Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore by Stephen Utz Walker Percy’s unusual aspirations set his novels apart from most literary attempts to understand profound human problems. He gave meaning to the category of art as inquiry. In the novels, his characters’ eccentric quests treat everyday things as evidence for abstract and…
My chum, Péter Érdi, editor of Cognitive Systems Research, has alerted me to the open access memoir (63 pages) by neuroscience grandee Michael Arbib. Giving me the opportunity to talk to these visitors was one of the ways in which McCulloch contributed more to my graduate education than any other professor at MIT. When I thanked him, he…
The question must arise then: If triadic activity is overt behavior and as such is the proper object of investigation of a factual behavioral science and is not formulable by the postulates and laws of conventional behaviorism, what manner of “postulates” and “laws,” if any, would be suitable for such a science? Or is the…
Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned. Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello in Scientific American Artificial intelligenceDescarteslanguageMichael TomaselloNoam ChomskyPaul IbbotsonPhilosophy of minduniversal grammar
William review of Ryle’s posthumously published On Thinking. I paste in the text below image in case the free access is withdrawn. BTW, Ryle was born on this day in 1900. He was an exceptionally nice man, friendly, generous, uncondescending, unpretentious, and, for a well-known professional philosopher, startlingly free from vanity. . . . he conveyed a…
Here is the intro to Matthew’s article: Where does thinking happen? The obvious and most common answer is “somewhere inside the head.” After all, this is where the brain is safely housed behind seven millimeters of protective armor. However, despite the instinctive appeal of this response, some theoretical camps have been willing to flirt with…
This from The Atlantic – kindly sent my way by Richard Symonds. Artificial intelligenceB.F. SkinnerChomskyCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive sciencecomplexityconsciousnessDavid MarrEmbodied cognitionJohn McCarthyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyNoam ChomskyPhilosophy of mind
