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From: cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Subject: Re: Is functionalism dead? (was Is belief a choice? )
References: <Pine.OSF.3.91.950728101907.660A-100000@sable.ox.ac.uk> <806952708snz@longley.demon.co.uk> <3vj8ng$7l5@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 21:10:23 GMT
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In article <3vj8ng$7l5@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>David@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:

>> ...to see that the man  who,  to  a
>> large extent, legitimized 'Cognitive Science', actually  decided,
>> under Quine's influence, that in the end, it just comes  down  to
>> behaviourism.

>This is a paraphrase that is totally unacceptable. See below.

>Putnam came to the (correct) realisation that many of our
>ascriptions of mental states do not MERELY talk about internal
>states.

>All that follows from this is that we abandon Putnam's (or Fodor's
>or anybody's) earlier idea that the semantics of information states
>can be defined ENTIRELY internally. That's Methodological solipsism
>-- a mistaken doctrine which you have more than once mistakenly
>claimed I adhere to.

>I don't know why anyone ever believed it except as a result of
>misconceived philosophical arguments (e.g. based on concept
>empiricism.)

>Just because Putnam discovered this mistake and rejected certain
>forms of cognitivism this does not justify your claiming or implying
>that he refuted all forms of cognitivism, or that cognitivism and
>functionalism in all their forms are wrong.

Thanks, Aaron, for making this clear to me to me at last.  It simply
never entered my head that anyone still alive could possibly be so
silly as to believe that meaning is purely internal, and that the only
possible kind of scientific psychology is behaviourist.  Familiar with
the workings and metaphorical uses of computers, I find the biggest
obstacle to educating myself in philosophy of mind is being unable to
believe the extraordinarily strangled misconceptions that "logic" has
forced upon many otherwise apparently intelligent people in this
field. You have shifted a baffling weight from my mind into my
wastebasket :-)

>I've been trying for some time to characterise a version of
>functionalism that accepts that many descriptions of information
>states intrinsically involve external reference (what some
>philosophers call "broad content"). The job is made easier by the
>fact that software engineering is full of quite well understood
>examples of functionally analysable systems whose information sates
>are not solipsistic, e.g. office automation systems.

What about purposeful devices, such as the famous thermostat (and its
local world)? I like to argue that since the behaviour of *inherently*
purposeful devices (e.g. servomotors as opposed to corkscrews) is most
economically described by including the purpose in the description,
and since (some internal representation of) the purpose is an
essential part of the mechanism by which the behaviour is produced,
then a properly scientific description of the behaviour of the device
*must* include its purpose. It doesn't matter whether the purposeful
device in question was designed by a human mind, or mindless
evolution, the point is that the purpose is part of the
behaviour-generating machinery, and consequently is a useful part of a
scientific description, and an essential part of a scientific
explanation. I feel silly labouring this point, but I'm aware that
some philosophers and scientists have thrown out purpose along with
the subjective bathwater.

Does this help semantically broad-content functionalism?
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@aifh.ed.ac.uk         +44 (0)131 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205
"The mind reigns, but does not govern" -- Paul Valery
