USYD Philosophy Postgraduate Work-In-Progress Seminar Bruce Long: "ISM: A Low Level Causal-Internalist Informational Theory of Mind and Mental Representation."
Monday the 9th of August, 3.30-5pm, Philosophy Common Room (Main Quad, University of Sydney) "It is common for philosophers to speak about concepts and conceptual content, and about propositions and propositional content as having a relation - or more specifically a cognitive relation - to what an agent believes or knows. Concepts on some theories are broadly taken to be the contents of thought, but there are numerous views about how they are constitued and structured. Some theorists regard concepts as modes of presentation (for example Fodor Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, 1998) and there is significant debate about how concepts are structured. Propositions are said to be whatever it is that is the content of a linguistic assertion independent of what language or sentence structure is used to express the assertion, and are also regarded as the object of thought - that at which doxastic states are directed at or which, when taken in conjunction with factors such as truth and falsity and mental assent. I will argue that concepts and propositions and their structures can and should both be analysed and abstractly modelled (in the scientific sense of structured representation) in informational terms, and that in conjunction with a coherent metaphysics of information, this approach reveals a general ontic basis and explanatory story for the structure of concepts and propositions, and suggests that both constitute different abstracta applied to the same informational mechanisms for different purposes." Everyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to present or require further information, please contact Nick Malpas at [email protected] The format is 30 minutes for presentations followed by 1 hour of discussion. Since the primary aim of this seminar is to generate discussion, presentations need not be particularly polished or formal.
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