s c h o n b e i n w @ c o f c . e d u
selected papers, presentations, or works in progress.
+ 'Language and the (re)structuring of mental representation'. In this paper I wade into the dispute between Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark regarding the impact of language on mental representation. Very roughly, the former holds that language has a profound effect on the structure of mental representation, while the latter does not - language is more of an external representational system that enables us to cognize in certain ways, but not by engendering a system of internal representation that mirrors the structure of language. I side with Wheeler here, and survey some theoretical results in support of the reorganization thesis. I also describe how these results suggest a hybrid approach that preserves much of Clark's position. This is a work in progress.
+ 'Coordinated behavior, emergence, and the explanatory salience of collective representations', presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association, 10 April 2009, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Responding to an argument advanced by Rupert, Huebner argues that there are cases where it is explanatorily salient to attribute collective representations (e.g., group intentional states) - in particular, cases where cognitive activity is distributed across the coordinated behavior of many individuals. In this paper I first provide an alternative interpretation of Rupert's argument that avoids Huebner's initial criticism. I then attempt to salvage Huebner's argument by drawing on Clark's discussion of distributed cognition in ship navigation. However, I argue that this attempt unfortunately fails - more is required to guarantee the explanatory salience of collective representations than emergence grounded in distributed coordinated behavior. My replies to comments are here.
+ 'Can computational simulations of language emergence support a 'use' theory of meaning?' Forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.
+ 'Comments on Wayne Wright's 'Opponent processing and the physical basis of color', Presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, March 2008, New Orleans, LA. Wright attacks Paul Churchland's account of color realism. In these comments, I identify still more problems with that account.
+ 'Comments on Gualtiero Piccinini's 'The mind as neural software', Presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, April 2007, Atlanta, GA.
+ 'Cognition and the power of continuous dynamical systems', Minds and Machines, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2005.
+ 'Review of Michael Cole's Cultural Psychology'. Philosophical Psycholoy, vol. 10, no. 4, 1997
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