Papers by David Leech Anderson
Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ont... more Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for "tree"-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some contemporary antirealists. This does not mean that the virtual objects lack ontological standing. There is an important sense in which virtual objects are no less real for being mind-dependent.
WORKSHOP Interactive Computer-Based Activities for Undergraduate Cog Sci Instruction: Training in... more WORKSHOP Interactive Computer-Based Activities for Undergraduate Cog Sci Instruction: Training in their Use & Exploring Future Directions in their Development and Dissemination David Leech Anderson (dlanders@ilstu.edu) Department of Philosophy, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4540, Normal, IL 61790-4540 USA Peter Bradley (peter@mcdaniel.edu) Department of Philosophy and Religion, McDaniel College, Westminster, MD 21157USA Gary Bradshaw (glb2@ra.msstate.edu) Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University, P.O. Box 6161, Mississippi State, MS 39762 USA Ruth Eberle (reberle@indiana.edu) Informatics Building, 901 E. 10th St, Bloomington, IN 47408-3912 Kenneth Livingston (livingst@vassar.edu) Psychology Dept, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue Box 729, Poughkeepsie, New York 12604 USA Neil Stillings (nstillings@hampshire.edu) School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA 01002 USA Keywords: Instruction; pedagogy; online experiments; cognitive psychology; ...
Hilary Putnam was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His peers have ca... more Hilary Putnam was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His peers have called him "one of the finest minds I've ever encountered" (Noam Chomsky) and "one of the greatest philosophers this nation has ever produced" (Martha Nussbaum). Standard obituaries covering his "life and times" are available in the mass media. 1 This essay Post (www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-nussbaum/hilary-putnam-1926-2016_b_ 9457774.html).
Functional intentionality" is the dominant theory about how mental states come to have the conten... more Functional intentionality" is the dominant theory about how mental states come to have the content that they do. "Phenomenal intentionality" is an increasingly popular alternative to that orthodoxy, claiming that intentionality cannot be functionalized and that nothing is a mental state with intentional content unless it is phenomenally conscious. There is a consensus among defenders of phenomenal intentionality that the kind of phenomenology that is both necessary and sufficient for having a belief that "there is a tree in the quad" is that the agent be consciously aware of the meaning of "tree" and "quad". On this theory, experiences with a valence-experiences like happiness and sadness, satisfaction and frustration-are irrelevant to intentionality. This paper challenges that assumption and considers several versions of "valent phenomenal intentionality" according to which a capacity for valent conscious experiences is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for intentionality (or both).
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2012
DRAFT: Forthcoming in Realism & Antirealism, ed. William Alston, Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2002 Why God Is Not a Semantic Realist
mind.ilstu.edu
What is the proper interpretation of statements about the external worldthat is, statements abou... more What is the proper interpretation of statements about the external worldthat is, statements about trees, planets, tables, and other of the objects that constitute the world that we inhabit? On the contemporary philosophical scene, traditional theists are among the most vocal ...
Mind & Matter, 2017
Functional intentionality" is the dominant theory about how mental states come to have the conten... more Functional intentionality" is the dominant theory about how mental states come to have the content that they do. "Phenomenal intentionality" is an increasingly popular alternative to that orthodoxy, claiming that intentionality cannot be functionalized and that nothing is a mental state with intentional content unless it is phenomenally conscious. There is a consensus among defenders of phenomenal intentionality that the kind of phenomenology that is both necessary and sufficient for having a belief that "there is a tree in the quad" is that the agent be consciously aware of the meaning of "tree" and "quad". On this theory, experiences with a valence-experiences like happiness and sadness, satisfaction and frustration-are irrelevant to intentionality. This paper challenges that assumption and considers several versions of "valent phenomenal intentionality" according to which a capacity for valent conscious experiences is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for intentionality (or both).
Philosophical Topics, 1992
Failure to recognize the "realistic" motivations for Putnam's commitment to internal realism has ... more Failure to recognize the "realistic" motivations for Putnam's commitment to internal realism has led to a widely shared misunderstanding of Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism. Realist critics of these arguments frequently offer rebuttals that fail to confront his arguments. Simply put, Putnam's arguments --the brains in a vat argument as well as the model-theoretic argument -- are "reductios" that are intended to show that "metaphysical realism itself is not sufficiently realistic". If that claim can be substantiated then Putnam can go on to argue that his own view is, by comparison, more realistic than metaphysical realism.
There is a long and storied history of debates over "realism" that has touched literall... more There is a long and storied history of debates over "realism" that has touched literally every academic discipline. Yet realism-antirealism debates play a relatively minor role in the contemporary study of consciousness. In this paper four basic varieties of realism and antirealism are explored (existential, epistemological, semantic, and ontological) and their potential impact on the study of consciousness is considered.
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2013
According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to a... more According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to as "functional intentionality," a machine can have genuine intentional states so long as it has functionally characterizable mental states that are causally hooked up to the world in the right way. This paper considers a detailed description of a robot that seems to meet the conditions of functional intentionality, but which falls victim to what I call "the composition problem." One obvious way to escape the problem (arguably, the only way) is if the robot can be shown to be a moral patient-to deserve a particular moral status. If so, it isn't clear how functional intentionality could remain plausible (something like "phenomenal intentionality" would be required). Finally, while it would have seemed that a reasonable strategy for establishing the moral status of intelligent machines would be to demonstrate that the machine possessed genuine intentionality, the composition argument suggests that the order of precedence is reversed: The machine must first be shown to possess a particular moral status before it is a candidate for having genuine intentionality.
What is the Model-Theoretic Argument?
The Journal of Philosophy, 1993
... 17 One of Putnam's "sweeping dismissals" of externalism is found i... more ... 17 One of Putnam's "sweeping dismissals" of externalism is found in Realism and Reason (p. xii). 18 I am convinced that Putnam's "Brains in a Vat" argument-if it is inter-preted as a reductio-applies a similar kind of pressure on the realist; cf. ...
American Philosophical Quarterly, 1995
Descartes and Locke were committed to it; virtually all contemporary metaphysical re? alists embr... more Descartes and Locke were committed to it; virtually all contemporary metaphysical re? alists embrace it; even skeptics and antireal ists accept it. The dogma is this://one is a metaphysical realist about the external world, then one ought to be a semantic re? alist ...
Why God Is Not a Semantic Realist * David Leech Anderson What is the proper interpretation of sta... more Why God Is Not a Semantic Realist * David Leech Anderson What is the proper interpretation of statements about the external world-that is, statements about trees, planets, tables, and other of the objects that constitute the world that we inhabit? On the contemporary philosophical scene, traditional theists are among the most vocal defenders of a realist interpretation of such statements. And this for good reason. There seem to be compelling reasons for a theist to think that the truth about the world is to be determined not by how things seem from the human perspective (as those who reject realism typically argue), but by how an omniscient mind knows things to be in themselves, in their brute objectivity. According to this view, if there is such a God, then our claims about the world are properly judged (true or false) by how the world is in itself, not by how things seems to us from our finite epistemic perspective.
This is an extended intellectual obituary for Hilary Putnam.
Philosophy & Theory of Artificial Intelligence, (Ed.) Vincent C. Müller, Springer: New York, NY, pp. 321-333, 2012
"According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to ... more "According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to as “functional intentionality,” a machine can have genuine intentional states so long as it has functionally characterizable mental states that are causally hooked up to the world in the right way. This paper considers a detailed description of a robot that seems to meet the conditions of functional intentionality, but which falls victim to what I call “the composition problem.” One obvious way to escape the problem (arguably, the only way) is if the robot can be shown to be a moral patient – to deserve a particular moral status. If so, it isn’t clear how functional intentionality could remain plausible (something like “phenomenal intentionality” would be required). Finally, while it would have seemed that a reasonable strategy for establishing the moral status of intelligent machines would be to demonstrate that the machine possessed genuine intentionality, the composition argument suggests that the order of precedence is reversed: The machine must first be shown to possess a particular moral status before it is a candidate for having genuine intentionality ."
Journal of Consciousness Studies 19, No. 5–6, pp. 12–39 , 2012
This paper has two main goals. First, it asks whether causality
is an adequate foundation for th... more This paper has two main goals. First, it asks whether causality
is an adequate foundation for those theories of cognition and
consciousness that are built upon it. The externalist revolution has
reconceived all three dimensions of cognition — the semantic, the
epistemological, and the mental — upon a foundation of ‘causal connections of the appropriate type’. Yet these new theories almost completely ignore the long-standing controversies surrounding the very nature of causality, and the very real threat that ‘causality’ may be ill-equipped to do the work required of it. The second goal is to defend a kind of causality, largely ignored, that is grounded in the phenomenally conscious states of cognitive agents. While it is popular to try to reduce consciousness to causality, this is a kind of causality that ultimately
reduces to (phenomenal) consciousness.
American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy & Computers, Fall 2009 9(1), pp. 15-19
Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ont... more Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for “tree”-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some contemporary antirealists. This does not mean that the virtual objects lack ontological standing. There is an important sense in which virtual objects are no less real for being mind-dependent.
American Philosophical Quarterly, 32 pp. 1-11, 1995
There is a dogma about metaphysical realism that is well nigh universal: "If one is a metaphysica... more There is a dogma about metaphysical realism that is well nigh universal: "If one is a metaphysical realist about the external world, then one ought to be a semantic realist about (all) external- world statements". I argue that this dogma should be rejected. It is possible for a metaphysical realist to be a "semantic dualist", holding that some middle- sized object statements receive a realist interpretation, but that most such statements require an antirealist interpretation. To show that a semantically dual language is at least possible, I describe a possible world (The Land of Subscript) whose inhabitants speak a version of English that is syntactically dual. Further I argue that English in the "actual world" is itself semantically dual.
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Papers by David Leech Anderson
is an adequate foundation for those theories of cognition and
consciousness that are built upon it. The externalist revolution has
reconceived all three dimensions of cognition — the semantic, the
epistemological, and the mental — upon a foundation of ‘causal connections of the appropriate type’. Yet these new theories almost completely ignore the long-standing controversies surrounding the very nature of causality, and the very real threat that ‘causality’ may be ill-equipped to do the work required of it. The second goal is to defend a kind of causality, largely ignored, that is grounded in the phenomenally conscious states of cognitive agents. While it is popular to try to reduce consciousness to causality, this is a kind of causality that ultimately
reduces to (phenomenal) consciousness.