Flanagan - The Science of The Mind 2e.pdf - psF - DarkDream

Acknowledgments

I began writing this book during the academic year 1980 - 1981 while

I was on leave from Wellesley College and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard

University . Many people have helped me get from the first draft to

the book you now have before you .

Roger Brown , Patricia Kitcher , Richard Lerner , John Macnamara , and

James Moor read the earliest draft and gave valuable guidance .

David Pillemer , Jerry Samet , Kathryn Tolbert , and Ken Winkier gave

sage advice on parts of later drafts.

Howard Gardner , Michel Grimaud , Robert Simon , Barbara Von

Eckardt , Sheldon White , and Jeremy Wolfe read the next to penultimate

version and made many helpful suggestions .

Jonathan Adler and Joyce Walworth provided constant support and

thoughtful criticism . The two of them performed every service from

helping me get my arguments in shape to reuniting split infinitives . I

owe them my deepest thanks.

Karen Olson and Susan Sawyer helped with the bibliography , and

Harry and Betty Stanton , my editors , helped make what ' was already

an intellectually and personally exciting process even more so.

In addition to my gratitude to Wellesley College for supporting the

leave during which the book was first conceived and to Harvard University

for housing me during that year , I owe thanks to many colleagues

at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciencesat Stanford

University , where I spent the summer of 1979 working out several of

the ideas on the connection ~ etween moral philosophy and moral psychology

which appear in this book. Thanks also to many colleagues

who participated in Jerry Fodor ' s Institute on " Psychology and the

Philosophy of Mind " at the University of Washington in Seattle during

the summer of 1981 for helping shape my thinking on some of the

philosophical issuesin cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence .

I am grateful to the Council for Philosophical Studies , the National

Endowment for the Humanities , and the Mellon Foundation for various

research grants which helped to support this project . Last but not least ,

Acknowledgments

thanks to my good friend and constant companion Wellesley ' s DEC -

SYSTEM - 20 for many thousands of conversations in EMACS , the language

we both understand.

Wellesley , Massachusetts

July 1983

Preface to the Second Edition

I was very gratified by the reception to the first edition of TheScience

of the Mind . By the time of the fifth printing , it became clear that a

second edition should be produced to keep readers abreast of some

recent developments in mind science. The original discussion of AI

was outdated becauseof new work in connectionism and parallel distributed

processing . Chapter 6 has been substantially revised to reflect

these exciting new developments , and minor revisions have

been made in all the other chapters . The other major change involves

the addition of the new chapter " Consciousness. " This chapter reflects

my most recent thinking about this the hardest problem in the

scienceof the mind . I taught a seminar on consciousnessin the spring

of 1989 and had as visitors Dan Dennett , Mike Gazzaniga , Pat

Kitcher , Carolyn Ristau , Georges Rey , David Rosenthal , and Bob Van

Gulick . I am grateful to them for inspiring me to give the problem of

consciousnessa stab . Their ideas are reflected in the new chapter at

many points . I am also grateful to the Sloan Foundation for making

these visits possible . Two colleagues from Wellesley ' s psychology department

and fellow members of our cognitive science group , Margery

Lucas and Larry Rosenblum ( now at the University of California

at Riverside ) , and my colleague from philosophy , Ken Winkier , also

participated in the seminar. I thank them and the wonderful group

of students who shared in the excitement . This second edition is dedicated

to the memory of my beloved brother Peter. He enriched my

life and the lives of our entire family beyond description .

Wellesle , Massachusetts

May 1990

Introduction

Psychology , according to the standard fable , severed its connection

with philosophy in 1879 and became a science. Armchair speculation

was abandoned in favor of a rigorous empirical approach to the study

of mind . Metaphysics and epistemology thus remained the harmless

amusements of fundamentally unrealistic minds , while psychologists

got on with studying the real thing .

Fortunately , the separation has not lasted. Thanks in part to the

recent surge of interest in the cognitive sciences , as well as to a trend

toward a more naturalistic style of philosophy , we are seeing the reemergence

of an exciting and fruitful alliance among philosophers ,

psychologists , and mind scientists generally . This book is intended as

a contribution to this renewed alliance. In it I try to sort out the various

ways in which philosophical assumptions appear in , affect , afflict , and

illuminate the scienceof mind . Conversely , I examine the implications

the science of mind has for traditional philosophical concerns.

Some of the philosophical issues I discuss have received their most

vivid formulations and have taken their most surprising turns within

psychological theories , such as the problem of self - knowledge in psychoanalysis

and the problem of the unity of consciousnessin cognitive

psychology . Other traditional philosophical questions have been declared

solved or dissolved by psychological theories , such asthe problem

of free will in behaviorism , the question of the incorrigibility of introspection

in cognitive psychology , and the mind - body problem in

artificial intelligence . My overall goal is to bring out the way philo -

sophical concerns figure within psychology and to indicate the contribution

psychology makes to the solutions of some reputedly

unsolvable philosophical conundrums .

I think of science , especially the human science , as having a narrative

structure. I mean this in two senses. First , individual theories of mind

are often fruitfully read as stories about what the mind is or would be

like if certain assumptions about it proved to be true. Second , the

histories of psychology and philosophy of mind , taken together , com -

xiv Introduction

prise a series of chapters among which there is intelligible interplay

between earlier and later chapters . Furthermore , the narrative , taken

asa whole or in terms of its major episodes , involves all sorts of drama.

There are the tragic theoretical flaws originating in unarticulated but

seemingly noble philosophical assumptions ; there are moments when

theoretical singlemindedness born of shallow but honest commitment

to a vision pays great dividends ; there are the " reinventions of the

question

ably great thinkers .

My views on the narrative structure of scienceand my abiding conviction

that there is much to be learned from great thinkers , even if

their theories are now considered wrong or outdated , help explain

the structure of this book . I examine critically the ways in which important

philosophical issues arise within several distinct theoretical

traditions . I find it most useful to organize discussion around the

views of some major figure , and have done so in all but three cases.

Within the fields of cognitive scienceand Artificial Intelligence there

are no agreed - upon single representatives . And no one has emerged

to provide " the one true theory " of consciousness. Overall , the cast

of characters includes Rene Descartes , William James , Sigmund

Freud , B. F. Skinner , Jean Piaget , Lawrence Kohlberg , a mixed lot of

philosophers of mind , cognitive psychologists and members of the

artificial intelligentsia , and one evolutionary biologist , E. O . Wilson .

I will have succeeded by my own lights if I provide an account of

the scienceof the mind that indicates just how philosophically rich its

theories are and an account of the philosophy of mind that locates

many of its main problems and concerns in the actual theorizing of

mind scientists . For the reader, going through the book sequentially is

the best strategy , but I have tried to make each chapter stand more or

less on its own so that the book can be read in any order without a

major loss to the overall project . In order to assist the uninitiated , I

have listed several useful introductions to the material under discussion

at the foot of the first page of each chapter , and I have included a list

of suggestedreadings at the end of each chapter .

question

wheel " born of forgetfulness , or commission of Santayana ' s sin of

failing to attend to history ; and there are the moments of un

ably

great insight by un

Flanagan - The Science of The Mind 2e.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: