Thinking take place in a mental language.
This language consists of a system of representations that is physically realized in the brain of thinkers.
Thinking is not proceeding from thoughts to thoughts in arbitrary fashion: thoughts that are causally connected are in some fashion semantically (rationally, epistemically) connected too. If this were not so, there would be little point in thinking
What one gets when one 'thinks' is a series of representations all such representations have a linguistic shell. If we endeavour to get to the kernel, the essence that is inside the shell we that that too has has a linguistic covering.
If we care to look back we find that Descartes was completely puzzled by just this rational character and semantic coherence of thought processes so much so that he failed to even imagine a possible mechanistic explication of it. He thus was forced to appeal to Divine creation. But we can now see/imagine at least a possible mechanistic/naturalistic scenario.
This language consists of a system of representations that is physically realized in the brain of thinkers.
Thinking is not proceeding from thoughts to thoughts in arbitrary fashion: thoughts that are causally connected are in some fashion semantically (rationally, epistemically) connected too. If this were not so, there would be little point in thinking
What one gets when one 'thinks' is a series of representations all such representations have a linguistic shell. If we endeavour to get to the kernel, the essence that is inside the shell we that that too has has a linguistic covering.
If we care to look back we find that Descartes was completely puzzled by just this rational character and semantic coherence of thought processes so much so that he failed to even imagine a possible mechanistic explication of it. He thus was forced to appeal to Divine creation. But we can now see/imagine at least a possible mechanistic/naturalistic scenario.
And we find that thinking is a Syntactic Engine Driving a Semantic Engine, this may appear to some as very AI and that is because it is. So we come to the hypothesis that the brain is a kind of computer trafficking in representations in virtue of their syntactic properties.
syntax = the study of the rules for the formation of grammatical sentences in a language.
semantics = the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning,of a word, sign, sentence, etc.
The Formalist Motto:
If you take care of the syntax of a representational system, its semantics will take care of itself.
So we have in (Dennet's) words a syntactically driven engine preserving semantic properties of its processes, i.e. driving a semantic engine
But where do the semantic properties of the mental representations come from in the first place? How can they mean anything?
Brentano's bafflement was with the intentionality of the human mind,
But if we go deeper, how at the
level of atomic symbols (non-logical primitives): how do the atomic symbols represent what they do? CONCEPTS The basic idea lies in so-called functional or conceptual role semantics, according to which a concept is the concept it is precisely in virtue of the particular causal/functional potential it has in interacting with other concepts. Each concept may be thought of as having a certain distinctive set of epistemic/semantic relations or liaisons to other concepts. We can conceive of this set as determining a certain “conceptual role” for each concept. We can then take these roles to determine the semantic identity of concepts: concepts are the concepts they are because they have the conceptual roles they have; that is to say, among other things, concepts represent whatever they do precisely in virtue of these roles. The idea then is to reduce each conceptual role to causal/functional role of atomic symbols.
The above thinking is completely silent about consciousness and the problem of qualia and consciosuness.
Brentano analyzed the basic form of the information processing models developed to account for three types of cognitive phenomena: perception as the fixation of perceptual beliefs,concept learning as hypothesis formation and confirmation, and decision making as a form of representing and evaluating the consequences of possible actions carried out in a situation with a preordered set of preferences. He rightly pointed out that all these psychological models treated mental processes as computational processes defined over representations.
The Formalist Motto:
If you take care of the syntax of a representational system, its semantics will take care of itself.
So we have in (Dennet's) words a syntactically driven engine preserving semantic properties of its processes, i.e. driving a semantic engine
But where do the semantic properties of the mental representations come from in the first place? How can they mean anything?
Brentano's bafflement was with the intentionality of the human mind,
But if we go deeper, how at the
level of atomic symbols (non-logical primitives): how do the atomic symbols represent what they do? CONCEPTS The basic idea lies in so-called functional or conceptual role semantics, according to which a concept is the concept it is precisely in virtue of the particular causal/functional potential it has in interacting with other concepts. Each concept may be thought of as having a certain distinctive set of epistemic/semantic relations or liaisons to other concepts. We can conceive of this set as determining a certain “conceptual role” for each concept. We can then take these roles to determine the semantic identity of concepts: concepts are the concepts they are because they have the conceptual roles they have; that is to say, among other things, concepts represent whatever they do precisely in virtue of these roles. The idea then is to reduce each conceptual role to causal/functional role of atomic symbols.
The above thinking is completely silent about consciousness and the problem of qualia and consciosuness.
Brentano analyzed the basic form of the information processing models developed to account for three types of cognitive phenomena: perception as the fixation of perceptual beliefs,concept learning as hypothesis formation and confirmation, and decision making as a form of representing and evaluating the consequences of possible actions carried out in a situation with a preordered set of preferences. He rightly pointed out that all these psychological models treated mental processes as computational processes defined over representations.
Peter Cheevers' short stories are published by Ether Books
http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118
Peter Cheevers' PhD can be found in UK Libraries.
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