Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Emotion

By Richardson, Louise

As befits the variety of roles that emotion plays in our lives, emotion is a topic of consideration in a variety of areas of philosophy and this is ...

Perception

By Logue, Heather

If you want to get to grips with philosophy of perception, the best place to start is M.G.F. Martin’s entry on (you guessed it) perception! ...

Action

By Hornsby, Jennifer

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning ...

Action

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning ...

Akan philosophical psychology

By Wiredu, Kwasi

The word Akan refers to the Twi-speaking people of southern and central Ghana. Akan traditional philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the person. It has cosmological ramifications, ...

Akrasia

By Steward, Helen

The Greek word ‘akrasia’ is usually said to translate literally as ‘lack of self-control’, but it has come to be used as a general term for the phenomenon ...

Anomalous monism

By McLaughlin, Brian P.

Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental ...

Awareness in Indian thought

By Phillips, Stephen H.

Classical Indian schools all stake out positions on awareness, its intrinsic nature, its place in the causal processes crucial to human accomplishment, its relations to objects in the ...

Behaviourism, analytic

By Braddon-Mitchell, David

Analytical behaviourism is the doctrine that talk about mental phenomena is really talk about behaviour, or tendencies to behave. For an analytical behaviourist, to say that Janet desires ...

Bodily sensations

By Martin, M.G.F.

Bodily sensations are those feelings, or sensory experiences, most intimately associated with one’s body: aches, tickles; feelings of pain and pleasure, of warmth, of fatigue. Many philosophers contrast ...

Chinese room argument

By Gulick, Robert Van

John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ argument aims to refute ‘strong AI’ (artificial intelligence), the view that instantiating a computer program is sufficient for having contentful mental states. Imagine a ...

Cognition, infant

By Gopnik, Alison; Meltzoff, Andrew N.

In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant’s initial representation of the world ...

Cognitive architecture

By Pylyshyn, Zenon W.

Cognitive architecture involves the properties of mental structures and mental mechanisms that do not vary when people have different goals, beliefs, precepts or other cognitive states. A serious ...

Cognitive development

By Keil, F.C.; Gutheil, G.

Psychological research of the last two decades has produced a surge of surprising results regarding cognitive development in children that has challenged a number of traditional philosophical assumptions ...

Cognitive pluralism

By Ramsey, William

Cognitive pluralism refers to the very different ways in which people engage in cognitive activity in general, and reasoning in particular. Cognitive pluralism does not focus upon differences ...

Colour and qualia

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Colour and qualia

By Levine, Joseph

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Common-sense reasoning, theories of

By Horty, John

The task of formalizing common-sense reasoning within a logical framework can be viewed as an extension of the programme of formalizing mathematical and scientific reasoning that has occupied ...

Concepts

By Rey, Georges

The topic of concepts lies at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of mind. A concept is supposed to be a constituent of a thought (or ‘proposition’) rather ...

Connectionism

By McLaughlin, Brian P.

Connectionism is an approach to computation that uses connectionist networks. A connectionist network is composed of information-processing units (or nodes); typically, many units process information simultaneously, giving rise ...

Content, indexical

By Bach, Kent

Many of our thoughts are about particular individuals (persons, things, places,…). For example, one can spot a certain Ferrari and think that it is red. What enables this ...

Content, non-conceptual

By Crane, Tim

To say that a mental state has intentional content is to say that it represents features of the world. The intentional content of a belief can be characterized ...

Content, non-conceptual

A mental state has intentional content when it represents features of the world. The intentional content of a belief can be characterized in terms of concepts: the content ...

Content: wide and narrow

By Bach, Kent

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, ...