
James FetzerUniversity of Minnesota, Duluth | UMD
James Fetzer
About
145
Publications
8,956
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,260
Citations
Publications
Publications (145)
The propensity interpretation poses an intriguing alternative to the frequency definition for the explication of probability as a physical magnitude. It is intended to provide an explicitly dispositional account of this concept within the context of statistical laws. First systematically advocated by Karl Popper, it has been endorsed - in one form...
Abstract Discovering an adequate explanation for the evolution of consciousness has been described as “the hard problem” about consciousness that we would like to understand. The difficulty becomes compounded by the introduction of such notions as the unconscious or the preconscious as its counterparts, at least for species of the complexity of hum...
The distinguished theologian, David Ray Griffin, has advanced a set of thirteen theses intended to characterize (what he calls)
“Neo-Darwinism” and which he contrasts with “Intelligent Design”. Griffin maintains that Neo-Darwinism is “atheistic” in forgoing
a creator but suggests that, by adopting a more modest scientific naturalism and embracing a...
There are two great traditions in the philosophy of mind that continue to exercise their influence in the age of computing machines. These are the dualistic tradition associated especially with the name of René Descartes and the behavioristic tradition associated with B.F. Skinner. Dualism is strongly anti-reductionistic, insofar as mentality is ta...
The thought that evolution invariably brings about progress deserves consideration, especially in light of the use of optimizing
models of its operation. An extremely interesting collection of papers on evolution and optimality affords a suitable point
of departure. In The Latest on the Best (1987), for example, some who believe that evolution shou...
This paper pursues the question, “To what extent does the propensity approach to probability contribute to plausible solutions
to various anomalies which occur in quantum mechanics?” The position I shall defend is that of the three interpretations –
the frequency, the subjective, and the propensity – only the third accommodates the possibility, in...
The demise of deterministic theories and the rise of indeterministic theories clearly qualifies as the most striking feature
of the history of science since Newton, just as the demise of teleological explanations and the rise of mechanistic explanations
dominates the history of science before Newton’s time. In spite of the increasing prominence of...
Perhaps no principle of reasoning holds more promise for understanding the foundations of scientific inquiry than that of
inference to the best explanation. In its general form, this is a species of inductive inference that involves selecting one member from a set of alternative
hypotheses as the hypothesis providing the best explanation for the av...
Historical Background
The Turing TestPhysical MachinesSymbol SystemsThe Chinese RoomWeak AIStrong AIFolk PsychologyEliminative MaterialismProcessing SyntaxSemantic EnginesThe Language of ThoughtFormal SystemsMental PropensitiesThe Frame ProblemMinds and BrainsSemiotic SystemsCritical DifferencesThe Hermeneutic CritiqueConventions and CommunicationO...
Few nations of the world have a more distinguished philosophical tradition than Finland, and few philosophers have attained
the distinction of Jaakko Hintikka. His research displays a breadth of interest and a depth of analysis that brings a sense
of admiration tinged with envy to most members of the profession. It would be asking too much of anyon...
Luciano Floridi (2003) offers a theory of information as a strongly semantic notion, according to which information encapsulates truth, thereby making truth a necessary condition for a sentence to qualify as information. While Floridi provides an impressive development of this position, the aspects of his approach of greatest philosophical signific...
The distinction between misinformation and disinformation becomes especially important in political, editorial, and advertising contexts, where sources may make deliberate efforts to mislead, deceive, or confuse an audience in order to promote their personal, religious, or ideological objectives. The difference consists in having an agenda. It thus...
empts to answer this question. The paradox of interactionism, in his view, arises from maintaining both that the attributes and structures a cognitive agent uses to conceptualize its environment can be created differently, and that this creation is not arbitrary but somehow constrained by an environment that does not have a pre-existing structure....
ly provides reasonable summaries of the essays, it doesn't come close to suggesting applications of the theoretical work to AI. It may well be that computer scientists ought to be famil- iar with the essays in the book. Most of the essays are, after all, classics. But it is pedagogically naive to think that one can drop, for example, Davidson's "Tr...
An approach to inference to the best explanation integrating a Popperianconception of natural laws together with a modified Hempelian account of explanation, one the one hand, and Hacking's law of likelihood (in its nomicguise), on the other, which provides a robust abductivist model of sciencethat appears to overcome the obstacles that confront it...
An important collection of studies providing a fresh and original perspective on the nature of mind, including thoughtful and detailed arguments that explain why the prevailing paradigm - the computational conception of language and mentality - can no longer be sustained. An alternative approach is advanced, inspired by the work of Charles S. Peirc...
Interpreting Harnad (2001) behavioristically, this commentary contends that the TTT cannot adequately discriminate between thinking things and thoughtless machines. The difference at stake concerns an internal difference with external manifestations that requires an inference to the best explanation for its tentative solution. I thus cast doubt upo...
Interpreting Harnad (2001) behavioristically, this commentary contends that the TTT cannot adequately discriminate between thinking things and thoughtless machines. The difference at stake concerns an internal difference with external manifestations that requires an inference to the best explanation for its tentative solution. I thus cast doubt upo...
In the September 1988 issue of Communcations of the ACM, the primary publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, an article appeared in which I advanced an appraisal of the scope and limits of formal methods to guarantee the reliability of computer system performance. Although intended as a philosophical critique, the response thereby g...
As a professional philosopher, of course, I have become accustomed to the truth that no position is so absurd that some philosopher has not held it. As a human being, of course, I have also had to personally cope with experiences in life that have involved formal systems and syntax processing. Sometimes our professional activities become detached f...
The purpose of this paper is to explore three alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of language and mentality, which accent syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical aspects of the phenomena with which they are concerned, respectively. Although the computational conception currently exerts considerable appeal, its defensibility appears...
Perhaps no aspect of the theory of definitions has become more familiar to students of this subject than that there are really only two ways in which every word that occurs within a language could be defined. The first — that of definitional circularity — arises when the words that occur in a language L are permitted to be defined by means of other...
The idea that human thought requires the execution of mental algorithms provides a foundation for research programs in cognitive science, which are largely based upon the computational conception of language and mentality. Consideration is given to recent work by Penrose, Searle, and Cleland, who supply various grounds for disputing computationalis...
Perhaps no other view concerning the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence has been as widely accepted or as broadly influential as the physical symbol system conception advanced by (1976), where symbol systems are machines — possibly human — that process symbolic structures through time. From this point of view, artificial intelligenc...
The purpose of this article is to show why consciousness and
thought are not manifested in digital computers. Analyzing the
rationale for claiming that the formal manipulation of physical
symbols in Turing machines would emulate human thought, ...
Some theories have such appealing names that their truth virtually appears to be self-evident. The thesis that humans perform deductions by using metal models, for example, invites the generalization that humans may not only reason but also think by means of mental models. Indeed, the notion of a model is sufficiently ambiguous that, in one or anot...
Taking Brian Cantwell Smith's study, “Limits of Correctness in Computers,” as its point of departure, this article explores the role of models in computer science. Smith identifies two kinds of models that play an important role, where specifications are models of problems and programs are models of possible solutions. Both presuppose the existence...
The computational conception of the mind that dominates cognitive science assumes that thought processes involve the computation of algorithms or the execution of functions. Human minds turn out to be automatic formal systems or physical syntax-processing systems. The objection has often been posed that systems of this kind do not possess sufficien...
On January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970 Saul Kripke delivered three lectures at Princeton University. They produced something of a sensation. In the lectures he argued, amongst other things, that many names in ordinary language referred to objects directly rather than by means of associated descriptions; that causal chains from language user to langu...
Cognitive science has been dominated by the computational conception that cognition is computation across representations.
To the extent to which cognition as computation across representations is supposed to be a purposive, meaningful, algorithmic,
problem-solving activity, however, computers appear to be incapable of cognition. They are devices t...
Recent and ongoing developments in science and technology - such as the prevention and treatment of disease through genetics and the development of increasingly sophisticated computer systems with wide-ranging applications - hold out the promise of vastly improving the quality of human life, but they can also raise serious ethical, legal, and publi...
Perhaps no technological innovation has so dominated the second half of the twentieth century as has the introduction of the programmable computer. It is quite difficult if not impossible to imagine how contemporary affairs—in business and science, communications and transportation, governmental and military activities, for example—could be conduct...
Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, by Henry Plotkin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. xviii + 269 pages, $27.95 hardcover. ISBN 0-674-19280-X.
The social exchange theory of reasoning, which is championed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, falls under the general rubric evolutionary psychology and asserts that human reasoning is governed by content-dependent, domain-specific, evolutionarily-derived algorithms. According to Cosmides and Tooby, the presumptive existence of what they call cheat...
The idea that human thought requires the execution of mental algorithms provides a foundation for research programs in cognitive science, which are largely based upon the computational conception of language and mentality. Consideration is given to recent work by Penrose, Searle, and Cleland, who supply various grounds for disputing computationalis...
This anthology consists of twelve studies concerning the theoretical foundations of connectionism, which the series editor, David Rumelhart, characterizes in the “Series Foreword” as “brain-style computation”. In the Preface, the three editors (including Rumelhart) contrast connectionism with Newell and Simon’s conception of “physical symbol system...
Among the most important problems confronting computer science is that of developing a paradigm appropriate to the discipline. Proponents of formal methods - such as John McCarthy, C.A.R. Hoare, and Edgar Dijkstra - have advanced the position that computing is a mathematical activity and that computer science should model itself after mathematics....
My purpose here is to elaborate the reasons I maintain that Salmon has not been completely successful in reporting the history of work on explanation. The most important limitation of his account is that it does not emphasize the critical necessity to embrace a suitable conception of probability in the development of the theory of probabilistic exp...
Recent excitement over the emergence of connectionism as a theory of the brain has been muted by a powerful critique advanced by Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn (1988). The position which they develop assumes that an acceptable account of brain structure must be able to sustain an appropriate model of cognitive function. They introduce what they tak...
Philip Kitcher and Wesley C. Salmon have edited an important anthology of new papers on scientific explanation, a central problem—possibly the central problem—in the theory of science (Kitcher and Salmon 1989). Their collection begins with a comprehensive essay by Salmon that attempts to trace the development of work on this issue from Hempel and O...
Not least among the fascinating issues confronted by computer science is the extent to which purely formal methods are sufficient to secure the goals of the discipline. There are those, such as C. A. R. Hoare and Edsgar Dijkstra, who maintain that, in order to attain the standing of a science rather than of a craft, computer science should model it...
One of the central problems for contemporary philosophy of science is how to reconcile the roles of observation and theory in scientific endeavour. This book develops an explanation that occupies a position between the empiricists and the rationalists, while retaining the strengths of both arguments. Students of the philosophy of science.
No area of contemporary philosophy has been so overrun by “definitions,” “accounts,” “analyses,” and “explications” as has
the theory of knowledge. Ever since Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in 1963 which produced counterexamples to
the “justified true belief” account of “S knows that p,” philosophers have sought to formulate the “right...
We are not interested in whether the animal in question is a bird or not in fact, but whether it is one in law.1
Perhaps no aspect of the theory of definitions has become more familiar to students of this subject than that there are really
only two ways in which every word that occurs within a language could be defined. The first — that of definitional circularity
— arises when the words that occur in a language L are permitted to be defined by means of other...
Traditionally, the word ‘definition’ means something like explicit definition and, mainly in the philosophy of science, a
very limited class of its generalizations. Traditional accounts of definability are often vague and obscure, however, so that
it is not always clear what the word stands for. Hence, it is instructive to place definitions in a mo...
It has been nearly forty years since the publication of ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism.’1 Despite some vigorous rebuttals during that interval,2 Quine’s rejection of analyticity still prevails — in that philosophers en masse have either joined Quine in repudiating the “analytic”/“synthetic” distinction or remained (however mutinously) silent and
made no...
What is identifiability, anyway, and what does it have to do with definitions and definability? The basic intuitive idea is
clear. A concept (say, a one-place predicate P) occurring in a theory T[P] is definable on the basis of this theory iff the theory determines the interpretation of P as soon as the interpretations of the other concepts occurri...
The nature of meaning and the definition of terms has preoccupied philosophers at least since the time of Socrates. The centrality
of language with respect to the construction of arguments and the centrality of arguments to the advancement of philosophy
makes the nature of meaning and the character of definitions of special importance in relation t...
Beliefs and the processes and procedures used to assess them vary quite a bit from person to person. Analytic philosophers
of a certain ilk think they can substantially reduce these kinds of cognitive diversity. They believe that through the process
of defining key terms of moral and epistemic justification they can identify and defend principles o...
Defining is either giving the meaning of words or other linguistic things, which is called “nominal definition” or clarifying
a given meaning, which is a proposition or property or relation, by showing it to be a compound of other propositions or properties
or relations, which is called “real definition”.
Text">
The purpose of this paper is to show how vagueness is relevant to definition and thereby to thought experiments, the methodology The purpose of this paper is to show how vagueness is relevant to definition and thereby to thought experiments, the methodology
of analysis, and substantive philosophical positions. I hope to achieve this goal en...
Cosmides, Wason, and Johnson-Laird, among others, have suggested evidence that reasoning abilities tend to be domain specific, insofar as humans do not appear to acquire capacities for logical reasoning that are applicable across different contexts. Unfortunately, the significance of these findings depends upon the specific variety of logical reaso...
Since much of the debate about the mentality of machines depends upon or arises from analogical reasoning, it might be worthwhile to review what this species of reasoning is all about. Generally speaking, reasoning by analogy occurs when two things (or kinds of things) are compared and the inference is drawn that, since one — the more familiar case...
There are several reasons why the nature of language is fundamental to research in artificial intelligence in particular and to cognitive inquiry in general. One tends to be the assumption — considered in part in Chapter 2 — that thinking takes place in language, which makes the nature of language fundamental to the nature of mental processes, if n...
Perhaps the most important conception that the AI community has yet devised is that of an “expert system”. This involves the implementation of a body of expert knowledge in the form of a computer program in order to make that knowledge available to anyone who has the capability to utilize that program. If we define a domain as a class of problems t...
Ultimately, the key to understanding the character of knowledge representation requires the recognition that knowledge-representation schemes — such as semantic networks, scripts and frames, and the like — have two sides or aspects, which have to be coordinated or synchronized for representation to succeed. Adequately understood, knowledge represen...
One of the most significant results to be derived from studies of this kind concerns the central role of logic in formalizing and understanding different schemes for representing knowledge. Although there are those, such as Minsky, who dispute the suitability of logic for this purpose, their positions tend to derive such plausibility as they posses...
One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject matter turns out to be surprisingly difficult to define. The problem, of course, has two parts, since securing an adequate grasp of the nature of the artificial would do only as long as we were already in possession of a suitable un...
A potentially valuable distinction that might capture at least part of the difference between experts and expert systems has been drawn by Drew McDermott (1981b). McDermott suggests that there is a fundamental difference between finished programs and expert systems. Thus, in explaining the development of the expert system Rl, which is employed to c...
With Chapter 4 as background, we are now in a position to take a closer look at a series of issues in AI with the resources required to clarify and illuminate what is going on from the perspective of the theory of knowledge. It will turn out that the problem of capturing common-sense knowledge has several different facets, not least of which are ar...
One of the principal motives for pursuing an analytical problem-space approach for this investigation is that some of the most influential figures working within this field have gradually evolved in their positions, Fodor especially. Fodor (1987), for example, yields a functional analysis within common-sense psychology, yet he persists in maintaini...
This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human. (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosop...
Incluye bibliografía e índice
The purpose of this paper is to explore three alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of language and mentality, which accent syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical aspects of the phenomena with which they are concerned, respectively. Although the computational conception currently exerts considerable appeal, its defensibility appears...
The author points out that the notion of program verification appears to trade on an equivocation: algorithms, as logical structures, are appropriate subjects for deductive verification; programs, as causal models of those structures, are not. The success of program verification as a generally applicable and completely reliable method for guarantee...
The first part of the book contains papers dealing with AI in relation to the philosophy of language and the theory of mind, and is thus ontological in nature, whereas the second part treats AI in relation to the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, and is thus concerned with methodology. The work is crucial to a fundamental understan...
Perhaps no other view concerning the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence has been as widely accepted or as broadly influential as the physical symbol system conception advanced by Newell and Simon (1976), where symbol systems are machines — possibly human — that process symbolic structures through time. From this point of view, artif...
The contributions to this special collection concern issues and problems discussed in or related to the work of Wesley C. Salmon. Salmon has long been noted for his important work in the philosophy of science, which has included research on the interpretation of probability, the nature of explanation, the character of reasoning, the justification o...
This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and phi losop...
If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation (and its variants), that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. S...