Academic literature on the topic 'Mentalistic explanation'
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Journal articles on the topic "Mentalistic explanation"
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Buckareff, Andrei A., and Jing Zhu. "The Primacy of the Mental in the Explanation of Human Action." Disputatio 3, no. 26 (2009): 73–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/disp-2009-0001.
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Abstract The mentalistic orthodoxy about reason-explanations of action in the philosophy of mind has recently come under renewed attack. Julia Tanney is among those who have critiqued mentalism. The alternative account of the folk practice of giving reason-explanations of actions she has provided affords features of an agent’s external environment a privileged role in explaining the intentional behaviour of agents. The authors defend the mentalistic orthodoxy from Tanney’s criticisms, arguing that Tanney fails to provide a philosophically satisfying or psychologically realistic account of reason-explanation of action.
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Schimmel, Paul. "Mind Over Matter? II: Implications for Psychiatry." Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 35, no. 4 (2001): 488–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1614.2001.00914.x.
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Objective: To explore concepts of causality within the mind and aetiology of psychiatric disorders in the light of the proposed formulation of the mind–brain problem. Method: Taking the two propositions of this formulation as ‘first principles’ a logical analysis is attempted. Results and conclusions: Neural activity cannot in principle be regarded as causing mental activity, or vice versa. Causal processes are most coherently conceptualised in terms of the ‘mind–brain’ system. Determination of causal and aetiological effects will always necessitate consideration of contextual evidence. Because of the ‘explanatory gap’ between explanation in neurophysiological terms and ‘mentalistic’ terms, whenever formulation in mentalistic terms is possible this will carry greater explanatory power; that is, it will carry meaning in the way a neural formulation cannot.
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Sumonja, Milos. "Semantic mentalism, intesubjecitivity and metaphysics of normativity." Theoria, Beograd 60, no. 4 (2017): 195–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/theo1704195.
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The subject of this paper is Kripkenstein's critique of mentalistic explanation of linguistic normativity, as well as his intersubjective conception of normativity. The author argues against dominant intepretation of Kripkenstein's view on meaning as social metaphysics of normativity, the theory which reduces language rules to community consensus. It is pointed out that Kripkenstein's rejection of mentalistic thesis that meaning is some kind of mental state in the head of a speaker results in anti-reductionistic character of intersubjective conception of normativity, which describes how we speak about difference between correct and incorrect uses of language in everyday life, but does not say what that difference is, or what it consists of. Hence, it is concluded that, according to Kripkenstein, community is the only normative tribunal in matters of language, but it's not the supreme judge because, rather than passing irrevocable judgments on correctness of individual speech acts, community actually constitutes a framework that enables the normative disputes between its members.
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Gustafsson, Martin. "Quine on Explication and Elimination." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cjp.2006.0001.
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In section 53 of Word and Object, Quine argues that the set-theoretical explications of the concept of the ordered pair of f ered by mathematicians such as Wiener and Kuratowski give us a model for the clarification of philosophically troublesome ideas. According to Quine, ordered pairs might seem indispensible in science. But at the same time they have appeared unclear to many philosophers, who have argued that an extensional treatment of the logic of relations can be satisfactory only to the extent that we can give a transparent and substantial explanation of what an ordered pair really is. Quine cites Peirce as someone who tries to meet this sort of demand. The explanation Peirce offers is mentalistic, but it is not the mentalism that Quine regards as the most fundamental problem with Peirce's account.
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Haslam, Nick. "Dimensions of Folk Psychiatry." Review of General Psychology 9, no. 1 (2005): 35–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.1.35.
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This article presents a social-cognitive model of laypeople's thinking about mental disorder, dubbed “folk psychiatry.” The author proposes that there are 4 dimensions along which laypeople conceptualize mental disorders and that these dimensions have distinct cognitive underpinnings. Pathologizing represents the judgment that a form of behavior or experience is abnormal or deviant and reflects availability and simulation heuristics, internal attribution, and reification. Moralizing—the judgment that individuals are morally accountable for their abnormality—reflects a form of intentional explanation grounded in everyday folk psychology. Medicalizing represents the judgment that abnormality has a somatic basis and reflects an essentialist mode of thinking. Psychologizing—ascribing abnormality to psychological dysfunction—reflects an emergent form of mentalistic explanation that is neither essentialist nor intentional. Implications for psychiatric stigma and for cross-cultural variations in understandings of the psychiatric domain are discussed.
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Searle, John R. "Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and cognitive science." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, no. 4 (1990): 585–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00080304.
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AbstractCognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the “Connection Principle.” The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential point is that intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is.Once we recognize the Connection Principle, we see that it is necessary to perform an inversion on the explanatory models of cognitive science, an inversion analogous to the one evolutionary biology imposes on preDarwinian animistic modes of explanation. In place of the original intentionalistic explanations we have a combination of hardware and functional explanations. This radically alters the structure of explanation, because instead of a mental representation (such as a rule) causing the pattern of behavior it represents (such as rule-governed behavior), there is a neurophysiological cause of a pattern (such as a pattern of behavior), and the pattern plays a functional role in the life of the organism. What we mistakenly thought were descriptions of underlying mental principles in, for example, theories of vision and language were in fact descriptions of functional aspects of systems, which will have to be explained by underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. In such cases, what looks like mentalistic psychology is sometimes better construed as speculative neurophysiology. The moral is that the big mistake in cognitive science is not the overestimation of the computer metaphor (though that is indeed a mistake) but the neglect of consciousness.
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Nachson. "Mentalistic Explanations of Organismic Behavior: Fact or Fiction?" American Journal of Psychology 132, no. 3 (2019): 387. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.132.3.0387.
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Montgomery, Derek E. "Situational features influencing young children's mentalistic explanations of action." Cognitive Development 9, no. 4 (1994): 425–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0885-2014(94)90014-0.
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Csibra, Gergely, and Gyorgy Gergely. "The teleological origins of mentalistic action explanations: A developmental hypothesis." Developmental Science 1, no. 2 (1998): 255–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-7687.00039.
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Thelen, Esther, Gregor Schöner, Christian Scheier, and Linda B. Smith. "So what's a modeler to do?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1 (2001): 70–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x01553911.
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We argue that mentalistic constructs like the “object concept” are not substitutes for process explanations of cognition, and that it is impossible to prove the existence of such constructs with behavioral tasks. We defend the field theory as an appropriate level for modeling embodiment. Finally, we discuss the model's biological plausibility and its extensions to other tasks and other species.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Mentalistic explanation"
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Sarihan, Isik. "Mental Content And Mentalistic Causal Explanation: A Case Against Externalism." Master's thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612726/index.pdf.
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This thesis presents a defense of the view that externalism cannot be a theoretical basis of a mentalistic causal-explanatory science, even though such a theoretical basis is implicitly or explicitly adopted by many cognitive scientists. Externalism is a theory in philosophy of mind which states that mental properties are relations between the core realizers of an individual&rsquo<br>s mental states (such as brain states) and certain things that exist outside those realizers (such as what the content of a mental state corresponds to in the actual world.) After clarifications regarding the term &ldquo<br>externalism&rdquo<br>and reviewing the history and the various forms of the externalist theory, it is argued that the properties offered by externalist theories as mental properties have no causal influence on behavior, and therefore cannot causally explain it. The argument is largely based on a method of comparing the causal powers of entities which are identical in all respects except their mental properties (as construed by externalism), and the conclusions are supported by metaphysical reflections on causation, dispositions, relational properties and historical properties. Objections to the defended view are considered and refuted. The thesis is written in the style of modern analytic philosophy.
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Conway, William. "The deep extent of mental autonomy." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1722.
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The central aim of this thesis is to argue that the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation presents a stronger constraint on what counts as a satisfactory statement of the relation between the mental and the physical than can be acknowledged within the metaphysical framework of non-reductive physicalism. Although the chief merit of non-reductive physicalism appears to be its ability to respect the irreducibility of mental concepts to physical concepts, whilst respecting the primacy of the physical ontology, I claim that its commitment to the principles of physicalism prevents that framework from being able to accommodate what I will refer to as the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation. The deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation manifests itself in the fact that the work carried out by mentalistic explanations is completely separate from the work carried out by physicalistic explanations. I claim that the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation cannot be recognised within a metaphysical framework which claims to recognise the primacy of the physical ontology because recopsing deep autonomy requires giving up the assumption that the mental must be related to the physical in the manner appropriate to discharging such metaphysical principles. I defend the claim that we can recognise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation if we take our successful explanatory practices as the starting point of our investigation, and only then revert to the question of how best to articulate the relation between the mental and the physical. My claim is that there is an intrinsic connection between the nature of the mental and the nature of human relationships, and I therefore suggest that the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation ought to be understood in connection with the autonomous nature of human relationships. The basic ideas in this thesis are derived by combining features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations with features of John MacMurray’s approach to human relationships. On the basis of this combination, I argue for the more specific claim that there is an intrinsic connection between what it means to say that an individual has the capacity to think and what it means to say that he has the capacity to be involved in various types of human relationships. This connection is then used to develop a non-causal account of human action to challenge the physicalist ’s causal account, which will be used to support the claim that mentalistic explanations are autonomous with respect to physicalistic explanations in the deeper sense. I conclude by arguing that the considerations which put us in position to recognise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation ought to constrain our statement of the relation between the mental and the physical, and I suggest that this statement should be consistent with the way in which mentalistic and physicalistic explanations carry out their work in our explanatory practices. I claim that individuals are subject to mentalistic explanations in so far as they have a life to live in the world with other people, and that individuals are subject to physicalistic explanations in so far as human beings are creatures whose life has a natural biological dimension. But rather than identifying the mental with the physical, and thereby compromise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation, I suggest that this relation might be understood in terms of the fact that the mental is embedded in the dimension of human life which is constituted by the involvement of individuals in various types of relationshps with each other, and that the dimension of human life in which physicalistic explanations are operative is presupposed as the causal background which must be in place if individuals are to have such a life to live in the world.
Books on the topic "Mentalistic explanation"
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Montgomery, Derek E. Situational features influencing mentalistic explanations of action. 1993.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Mentalistic explanation"
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Wiebe, Phillip H. "Mentalistic and Psychological Explanations." In Visions of Jesus. Oxford University Press, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195126693.003.0007.
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Papafragou, Anna, Kimberly Cassidy, and Lila R. Gleitman. "When We Think About Thinking." In Sentence First, Arguments Afterward. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199828098.003.0014.
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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of syntactic information. In tasks where children and adults hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs, we find that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. The findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract verbs.
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"V. Science and Mind: Explanations of Behavior and Mentalistic Language." In Mind, Brain, Behavior. De Gruyter, 1991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110883381-007.
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Maruyama, Yasushi. "Wittgenstein’s Children." In The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. Philosophy Documentation Center, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/wcp20-paideia199829502.
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The later Wittgenstein uses children in his philosophical arguments against the traditional views of language. Describing how they learn language is one of his philosophical methods for setting philosophers free from their views and enabling them to see the world in a different way. The purpose of this paper is to explore what features of children he takes advantage of in his arguments, and to show how we can read Wittgenstein in terms of education. Two children in Philosophical Investigations are discussed. The feature of the first child is the qualitative difference from adults. Wittgenstein uses the feature to criticize Augustinian pictures of language which tell us that children learn language by ostensive definition alone. The referential theory of meaning is so strong that philosophers fail to see the qualitative gap and to explain language-learning. The second child appears in an arithmetical instruction. Although he was understood to master counting numbers, he suddenly shows deviant reactions. Wittgenstein argues against the mentalistic idea of understanding by calling attention to the potential otherness of the child. This could happen anytime the child has not learned counting correctly. The two features show that teaching is unlike telling, an activity toward the other who does not understand our explanations. Since we might not understand learners because of otherness, the justification of teaching is a crucial problem that is not properly answered so long as otherness is unrecognized. As long as we ignore otherness, we would not be aware that we might mistreat learners.