - 331.
    It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemology is that normative assessment (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  14. Truth and meaning.Robert C. Cummins - 2002 - In Joseph Keim-Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics. Seven Bridges Press. pp. 175-197.
    D O N A L D D AV I D S O N’S “ Meaning and Truth,” re vo l u t i o n i zed our conception of how truth and meaning are related (Davidson    ). In that famous art i c l e , Davidson put forw a rd the bold conjecture that meanings are satisfaction conditions, and that a Tarskian theory of truth for a language is a theory of meaning for that language. (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  15.  80
    Truth and logical form.Robert C. Cummins - 1975 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 4 (1):29 - 44.
  16. The internal manual model of psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 1982 - Cognition and Brain Theory 5:257-68.
  17. Explanation and Subsumption.Robert C. Cummins - 1978 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978:163 - 175.
    The thesis that subsumption is sufficient for explanation is dying out, but the thesis that it is necessary is alive and well. It is difficult to attack this thesis: non-subsumptive counter-examples are declared incomplete, or mere promissory notes. No theory, it is thought, can be explanatory unless it resorts to subsumption at some point. In this paper I attack this thesis by describing a theory that (1) would explain every event it could describe, (2) does not explain by subsumption, and (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Innate modules vs innate learning biases.Denise D. Cummins & Robert C. Cummins - 2005 - Cognitive Processing.
    Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and “quasi-independent” from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are required in order to describe and explain how evolution shaped the mind.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19.  53
    (1 other version)The mind of the matter: Comments on Paul Churchland.Robert C. Cummins - 1984 - Philosophy of Science Association 1984:791-798.
  20. Cross domain inference and problem embedding.Robert C. Cummins - 1991 - In Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface. Cambridge: MIT Press.
    I.1. Two reasons for studying inference. Inference is studied for two distinct reasons: for its bearing on justification and for its bearing on learning. By and large, philosophy has focused on the role of inference in justification, leaving its role in learning to psychology and artificial intelligence. This difference of role leads to a difference of conception. An inference based theory of learning does not require a conception of inference according to which a good inference is one that justifies its (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  21.  79
    Cognitive evolutionary psychology without representational nativism.Denise D. Cummins, Robert C. Cummins & Pierre Poirier - 2003 - Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 15 (2):143-159.
    A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) ‘quasi-independent’ from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have no distinctive consequences for fitness if effecting those variations required widespread changes in other unrelated traits and capacities as well. These requirements would be satisfied by innate cognitive (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. Haugeland on representation and intentionality.Robert C. Cummins - 2002 - In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Philosophy of Mental Representation. New York: Oxford University Press UK.
    Haugeland doesn’t have what I would call a theory of mental representation. Indeed, it isn’t clear that he believes there is such a thing. But he does have a theory of intentionality and a correlative theory of objectivity, and it is this material that I will be discussing in what follows. It will facilitate the discussion that follows to have at hand some distinctions and accompanying terminology I introduced in Representations, Targets and Attitudes (Cummins, 1996; RTA hereafter). Couching the discussion (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23. Minds, Brains, and Computers: An Anthology.Robert C. Cummins & Denise Dellarosa Cummins (eds.) - 2000 - Blackwell.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24.  40
    Philosophy and AI: Essays at the Interface.Robert C. Cummins (ed.) - 1991 - Cambridge: MIT Press.
    Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  25. Programs and Theories of Behavior.Robert Charles Cummins - 1970 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26.  33
    Representation and covariation.Robert C. Cummins - 1988 - In Stuart Silvers (ed.), Representation: Readings In The Philosophy Of Mental Representation. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  27.  49
    Reply to Hugly and Sayward.Robert C. Cummins - 1977 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 6 (1):353-354.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark