I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Mar...

Hilary Putnam has made major contributions to philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. In philosophy of mind, he developed the theories of multiple instantiability and functionalism. In philosophy of language, a major contribution of his is semantic externalism. This paper will give a very brief overview of multiple instantiability and functionalism, and then describe semantic externalism...

What is functionalism? Both Silverstein (1987) and Nichols (1984) have analyzed in detail the variety of ways functionalism has been used by linguists. Silverstein made a division into four types of functions, referential and pragmatic: (a) `sense-structure', (b) the `abstract, "sentence"-internal distribution of forms,' (c) the `use of signal forms for purposive, intentional social effect' (d)...

Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that the mind sometimes extends outside the body to encompass features of the environment (HEC). HEC has been criticised by Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa, and Robert Rupert. In this paper, I argue for two claims: (1) HEC is a harder target than those critics have supposed; HEC is entailed by functionalism, a commonly held view in philosophy of mind, and one to w...

In the debate around the extended mind, the special alliance that the extended thesis often has with functionalism usually plays in favor of the former, with functionalism providing support for the extended thesis. Here I want to consider this alliance in the opposite direction: does the extended thesis provide support for functionalism by promoting the need of a level of explanation that is in...

A common objection to deflationism is that it is unable to account for the normative import of truth as a norm for assertion and belief. Most of the versions of truth pluralism agree, against deflationsim that the normativity of truth is a substantive feature of it. Alethic functionalism, as defended by Lynch (2009) includes it among the platitudes characteristic of the role of truth which are ...

During the past decade, the so-called ‘hypothesis of cognitive extension’, according to which the material vehicles of some cognitive processes are spatially distributed over the brain and the extracranial parts of the body and the world, has received lots of attention, both favourable and unfavourable. The debate has largely focussed on three related issues: (1) the role of parity consideratio...

As inherited experience and wisdom from traditional culture, cultural heritage is an important part of modern social life. Using the Neo-classical “Structural Functionalism”, this paper analyzes structural functional changes in Literature Art Cultural Heritage (LACH)1 transition tradition to times. In a society, there are multiple inheritance forms LACH, such as Urban Revitalization, Characteri...

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from repr...