Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic. The rationale for articulating...

This article reviews eight proposed strategies for solving the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP), which was given its classic formulation in Harnad (1990). After a concise introduction, we provide an analysis of the requirement that must be satisfied by any hypothesis seeking to solve the SGP, the zero semantical commitment condition. We then use it to assess the eight strategies, which are organi...

1 Introduction In the philosophy of language, examining the role and significance of derogatory words serves to counter our tendency to divorce theories of meaning from the social settings in which the phenomenon is found, and the communicative acts, attitudes and shared interests they incorporate. 1 Hornsby stresses the significance of this in a recent paper, which will form the basis for disc...

JOHN DILWORTH Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008, USA. (E-mail: [email protected]) [Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007), pp. 369-387. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com] Abstract. Representationalists currently cannot explain counter-examples that involve indeterminate perceptual content, but a double conten...

According to the self-representational theory of consciousness – self-representationalism for short – a mental state is phenomenally conscious when, and only when, it represents itself in the right way. Part of the motivation for this view is a conception of phenomenal consciousness as involving essentially a subtle, primordial kind of self-consciousness. A consequence of this conception is tha...

In a series of papers, Schwitzgebel has attempted to revive the dispositionalist account belief by tweaking it little and claiming previously unconsidered advantage over representationalism. The tweaks are include phenomenal cognitive responses, in addition overt behaviour, manifestations given belief; soften dispositions allowing for dispositional stereotypes. alleged is that dispositionalism ...

Abstract We propose a non-representationalist framework for deep learning relying on novel method computational phenomenology, dialogue between the first-person perspective (relying phenomenology) and mechanisms of models. thereby an alternative to modern cognitivist interpretation learning, according which artificial neural networks encode representations external entities. This mainly relies ...

Chalmers (2004), Wu (2010), and Block (2010) have independently argued that the effect of attention on the content of perception raises a challenge for representationalism. Covert shifts of attention seem to involve a change in the phenomenal character of perception, without a corresponding change in representational content. In this paper, I show that the challenge fails because the arguments ...