Phil/Psych 447
Office hours (HH368):
M 1:00-2:00; F 12:30-1:30, and by appointment.
Seminar in Cognitive Science
Week 4. Brains and Reality
Alternatives to Constructive Realism
Skepticism. Woody Allen: If everything is an illusion and nothing exists, then
I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Empiricism/positivism
Naive realism
Idealism
Postmodernism
Social constructivism
Mysticism
Relativism
Dimensions of meaning
Reference to things in the world
Relations of representations to other representations
Use in practical contexts
Discussion Questions
- What evidence supports the rejection of skepticism?
- What psychological and neurological evidence undermines the view that we
directly know the world?
- Does the constructive nature of perception and evidence show that reality
is mind-dependent?
- What are the advantages of shifting from thinking of minds and representations
as relational processes rather than things?
- What is the best evidence that reality exists independently of minds?
- Is meaning really multidimensional?
- Are there better materialist alternatives to the identity theory, e.g.functionalism
or eliminative materialism?
- How can our minds develop knowledge of non-perceived reality?
- Is knowledge of causality preverbal and multimodal?
Computational Epistemology
Laboratory.
Paul
Thagard
This page updated Sept.29, 2008