Hot Thought: Mechanisms of Emotional Cognition
Due Nov. 29. Late proposals only accepted in case of illness or family emergency.
Two pages, double spaced, 12 point; approximately 500 words.
Contents:
| Approach | Naturalistic | Analytic | Continental | Theological |
| Philosophers | Aristotle, Quine, Dennett | Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke | Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre | Aquinas, Plantinga |
| Methods | Theorizing in cooperation with science | Logico-linguistic analyses | A priori | A priori |
Thoughts are propositional attitudes, where propositions are abstract entities, the meanings of sentences.
There are analytic sentences, true by virtue of meaning.
Thought experiments can reveal conceptual truths, known a priori.
Philosophical problems arise from conceptual confusion and can be eliminated by analysis.
Thoughts are mental representations, which are neural structures that encode aspects of the world.
There is no analytic-synthetic distinction: Quine.
Thought experiments may be useful for generating hypotheses, but have no probative value.
Philosophical progress is made by developing better explanatory theories of knowledge, reality, and morals.
To interpret people, we must see them as largely rational.
Thagard & Nisbett 1983: "Do not judge people to be irrational unless you have an empirically justified account of what they are doing when they violate normative standards."
Computational Epistemology Laboratory.
This page updated Nov. 21, 2005.