Arbitrary Marks

In his 1998 paper, “Language within Our Grasp”, Arbib and his co-author, Giacomo Rizolatti argue that Broca’s area (implicated in human language capabilities) contain mirror neuron systems which are used in gesture recognition. A similar mirror nueron system in monkeys (in what’s called area F5) functions in the same way. Arbib and Rizolatti’s claim, when it comes to language, is that “such an observation/execution matching system provides a necessary bridge from ‘doing’ to ‘communicating’,as the link between actor and observer becomes a link between the sender and the receiver of each message.”

Thus recognizing actions and imitation (and only later on, communication) are the primary building blocks for language, not an innate Chomskian Universal language.

While I may not agree with the Churchlands on everything, I do appreciate their interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. I think these quotes, taken from Patricia Churchland’s book, Neurophilosophy, get at why:

“A theoretical value derived from studying neurological cases, therefore, is their potential for dislodging conventional assumptions…Such data seem to me crucially relevant in coming to understand how deficient folk psychology really is and how little we know of the deeper capacities underlying the known cognitive capacities of the brain…”

At the very least, neurological cases ought to be part and parcel of the thought experiments in philosophy of mind (and they are, much more, since the publication of her text). She talks about blindness denial and one philosopher’s argument that if one is conscious, it is impossible to fail to know you are blind. If empirical data seems to contradict this, then we should be perhaps a bit skeptical about arguments from a priori features, even while we continue to examine the data to be sure it’s represented properly.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to isolate innate characteristics of the brains of homosexual men and women. Earlier studies have focused on parts of the brain which are more or less plastic–that is, they have to do with perception or reproduction, behaviors that may reinforce structural [...]

I’ve been reading Patricia Churchland’s classic intro text, Neurophilosophy, in the evening (alternating between that and the Thomas Covenant series). While I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone–she gets really thick into details which obscure some of the take-away for the generalist–the most recent chapter I read on neuropsychology was tremendously useful.
Take the current media craze [...]

In the third chapter of Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim gives an evaluation of the Cartesian argument that immaterial minds exist.
It’s a view called “ontological dualism” (contrast this with David Chalmer’s “property dualism”) and is problematic for Kim because of trouble with explaining how causation works in this view. However, it is not [...]

A few weeks ago, I picked up Jaegwon Kim’s slim volume Phyicalism, or Something Near Enough and have finished his first chapter, an overview of the philosophical situation.

He calls the two problems of mental causation and consciousness Weltknoten, or a “world-knot” which philosophers haven’t been able to unravel yet. In a nutshell, the problem is that several key claims which seem to be necessary to hold are contradictory:

A week later, here’s the second part of my two-part series on Strawson. His major thesis is that we have cognitive experience, as well as sensory experience. The puzzle about intentionality (where to find the dividing line between humans, thermostats and artificial intelligence) can be resolved by asserting that “all mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena.”

 I’ve talked about intentionality here before, and also some of Galen Strawson’s work. I think he’s interesting because of the way he converges phenomenology and analytic philosophy. In fact, he’s part of the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind compilation I’ve been reading. His essay, “Intentionality and Experience: Terminological Preliminaries” is useful in hacking through some [...]

I’ve been dipping into a relatively recent book published by OUP called Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. During my master’s degree, I took a class on phenomenology at Saint Louis University–it was one of the most difficult mind-benders of a course in my time at UMSL. We read Husserl as well as Brandon. Tough [...]

I’m thankful for my readers because they are often able to point at particular tensions in my thought that I’m aware of, subtly, but that require more propositional attention. Dru’s comment about happiness is one instance of this.

While teaching at the Newberry Library, I’ve been reading Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience. One of the central questions about descriptions of so-called “mystical experience” (so-called because to categorize it begs numerous questions) is whether there is a raw, undifferentiated, phenomenal content to the experience. The basic picture is of having a single experience, in many people, times and cultural contexts, which then gets interpreted through a grid: