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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.
In his book, Existential Cognition: Minds in the World, McClamrock argued for the extreme importance of the external environment (both social and physical) in the determination of almost all varieties of human and animal behavior. His position is that the methodological individualism inherent in many contemporary forms of computational theories of the mind are completely inadequate and that we must look to the interactions between organism and world in order to find "external mechanisms that mediate behavior" as well as the usual internal mechanisms. Borrowing from Herbert A. Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that man's condition of being-in-the-world makes it impossible for him to understand himself by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which he himself is not an integral part.
However, unlike the continental philosophers, McClamrock relies upon results from modern information sciences, biology and cognitive science to support his conclusions about the bounded and embedded nature of consciousness and the mind as a whole. One of his examples, taken from David Marr, discusses the exploitation of local environmental regularities in the control mechanisms of the common fly.
The local surface mediates the signal from brain to wings, illustrating the point that the human nervous system may be said, in a certain sense, to extend to parts of its external environment.
In another example, McClamrock cites the case of a man driving from one destination to another. On the way, he encounters various external signals and stimuli (street names, direction signs, people who provide information when asked, landmarks, etc..) and all of these help him, in many cases are indispensable to, his successfully finding his way from point A to point B. The path he ends up traveling to get to point B from point A is, in any case, partially determined by his environment. In the case of ants, this is even clearer. When we look at the tracks that ants make as a result of their movements, they seemed to be highly ordered and preplanned. But, in fact, an ant will usually encounter unforeseen and unforeseeable obstacles as it makes its way along from one point to another. At each obstacle, it will be constrained to make a choice that it otherwise wouldn't. The path that it ultimately travels will therefore be heavily determined by its exterior environment, as well its behavior.
McClamrock's article "Emergence Unscathed: Kim on Non-Reducible Types" took on Jaegwon Kim's famous "causal powers" argument against multiple realizability. [1] Kim argued that multiple realizability conflicts with fundamental constraints on the definition of kinds and with general rules of scientific taxonomy. Kim's argument is based on two essential premises:
From this it follows that:
The second premise is
From all of this, it follows, according to Kim, that "if mental kinds are multiply realizable, then they are disqualified as proper scientific kinds...because they are realized by diverse physical causal kinds." [2]
McClamrock flatly rejected Kim's claim that "instances of M that are realized by the same physical base must be grouped under one kind". It is a consequence of token materialism that a complete specification of the causal powers of a mental kind at a certain time will be a complete specification of the causal powers of the physical state which implements it. But Kim's assertion only follows if we assume that the only specification of causal kinds can be in terms of causal powers of tokens. McClamrock suggested understanding higher-level causal powers as simply more general and abstract characterizations of the lower-level causal powers implemented in the physical structure of a system. There are many varieties of causal taxonomy classifying things according to various kinds of causal powers they possess. For example, a taxonomy of orbiting bodies may specify the causal powers of objects in terms of mass, position and velocity – abstracting from the body's chemical composition, geology or microbiotic agglomerations. Such an abstract and incomplete characterization of the causal powers of a system makes it possible to group together physically type-distinct instances of the higher-level kind (in this case, planets, stars and other orbiting bodies).
Moreover, taxonomies in computer science are typically characterized by such abstractions. What is of interest at the level of information processing are such things as registers and microprogramming operations, not the causal powers of the material structure of semiconductors.
Internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
In philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role, which means, their causal relations with other mental states, sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
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." Until his death in 2017 he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University.
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.
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism.
In philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, cognitive closure is the proposition that human minds are constitutionally incapable of solving certain perennial philosophical problems. Owen Flanagan calls this position anti-constructive naturalism or the "new mysterianism" and the primary advocate of the hypothesis, Colin McGinn, calls it transcendental naturalism acknowledging the possibility that solutions may be knowable to an intelligent non-human of some kind. According to McGinn, such philosophical questions include the mind-body problem, identity of the self, foundations of meaning, free will, and knowledge, both a priori and empirical.
Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that non-physical, mental properties exist in, or naturally supervene upon, certain physical substances.
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).
Multiple realizability, in the philosophy of mind, is the thesis that the same mental property, state, or event can be implemented by different physical properties, states, or events. Philosophers of mind have used multiple realizability to argue that mental states are not the same as — and cannot be reduced to — physical states. They have also used it to defend many versions of functionalism, especially machine-state functionalism. In recent years, however, multiple realizability has been used to attack functionalism, the theory that it was originally used to defend. As a result, functionalism has fallen out of favor in the philosophy of mind.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others, the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology. In the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy.
In epistemology and the philosophy of mind, methodological solipsism has at least two distinct definitions:
Type physicalism is a physicalist theory in the philosophy of mind. It asserts that mental events can be grouped into types, and can then be correlated with types of physical events in the brain. For example, one type of mental event, such as "mental pains" will, presumably, turn out to be describing one type of physical event.
Physical causal closure is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have pure physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim, or that "physical effects have only physical causes" — Agustin Vincente, p. 150.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.
Special sciences are those sciences other than fundamental physics. In this view, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience—indeed, all sciences except fundamental physics—are special sciences. The status of the special sciences, and their relation to physics, is unresolved in the philosophy of science. Jerry Fodor, for instance, has argued for strong autonomy, concluding that the special sciences are not even in principle reducible to physics. As such Fodor has often been credited for having helped turn the tide against reductionist physicalism.
The mind–body problem is a debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the brain as part of the physical body. It is larger than, and goes beyond, just the question of how mind and body function chemically and physiologically, as that question presupposes an interactionist account of mind–body relations. This question arises when mind and body are considered as distinct, based on the premise that the mind and the body are fundamentally different in nature.
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.
Tom Polger is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati in the United States. His research focuses on naturalistic accounts of the metaphysics of mind. Polger is a past president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Peter Ulric Tse is an American cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College. He directs the NSF EPSCoR Attention Consortium. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
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