Critical notice

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 271-284

  Ross, Don ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84923268389     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1997.10717480     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. As McClamrock (139) notes, this is even true of Gibson's account of perception, Gibson's own rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. Searle, of course, regularly attacks the idea of framing accounts of the mind in information-processing terms, and is therefore correct in his own view of himself as being at odds with the entire enterprise of cognitive science.
2. Simon, H., 1957. Administrative Behavior New York: Macmillan. (D. Marr, Vision (San Francisco: Freeman 1982); N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1965)
3. O'Nuallain, S., ed. 1988. Representation and Reality Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Live critics of functionalism, such as the Churchlands, or a recent incarnation of H. Putnam, do not attack functionalism of this bland sort. The Churchlands attack functionalism as conjoined with folk psychology, while Putnam rejects a special variant of functionalism, namely, Turing-machine functionalism. See D. Ross for a description of a surprisingly strong version of functionalism with which, it is argued, no one presently has grounds for disagreement (‘Minimal Strong Functionalism,’ Journal of Philosophical Research20 [1995] 237–68). I. Berkeley provides a helpful codicil, situated in the details of current debates in AI, to this argument (‘Connectionism, Tri-Level Functionalism and Causal Roles,’ in Computation, Cognition and Consciousness [New York: John Benjamins, forthcoming]).
4. 86 The philosophical literature also includes thorough analyses of the relationship between the philosophical presuppositions of Marr's theory and the externalism/internalism issue, which McClamrock's discussion does not reflect. See P. Morton, ‘Supervenience and Computational Explanation in Vision Theory,’ Philosophy of Science 60 (1993,–99; F. Egan, ‘Individualism, Computation and Perceptual Content,’ Mind101(1992) 443–59, and ‘Individualism and Vision Theory,’ Analysis541994 258–64
5. 1986. Knowledge of Language New York: Praeger. Later refinements by Chomsky of his own original theory, summarized in may be interpreted as a partial retreat from this overidealization.
6. could possiblyWe may, of course, wish for practical purposes to build systems which accomplish hitherto unachieved feats. In such enterprises, we face the need to explain how the task be performed given some set of environments and time constraints. Here, however, overidealization will be corrected by that most unyielding and reliable of critics, expensive engineering failure.
7. Stillings, N., 1987. “ ‘Modularity and Naturalism in Theories of Vision,’ in ”. In Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural-Language Understanding Edited by: Garfield, J., Vol. 2, 325–32. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. M. Arbib, ‘Modularity and Interaction of Brain Regions Underlying Visuomotor Coordination,’ in Garfield, ed., 333–63; D. Ross, ‘Against Positing Central Systems in the Mind,’ Philosophy of Science57 (1990) 297–312, and Metaphor, Meaning and Cognition (New York: Peter Lang 1993); D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1991); D. Rummelhart, P. Smolensky, J. McClelland, and G. Hinton, ‘Schemata and Sequential Thought Processes in PDP Models,’ in J. McClelland, D. Rummelhart, and the PDP Research Group, eds., Parallel Distributed Processing Vol. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1986) 7–57; A. Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1992); A. Clark, ‘The Kludge in the Machine,’ Mind and Language2 (1987) 277–99
8. I would like to thank Marc Ereshefsky and an anonymous referee for their comments, and, in the second case, bringing to my attention two outright errors, which have since been corrected.