Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition (Bradford Books)

Book Description

In Natural Ethical Facts William Casebeer argues that we can articulate a fully naturalized ethical theory using concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and that we can study moral cognition just as we study other forms of cognition. His goal is to show that we have "softly fixed" human natures, that these natures are evolved, and that our lives go well or badly depending on how we satisfy the functional demands of these natures. Natural Ethical Facts is a comprehensive examination of what a plausible moral science would look like.

Casebeer begins by discussing the nature of ethics and the possible relationship between science and ethics. He then addresses David Hume's naturalistic fallacy and G. E. Moore's open-question argument, drawing on the work of John Dewey and W. V. O. Quine. He then proposes a functional account of ethics, offering corresponding biological and moral descriptions. Discussing in detail the neural correlates of moral cognition, he argues that neural networks can be used to model ethical function. He then discusses the impact his views of moral epistemology and ontology will have on traditional ethical theory and moral education, concluding that there is room for other moral theories as long as they take into consideration the functional aspect of ethics; the pragmatic neo-Aristotelian virtue theory he proposes thus serves as a moral "big tent." Finally, he addresses objections to ethical naturalism that may arise, and calls for a reconciliation of the sciences and the humanities. "Living well," Casebeer writes, "depends upon reweaving our ethical theories into the warp and woof of our scientific heritage, attending to the myriad consequences such a project will have for the way we live our lives and the manner in which we structure our collective moral institutions."

Customer Reviews:

Nice Try.......2005-11-16

Philosophical ethics generally takes the form of deriving moral principles from arguments based on reason alone. The only bow to empirical reality is, in Kant's phrase, "ought implies can"; i.e., a moral principle must be capable of being followed by normal mortals. This position is virtually forced upon philsophers who accept Hume's critique of the "naturalistic fallacy," according to which it is impossible to derive normative principles from empirical facts alone ("is" cannot imply "ought"), or Moore's argument that "the Good" cannot be reduced to a set of descriptions of the natural world.

Casebeer rejects both arguments, and attempts to develop a naturalistic ethical theory from human nature (evolution) and the structure of the human brain (connectionism), arriving at an Aristotelian "virtue theory" in which the virtuous person strikes the appropriate mean between possible extremes of social behavior. Casebeer's argument is an extended and rigorous defense of Paul Churchland's treatment of moral cognition as a "skill" that is learned by example. "Moral knowledge becomes" Casebeer concludes (p. 105) "...knowledge of the structure of our social environment and how to navigate effectively within it."

Casebeer is an intelligent and engaging writer, and there are many very interesting insights and arguments in this book, which I therefore recommend to others interested in ethics. However, I do not believe Casebeer succeeds in defending his position, and indeed, I think it is quite indefensible.

Ethics, for Casebeer, Churchland, and perhaps even Aristotle, is the study of how people should behave if they are to "flourish" in the sense of maximizing their human potential, which is what is meant by "navigating successfully" in society. Ethical behavior is like good manners and appropriate dress, all of which are higher level social skills that allow one to better cultivate the self. It is thus virtually taken for granted that if one knows what is ethically correct, one will naturally follow its precepts (Casebeer follows Aristotle in analyzing "akrasia"---knowing the right thing to do but choosing not to do it---to "weakness of will" or other forms of irrationality).

This view of morality is of some personal and social importance, but does not cover moral choices that involve sacrificing one's personal well-being on behalf of the well-being of others (e.g., voting, participating in a collective action, saving a drowning child, fighting bravely for one's country), or when to behave in certain ways that are personally costly but have higher moral value (e.g., being honest or working hard). Nor does this view cover basic issues of political ethics, such as when is authority justified, what is the proper division of labor between the sexes, is it ethical to buy and sell bodily organs, and should abortion be legal? These fall completely outside the framework of this book.

The relationship between ethics (even of the limited sort entertained by Casebeer) and connectionism is also less obviously important than the author would have us believe. Connectionism as a psychological theory is itself not highly plausible, despite the voluminous writings of its few advocates, since neural nets reflect some but probably not all of brain structure. Moreover, the only implication of connectionism with ethics that I could ascertain from this book (and the writings of Paul Churchland and other connectionists) is that moral teaching is better accomplished by example than by the listing of basic principles. This may be true, but it does not require connectionism and it is hardly an earthshaking insight.

A final point: there is virtually nothing about evolution in this book.

Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation (Debates on Psychological Explanation, V. 2)

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Classical Gas
Classical Gas

Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation (Debates on Psychological Explanation, V. 2)

Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0631197451

Book Description

This volume provides an introduction to and review of key contemporary debates concerning connectionism, and the nature of explanation and methodology in cognitive psychology. The first debate centers on the question of whether human cognition is best modeled by classical or by connectionist architectures. The second centres on the question of the compatibility between folk, or commonsense, psychological explanation and explanations based on connectionist models of cognition. Each of the two sections includes a classic reading along with important responses, and concludes with a specially commissioned reply by the main contributor. The editorial introductions provide a comprehensive survey and map through the debates.

Customer Reviews:

Classical Gas.......2000-04-19

I'm sorry, but the empress is wearing no clothes. Pedantic gobbleygook suitable only for intellectuals and graduate students who want to word drop. One can only imagine the ego it took to compose this massive glob of intellectual wattle.

Classical Gas.......2000-04-19

Deconstructing the Mind (Philosophy of Mind Series)

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stich
misleading title...
"Folk" discussion, anyone?

Deconstructing the Mind (Philosophy of Mind Series)
Stephen P. Stich
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0195100816

Book Description

Over the last two decades, debates over the viability of commonsense psychology have been center stage in both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Eliminativists have argued that advances in cognitive science and neuroscience will ultimately justify a rejection of our "folk" theory of the mind, and of its ontology. In the first half of this book Stich, who was at one time a leading advocate of eliminativism, maintains that even if the sciences develop in the ways that eliminativists foresee, none of the arguments for ontological elimination are tenable. Rather than being resolved by science, he contends, these ontological disputes will be settled by a pragmatic process in which social and political considerations have a major role to play. In later chapters, Stich argues that the widespread worry about "naturalizing" psychological properties is deeply confused, since there is no plausible account of what naturalizing requires on which the failure of the naturalization project would lead to eliminativism. He also offers a detailed analysis of the many different notions of folk psychology to be found in philosophy and psychology, and argues that simulation theory, which purports to be an alternative to folk psychology, is not supported by recent experimental findings.

Customer Reviews:

stich.......2004-11-14

stich is my intro to philosophy professor... his rutgers website is www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich
he's a really amicable guy. i'm sure if you contacted him he'd be happy to chat

misleading title..........2003-10-23

I bought this book as a reference for support in my belief in eliminativism. To the contrary, it turns out to be a very cogent argument in support of a rich and real set of mental processes. The author's logic is impeccable and leads relentlessly to the conclusion that the eliminativists have got things wrong.

I will admit that I initially felt threatened by a confrontation with evidence that mental processes were real. I simply had to take seriously some concepts I thought I had permanently dismissed. Now, I am very relieved to dismiss the vacuous state of dead materialism instead. I feel human again.

I can heartily recommend this book for others who retreat into eliminativism in order to make life simpler. I can understand the selection of a title that draws the attention of precisely the readers who make the mistake of pretending the mind does not exist.

"Folk" discussion, anyone?.......1999-12-26

i'm curently working through "from folk psychology to cognitive science...." looking for others who have or are currently reading this or any other work on similar topics (e.g. content of beliefs, conceptual representation, etc....) if anyone has stich's homepage id love to chat with him....i think that the richness of this work requires some educated discussion, of which there is a paucity in this area.

Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks

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Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks
William Bechtel , and Adele Abrahamsen
Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0631207139

Amazon.com

Neural network theory is shaking up fields as disparate as philosophy and ecology: the paradigm shift is here. The second edition of Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks has been rewritten and restructured to accommodate the profound changes wrought during the '90s burst of research in the field. Authors William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen present their material clearly and accessibly, asking of their readers only a familiarity with algebra and formal logic. Covering the basics of representation, architecture, and rules, they move on to deep and exciting questions about connectionism's implications for artificial intelligence and neuroscience--thought-provoking reading for nearly everyone. The text is stimulating and offers hundreds of routes to further study through its well-integrated bibliography. Connectionism and the Mind is essentially a progress report on a very young discipline; its readers will see the future a little more clearly. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

Connectionism and the Mind provides a clear and balanced introduction to connectionist networks and explores their theoretical and philosophical implications.As in the first edition, the first few chapters focus on network architecture and offer an accessible treatment of the equations that govern learning and the propagation of activation, including a glossary for reference. The reader is walked step-by-step through such tasks as memory retrieval and prototype formation. The middle chapters pursue the implications of connectionism's focus on pattern recognition and completion as fundamental to cognition. Some proponents of connectionism have emphasized these functions to the point of rejecting any role for linguistically structured representations and rules, resulting in heated debates with advocates of symbol processing accounts of cognition. The coverage of this controversy has been updated and augmented by a new chapter on modular networks. Finally, three new chapters discuss the relation of connectionism to three emerging research programs: dynamical systems theory, artificial life, and cognitive neuroscience.

Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (Explorations in Cognitive Science, 6)

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Balanced insight

Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (Explorations in Cognitive Science, 6)
Andy Clark
Manufacturer: Bradford Book
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Parallel distributed processing is transforming the field of cognitive science. Microcognition provides a clear, readable guide to this emerging paradigm from a cognitive philosopher's point of view. It explains and explores the biological basis of PDP, its psychological importance, and its philosophical relevance.

Andy Clark is Dr. of Philosophy at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex.

Customer Reviews:

Balanced insight.......2000-04-29

"Microcognition" is a wonderful book for anyone wanting to understand and cogitate the most heated issues in AI today. The book is written in 1989, so the most prominent issue is that of connectionism versus classical AI. The book gives very good introduction to both paradigms and provides the rader with lots of background material. The book is basically divided into 2 sections, 1) The Mind's-Eye View and 2) The Brain's-Eye View. The discussion is balanced and insightful, and Clark is a wonderful writer. His conclusion in short is that AI research must continue in both the "Mind's-Eye View" (classical AI) strand and the "Brain's-Eye View" (connectionism) strand for the paradigms have different aims.

Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change

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Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change
Andy Clark
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence

ASIN: 0262032104

Book Description

Connectionist approaches, Andy Clark argues, are driving cognitive science toward a radical reconception of its explanatory endeavor. At the heart of this reconception lies a shift toward a new and more deeply developmental vision of the mind - a vision that has important implications for the philosophical and psychological understanding of the nature of concepts, of mental causation, and of representational change.

Combining philosophical argument, empirical results, and interdisciplinary speculations, Clark charts a fundamental shift from a static, inner-code-oriented conception of the subject matter of cognitive science to a more dynamic, developmentally rich, process-oriented view. Clark argues that this shift makes itself felt in two main ways. First, structured representations are seen as the products of temporally extended cognitive activity and not as the representational bedrock (an innate symbol system or language of thought) upon which all learning is based. Second, the relation between thoughts (as described by folk psychology) and inner computational states is loosened as a result of the fragmented and distributed nature of the connectionist representation of concepts.

Other issues Clark raises include the nature of innate knowledge, the conceptual commitments of folk psychology, and the use and abuse of higher-level analyses of connectionist networks.

Andy Clark is Reader in Philosophy of Cognitive Sciences in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, in England. He's the author of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing.

Connectionism and Meaning: From Truth Conditions to Weight Representations (Ablex Series in Artificial Intelligence)

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Connectionism and Meaning: From Truth Conditions to Weight Representations (Ablex Series in Artificial Intelligence)
Stuart A. Jackson
Manufacturer: Ablex Publishing Corporation
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1567501575

Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind (Studies in Cognitive Systems)

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Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind (Studies in Cognitive Systems)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0792314824

Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology (Bradford Books)

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Too early to judge

Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology (Bradford Books)
Terence E. Horgan , and John Tienson
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge Paperback Library)

ASIN: 0262082489

Book Description

Human cognition is soft. It is too flexible, too rich, and too open-ended to be captured by hard (precise, exceptionless) rules of the sort that can constitute a computer program. In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition. In place of the classical paradigm that take the mind to be a computer (or a group of linked computers), they propose that the mind is best understood as a dynamical system realized in a neural network.

Although Horgan and Tienson assert that cognition cannot be understood in classical terms of the algorithm-governed manipulation of symbols, they don't abandon syntax. Instead, they insist that human cognition is symbolic, and that cognitive processes are sensitive to the structure of symbols in the brain: the very richness of cognition requires a system of mental representations within which there are syntactically complex symbols and structure-sensitive processing.

However, syntactic constituents need not be parts of complex representations, and structure sensitive processes need not conform to algorithms. Cognition requires a language of thought, but a language of thought implicated in processes that are not governed by hard rules. Instead, symbols are generated and transformed in response to interacting cognitive forces, which are determined by multiple, simultaneous, (robustly) soft constraints. Thus, cognitive processes conform to soft (ceteris paribus) laws, rather than to hard laws. Cognitive forces are subserved by, but not identical with, physical forces in a network; the organization and the interaction of cognitive forces are best understood in terms of the mathematical theory of dynamical systems.

The concluding chapter elaborates the authors' proposed dynamical cognition framework.

A Bradford Book

Customer Reviews:

Too early to judge.......2006-08-01

This is a very nice book; I'm giving it only three stars because it might ultimately prove to be completely wrong...the classical cog sci vs. connectionism debate is all conjecture at this point.

There are a few things in the book I don't like, such as odd informal and arguably irrelevant scenarios involving playing basketball and feeling the need to go to the refrigerator for a beer. Also I don't like the treatment of defeasible conditionals. To my mind, "If A then, ceteris paribus, B" just means "If A then probably B". That is, E(B|A) is near one. Horgan and Teinson believe that ceteris paribus conditionals are a bona fide logical relation. I'm a non-fan of most non-standard logic. Also, as you can easily program a classical computer with any number of defeasible causal tendencies, I view this discussion as neutral re: their primary thesis.

Which is what? Well, Horgan and Tienson argue that the classical cognitive science approach to mental causation is committed to tractable computability of a state-transition function for mental states at the cognitive level. They then argue against this. What does this mean and why is it significant? Mental representations are (of) concepts. Plainly, the mind must be able to manipulate structured configurations of these representations in ways that respect syntactic structure. In order for a state transition function to be tractably computable at the cognitive level, one ought to be able to look just at the structure of representations being tokened at t plus memory stores and classical transition rules and figure out the structure of representations tokened at t+1. Anyway that's what it means. The question of significance requires some background.

Fodor, Pylyshyn, McLaughlin etc. argued that mental architectures that are connectionist at the cognitive level can't manipulate representations in a way that respects syntactic structure. Their arguments for the most part apply to simple connectist networks having concepts at the nodes interacting in a rather associationistic way. Connectionists say the addition of intervening nodes can result in a total system that respects structure. Classicists respond that, insofar as this happens, the system is just simulating a classical architecture at the cognitive level. Indeed, implementation aside, without a way to differentiate connectionist cognitive architecture from classical cognitive architecture, it's very difficult to even tell what the debate, on its face trench warfare between two facing dogmas, is tangibly about.

Whether or not their position ultimately proves right, Horgan and Tienson's tractable computability condition may be just such a tangible issue. That, I think, is the most significant aspect of their work here...they seem to have provided a way to see what's ultimately at issue.

Connectionism in Context (Artificial Intelligence & Society)

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Connectionism in Context (Artificial Intelligence & Society)

Manufacturer: Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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ASIN: 3540197168

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