Beer’s rich and rigorous attempt at dismantling old and deeply entrenched prejudices in cognitive science through the painstaking analysis of an evolved agent is more than welcome—especially so after a decade or more of not-quite-delivered promises from the dynamical systems approach to cognition. We are broadly in sympathy with the perspective Beer espouses, but we want to invite the author to...

themajor problem of the present article is to investigate relation betweenepistemological behaviorism and epistemological pluralism or relativism. can webelieve in epistemological behaviorism and set aside representationalism andthe same time we reject relativism and believe that the concept of truth playsthe key role in our understanding of the world and of the mind of agents. inthis article, ...

The major challenge posed to all those seeking to explain semantic properties of natural language is the pervasive dependence on context for the way in which expressions are understood. This chapter surveys the emergence of formal models of semantics against the background of the new emphasis in linguistics during the 1950’s of formal modelling of grammars, and then details the way in which for...

Rocco J. Gennaro [Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, 2007]

Both the American Revolution and the nation which grew out of it adopted as their guiding political philosophy the principles of representationalism and accountability: Decisions of governing political and social policy are to be made, for the most part, by those who are both representative of and accountable to the populace.1 To be sure, those who framed our Constitution never contemplated eit...

The Inverted Earth case has seen fierce debate between Ned Block, who says it defeats the causal-covariational brand of wide representationalism about qualia, and Michael Tye and Bill Lycan, who say it does not. The debate has generated more heat than light because of a failure to get clear on who is supposed to be proving what, and what premises can be deployed in doing so. I argue that a corr...