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Belief and Cognitive Architecture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

William Ramsey
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame

Extract

Considerable debate in philosophy of psychology has recently focussed upon two central themes. One concerns the ontological status of propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires, the other on the proper computational account of cognitive architecture. In the ontological debate, the two most prominent positions are eliminativism, which claims that commonsense psychology is false because there are no such things as beliefs and desires; and versions of intentional realism, which counters that beliefs and desires actually do exist in the mind/brain. In the cognitive architecture debate, there are again two outstanding views: classical cognitivism, which holds that cognition is something closely akin to symbol manipulation; and parallel distributed processing (or connectionism), which roughly maintains that cognition is the distributed activation of several simple, non-symbolic processing units. Furthermore, in spite of their different topics, the two debates have been linked by a number of authors who suggest that where you stand in the cognitive architecture debate should help determine where you stand in the debate over prepositional attitudes. So, for example, writers like Jerry Fodor have used the plausibility of classical cognitivism to defend a realist interpretation of propositional attitudes, while writers like Steve Stich and myself have argued that certain forms of connectionism support eliminativism.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1992

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References

NOTES

1 See Fodor, Jerry, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 1987), andGoogle ScholarRamsey, William, Stephen Stich and Joseph Garon, “Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the Future of Folk Psychology,” Philosophical Perspectives, 4 (1990): 499533CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Fodor, Jerry and Pylyshyn, Zenon, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis,” Cognition, 28 (1988): 371.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3 Smolensky, Paul, “On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11 (1988): 174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Rumelhart, David and McClelland, James, Parallel Distributed Processing (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 1986), Vol. 2, p. 7–57Google Scholar, and Smolensky, “On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism.”

5 Armstrong, David M., A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).Google Scholar