Robert D. Rupert

Last updated
Robert D. Rupert
Robert D. Rupert.jpg
Born1964
Bozeman, Montana
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Academic, researcher, and author
Academic background
EducationB.A., Philosophy (1987)
M.A., Philosophy (1990)
Ph.D., Philosophy (1996)
Alma mater University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Washington
Doctoral advisor Charles Chastain

Robert D. Rupert (born 1964) is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre [1] and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . [2]

Contents

Rupert's research addresses questions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. He has authored over 50 articles in these areas. His book, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, was published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. [3]

Education

Rupert received his B.A. in Philosophy from University of Washington in Seattle (1987) and his M.A. (1990) and Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation was entitled "The Best Test Theory of Extension." [4]

Career

Rupert joined Texas Tech University as a Visiting assistant professor in philosophy in 2000 and, in 2001, became assistant professor of philosophy. He left Texas Tech in 2005 and joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was promoted to associate professor in 2009 and Professor in 2013. From 2013 to 2016, he also held a twenty-percent faculty appointment in the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. [5]

He has been awarded visiting or research fellowships by the Australian National University, Ruhr University, Bochum, [6] and Western University (Ontario). He has also held visiting positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, and New York University. During academic year 2005–2006, he was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

From 2015 to 2020. he served as an Associate Editor of British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS), becoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal in 2020. [2]

Research and work

Rupert's early research focused on naturalistic theories of mental content and related questions about concept acquisition. He is the progenitor of the Best Test Theory of Extension, which assigns content to mental representations on the basis of patterns of causal interaction between the developing subject and kinds and properties in the subject's environment. [7] He argued that there is a fundamental overlap between the causal interactions that establish mental content and, at the same time, stabilize and give integrity to the vehicles possessing said content – an idea that he pursued within the frameworks of dynamical systems theory (Synthese 1998) [8] and cognitive neuroscience (Journal of Philosophy 2001). [9]

Rupert has also published papers on a cluster of issues in the metaphysics of mind and philosophy of science, including mental causation, [10] the nature of properties, [11] and the relation between the sciences of the mind and the more fundamental sciences.

The best-known and most influential aspect of Rupert's research focuses on situated cognition, which includes topics related to the extended mind, enactivism, embodiment, and distributed cognition. In 2004, he published "Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition." This paper had sizeable impact on the debate about extended mind and extended cognition, [12] as did his more comprehensive treatment of situated cognition in 2009's "Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. In the latter, he introduces the Conditional Probability of Co-contribution account of cognitive systems, which specifies what it is for a cluster of mechanisms to be bound together into a single cognitive system (or cognitive self), thereby, he argues, delineating the boundary of genuinely cognitive processing. [13] [14]

Rupert's interest in distributed cognition gave rise to an adjacent research program, on the topic of group minds. In this domain, he has attempted to identify the abstract properties that groups of humans share with individual humans, such that groups might properly be said to have mental or cognitive states of their own. [15] Although his best-known work on this topic (Episteme 2005) takes a skeptical tone, [16] his current efforts in this regard focus on graph-theoretic properties of networks – such as a network's having a small-world architecture – as candidates for such shared properties. [17]

In the area of cognitive systems and nature of cognition, Rupert has argued that the mind is massively representational and that philosophers of mind should set aside their commitment to a metaphysically distinctive personal-level. According to the former proposal, cognitive science should attend to the sheer number of mental representations with the same content that contribute to the production of an action or form of behavior. Rupert's work on the personal level encourages a flattened conception of the mind, according to which the mental states and processes often thought to be at a distinctive level – the level of the whole person – should be treated instead as states and processes sitting right alongside such states and processes as those at work in early visual processing or in the subconscious processes that fluidly determine whether incoming speech makes sense. [18]

In addition, Rupert has an ongoing interest in epistemology, which has produced papers on metaphilosophy, the a priori, [19] and on the role of so-called subpersonal processing in the determination of epistemic value. [20]

Publications

Books

Selected articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind</span> Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.

In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.

Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Fodor</span> American philosopher (1935–2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.

In metaphysics, the distinction between abstract and concrete refers to a divide between two types of entities. Many philosophers hold that this difference has fundamental metaphysical significance. Examples of concrete objects include plants, human beings and planets while things like numbers, sets and propositions are abstract objects. There is no general consensus as to what the characteristic marks of concreteness and abstractness are. Popular suggestions include defining the distinction in terms of the difference between (1) existence inside or outside space-time, (2) having causes and effects or not, (3) having contingent or necessary existence, (4) being particular or universal and (5) belonging to either the physical or the mental realm or to neither. Despite this diversity of views, there is broad agreement concerning most objects as to whether they are abstract or concrete. So under most interpretations, all these views would agree that, for example, plants are concrete objects while numbers are abstract objects.

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure. On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.

The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.

Jaegwon Kim was a Korean-American philosopher. At the time of his death, Kim was an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brown University. He also taught at several other leading American universities during his lifetime, including the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University, and Swarthmore College. He is best known for his work on mental causation, the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of supervenience and events. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events. Kim's work on these and other contemporary metaphysical and epistemological issues is well represented by the papers collected in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).

Ronald Albert McClamrock is an associate professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. His primary areas of research are the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science.

A mental representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.

The problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions. The problem divides into several distinct sub-problems, including the problem of causal exclusion, the problem of anomalism, and the problem of externalism. However, the sub-problem which has attracted most attention in the philosophical literature is arguably the exclusion problem.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body problem</span> Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies

The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Carruthers (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

Peter Carruthers is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, an associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, and a member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.

Lawrence Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. His research focuses in the philosophy of psychology. He also works in both the philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology.

John L. Pollock (1940–2009) was an American philosopher known for influential work in epistemology, philosophical logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which argues that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. It is contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges from neural activity alone. Externalism is a belief that the mind is not just the brain or functions of the brain.

Clark N. Glymour is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Andrew Brook is a Canadian philosopher, author and academic particularly known for his writings on Immanuel Kant and the interplay between philosophy and cognitive science. Brook is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Carleton University, former President of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, and former President of the Canadian Philosophical Association.

In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The EMT considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including the physical level.

References

  1. ↑ "Professor Robert Rupert | Eidyn". eidyn.ppls.ed.ac.uk.
  2. 1 2 "Robert Rupert Appointed New BJPS Co-Editor-in-Chief". May 26, 2020.
  3. ↑ Wilson, Robert A. (7 March 2010). "Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind".
  4. ↑ "The Best Test Theory of Extension: First Principle(s)".
  5. ↑ "Robert D. Rupert - CV" (PDF).
  6. ↑ "Robert D. Rupert | Center for mind, brain and cognitive evolution". dbs-lin.ruhr-uni-bochum.de.
  7. ↑ "Causal Theories of Mental Content". Best Test Theory. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2021.
  8. ↑ Rupert, Robert D. (October 1, 1998). "On the Relationship Between Naturalistic Semantics and Individuation Criteria for Terms in a Language of Thought". Synthese. 117 (1): 95–131. doi:10.1023/A:1005077508102. S2CID   595786.
  9. ↑ Rupert, Robert D. (2001). "Coining Terms in the Language of Thought: Innateness, Emergence, and the Lot of Cummins's Argument against the Causal Theory of Mental Content". The Journal of Philosophy. 98 (10): 499–530. doi:10.2307/3649467. JSTOR   3649467.
  10. ↑ "Mental Representations and Millikan's Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality?". ResearchGate.
  11. ↑ Rupert, Robert D. (June 2, 2008). "Ceteris ParibusLaws, Component Forces, and the Nature of Special-Science Properties 1". Noûs. 42 (3): 349–380. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2008.00685.x.
  12. ↑ Rupert, Robert D. (2004). "[PDF] Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition | Semantic Scholar". doi:10.5840/JPHIL2004101826. S2CID   170184290.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. ↑ "APA PsycNet". psycnet.apa.org.
  14. ↑ "Robert D. Rupert: Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind".
  15. ↑ "Empirical Arguments for Group Minds: A Critical Appraisal".
  16. ↑ "Minding One's Cognitive Systems: When Does a Group of Minds Constitute a Single Cognitive Unit?".
  17. ↑ "Group Minds and Natural Kinds".
  18. ↑ Fox, Deborah. "Robert Rupert - There Is No Personal Level: On the Virtues of a Psychology Flattened from Above".
  19. ↑ "Embodied knowledge, conceptual change, and the a priori; or, justification, revision, and the ways life could go".
  20. ↑ Carter, J. Adam; Rupert, Robert D. (April 2, 2020). "Epistemic value in the subpersonal vale". Synthese. 198 (10): 9243–9272. doi: 10.1007/s11229-020-02631-1 .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.