Days 10 - 12: Neurocomputational Reliabilism

•       Review: Traditional Reliabilism

•       Folk Psychology, LOT, Eliminitivism

•       Knowing How & Knowing That

•       Knowledge: Particular and General

•       On Attitudes and Information Processing

•       On Representation

•       Reliabilism without Propositional Attitudes

•       Evaluation

• Read the paper by Fodor and Pylyshyn

Review: Traditional Reliabilism

•       According to Goldman, what is it for a process or method to be reliable?

•       Commitment to truth

•       Commitment to propositional attitudes, especially belief

Folk Psychology, LOT, Eliminitivism

•       What is folk psychology?

•       What are Paul Churchland’s views on it?

•       What is the Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis (as developed by Fodor and Pylyshyn)?

•       LOT as a way of understanding how folk psychology might be true

•       Churchland wants to reconstrue reliabilism without belief or truth (so LOT is rejected, among other things)

Knowing How & Knowing That

•       What is propositional or declarative knowledge, i.e. knowing that?

•       What is procedural, skill, or capacity knowledge, i.e. knowing how?

•       Churchland on know how:

–      Not just motor, also perceptual

–      Many other species (besides homo sapiens) have it

–      Can’t be explained using LOT

Knowledge: Particular and General

•       What is the difference between particular and general knowledge?

•       What is the point of Churchland’s global aphasia example?

•       What is the point of discussing FaceNet in the context of particular and general knowledge?

–      Where is the particular?

–      Where is the general?

On Attitudes & Information Processing

•       More on FaceNet

•       According to Churchland,

–      what is the basic attitude for perceptual knowledge?

–      what is the basic mode of information processing?

•       Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, has been reconstrued; instead of a cognitive move from one set of sentences to another set of sentences, it is said to be a cognitive move from one (set of) vector(s) to another (set of) vector(s); perceptual abduction is vector transformation, not sentence transformation

On Representation

•       What are the vehicles, specific and general?

–      the comparison with maps

–      What does sameness of content amount to?

–      the comparison with maps

–      How do networks portray the world?

–      the comparison  with maps

–      Note well: the comparison with maps seems to do a lot of work

Reliabilism without Propositional Attitudes

•       What sort of attitudes are in use?

•       What takes the place of truth?

•       What is reliability about?

Evaluation

•       Discussion of some possible merits

•       Discussion of the role of knowledge attribution

–      Churchland’s interest in the social (Plato’s Camera); are the requisite tools present to make sense of knowledge attributions?

•       Discussion of maps

–      Some use maps and retain attributions of belief

–      Objections to maps, independent of the issue of keeping or rejecting beliefs

•       Other Considerations