A Dilemma or a Challenge? Assessing the All-star Team in a Wider Context

Alksnis, Nikolai

doi:10.1007/s11406-015-9618-2

Cited by 4 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…But the failure of decades of work on naturalizing intentionality should make us inclined to see an eliminativist stance as the default: that a new strategy for the naturalization of intentionality is worth betting on needs to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Alksnis (2015) is closer to my own view here, offering a pessimistic response to the failure of naturalizing content, by suggesting a break with this literature as a whole. Instead of assuming that all-intelligent behavior requires intentionality, Alksnis suggests that we can take a global anti-content approach such as in the work of Beer (1990Beer ( , 2000 on dynamical systems theory and robotics.…”

Section: Naturalism and The Problem Of Intentionalitysupporting

confidence: 57%

“…While Hutto and Satne have received fifteen replies to their target article (see Hutto and Satne (2015b) for an introduction to the issue), only three responses expressed skepticism that the naturalization of content will succeed (see Abramova & Villalobos, 2015;Alksnis, 2015;Rosenberg, 2015). Despite their inclinations towards eliminativism, however, none of them have criticized Hutto and Satne's characterization of Haugeland's baseball metaphor.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Revisiting the Intentionality All-Stars

Veit¹

2022

Review of Analytic Philosophy

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Eliminativism is a position most readily associated with the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands, denying that there are such things as propositional states. This position has created much controversy, despite the fact that intentionality has long been seen as perhaps the core problem for naturalistic philosophy. There is a more radical interpretation of eliminativism, however, denying not only mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but also intentionality (i.e., aboutness) on a global level. This position traces its contemporary origin back to Quine, but has generally been assumed to undermine naturalism or, worse, to be incoherent by the majority of philosophers who maintain that there clearly are things or mental states that are about others. In a recent paper, Hutto and Satne (2015a) offer an update that tries to revive John Haugeland's baseball analogy from his influential 1990 review paper The Intentionality All-Stars on the state of the game to argue that the failure of Neo-Cartesians, Neo-Behaviorists, and Neo-Pragmatists should urge us to make them work together to naturalize content and "win the game." But Hutto and Satne misunderstand what the game is ultimately about. The goal of the Intentionality All-Stars is not to naturalize content against eliminativism but to defend a naturalist "thirdperson" view of the problem against first-person phenomenalists. For this goal, a naturalist defense of global content eliminativism would equally enable them to emerge victorious. Revisiting Haugeland, I will offer my own analysis of the current state of play to argue that global content eliminativism has not received sufficient attention and deserves a more prominent place in the debate than it currently occupies.

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Section: Naturalism and The Problem Of Intentionalitysupporting

confidence: 57%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the Intentionality All-Stars

Veit¹

2022

Review of Analytic Philosophy

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“…give me to the bottle of soft drink I paid for, and that it is plotting against me, as it always gives my friend his drink but often fails to give me mine. It seems important to be able to state independently of choice or non-scientific observation when intentionality is being correctly ascribed (see Alksnis 2015).…”

Section: Consider One Of Ryle's Examples That Of a Habitual Smokermentioning

confidence: 99%

Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition

Alksnis

Reynolds

2019

Synthese

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“…Radicalizing Enactivism (Hutto & Myin, 2013) was widely criticized for lacking a positive story of what precisely gives rise to content in mature minds (e.g. Alksnis, 2015;Harvey, 2015;Korbak, 2015). Evolving Enactivism was supposed to fill this gap and tell the whole story of how basic minds meet content (according to the subtitle).…”

Section: Natural Origins Of Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Numerous authors have argued this view to be indefensible, first because the HPC argument is flawed, and secondly, because H&M fail to provide a positive research program for cognitive science (e.g. Alksnis, 2015;Harvey, 2015;Korbak, 2015). My focus in this paper will be to review these two worries and evaluate whether H&M's most recent account (in their 2017 book Evolving Enactivism) does address these worries and can be defended against them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsupervised Learning and the Natural Origins of Content

Korbak¹

2019

AVANT

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In this paper, I evaluate the prospects and limitations of radical enactivism as recently developed by Hutto and Myin (henceforth, "H&M") (2013, 2017). According to radical enactivism, cognition does not essentially involve content and admits explanations on a semantic level only as far as cognition is scaffolded with social and linguistic practices. I investigate their claims, focusing on H&M's criticism of the predictive processing account of cognition (dubbed the bootstrap hell argument) and their own account of the emergence of content (the natural origins of content). I argue that H&M fail on two fronts: unsupervised learning can arrive at contentful representations and H&M's account of the emergence of content assumes an equivalent bootstrapping. My case is illustrated with Skyrms' evolutionary game-theoretic account of the emergence of content and recent deep learning research on neural language models. These arguments cast a shadow of doubt on whether radical enactivism is philosophically interesting or empirically plausible.

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A Dilemma or a Challenge? Assessing the All-star Team in a Wider Context

Cited by 4 publications

References 23 publications

Revisiting the Intentionality All-Stars

Revisiting the Intentionality All-Stars

Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition

Unsupervised Learning and the Natural Origins of Content

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