Plato's Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals
304
Plato's Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals
304eBook
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Overview
In Plato's Camera, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation—or "takes a picture"—of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book.
Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262300827 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2012 |
| Series: | The MIT Press |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction: A Fast Overview 1
1 Some Parallels and Contrasts with Kant 1
2 Representations in the Brain: Ephemeral versus Enduring 4
3 Individual Learning: Slow and Structural 11
4 Individual Learning: Fast and Dynamical 16
5 Collective Learning and Cultural Transmission 25
6 Knowledge: Is It True, Justified Belief? 30
2 First-Level Learning, Part 1: Structural Changes in the Brain and the Development of Lasting Conceptual Frameworks 35
1 The Basic Organization of the Information-Processing Brain 35
2 Some Lessons from Artificial Neural Networks 38
3 Motor Coordination 45
4 More on Colors: Constancy and Compression 50
5 More on Faces: Vector Completion, Abduction, and the Capacity for 'Globally Sensitive Inference' 62
6 Neurosemantics: How the Brain Represents the World 74
7 How the Brain Does Not Represent: First-Order Resemblance 78
8 How the Brain Does Not Represent: Indicator Semantics 90
9 On the Identity/Similarity of Conceptual Frameworks across Distinct Individuals 104
3 First-Level Learning, Part 2: On the Evaluation of Maps and Their Generation by Hebbian Learning 123
1 On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A First Pass 123
2 The Neuronal Representation of Structures Unfolding in Time 139
3 Concept Formation via Hebbian Learning: Spatial Structures 157
4 Concept Formation via Hebbian Learning: The Special Case of Temporal Structures 165
5 A Slightly More Realistic Case 170
6 In Search of Still Greater Realism 174
7 Ascending from Several Egocentric Spaces to One Allocentric Space 180
4 Second-Level Learning: Dynamical Changes in the Brain and Domain-Shifted Redeployments of Existing Concepts 187
1 The Achievement of Explanatory Understanding 187
2 On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A Second Pass (Conceptual Redeployments) 196
3 On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A Third Pass (Intertheoretic Reductions) 204
4 Scientific Realism and the Underdetermination of Theory by Evidence 215
5 Underdetermination Reconceived 223
5 Third-Level Learning: The Regulation and Amplification of First- and Second-Level Learning through a Crowing Network of Cultural Institutions 251
1 The Role of Language in the Business of Human Cognition 251
2 The Emergence and Significance of Regulatory Mechanisms 255
3 Some Prior Takes on This Epicerebral Process 261
4 How Social-Level Institutions Steer Second-Level Learning 268
5 Situated Cognition and Cognitive Theory 274
Appendix 279
References 281
Index 287
What People are Saying About This
This is Paul Churchland's definitive account of how sentient creatures structure and acquire knowledge of the world. It will positively engage all those for whom developments in the cognitive sciences are crucial for epistemology. It also poses a thoroughgoing challenge to those who hold that the practice of giving linguistically formulated reasons to support beliefs is fundamental for all knowing.
In Plato's Camera, Paul Churchland advances a compelling philosophy that is both naturalistic and humane. Inspired by the structures and dynamics of neural representation and looking behind and beyond conceptions whose principal credential is their language-like forms or their entrenchment, it is wonderfully accessible, elegantly written, and brilliantly argued. Plato's Camera delivers powerful insights about nearly every major topic of metaphysics and epistemology.
Paul Churchland delivers a measured and engaging account of the activation-vector-space framework for understanding the brain as an organ of thought, imagination, and reason. This delightful treatment takes us further, however, addressing in significant detail the impact of cultural and linguistic practice on learning and thought. Plato's Camera is a must-read for those interested in the nature and possibility of human epistemic contact with the world.
Plato's Camera is a startlingly original and deeply scientifically informed work that provides answers to the most fundamental questions of epistemology and philosophy of mind. How do action-oriented beings-in-time learn to negotiate reality? How do humans and other animals come to know the world, and what is it that we know? Paul M. Churchland is a Platonist and a pragmatist—in the lineage of Peirce, Quine, Sellars, and Rorty—and philosophy's foremost critic of the paradigm that models thought on language. We learn to negotiate reality by building n-dimensional maps that encode information about what in the world is 'timeless, changeless, and still.' Getting the universals right allows quick real-time adjustments to the particulars of experience. Hold on for the exciting and unexpected story of how the brain gets these jobs done. There are very few books in philosophy that deserve to be called 'deep.' Plato's Camera is deep.
Plato's Camera is a startlingly original and deeply scientifically informed work that provides answers to the most fundamental questions of epistemology and philosophy of mind. How do action-oriented beings-in-time learn to negotiate reality? How do humans and other animals come to know the world, and what is it that we know? Paul M. Churchland is a Platonist and a pragmatist—in the lineage of Peirce, Quine, Sellars, and Rorty—and philosophy's foremost critic of the paradigm that models thought on language. We learn to negotiate reality by building n-dimensional maps that encode information about what in the world is 'timeless, changeless, and still.' Getting the universals right allows quick real-time adjustments to the particulars of experience. Hold on for the exciting and unexpected story of how the brain gets these jobs done. There are very few books in philosophy that deserve to be called 'deep.' Plato's Camera is deep.
—Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University; author of The Bodhisattva's Brain
Paul Churchland delivers a measured and engaging account of the activation-vector-space framework for understanding the brain as an organ of thought, imagination, and reason. This delightful treatment takes us further, however, addressing in significant detail the impact of cultural and linguistic practice on learning and thought. Plato's Camera is a must-read for those interested in the nature and possibility of human epistemic contact with the world.
—Andy Clark, FRSE, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of EdinburghThis is Paul Churchland's definitive account of how sentient creatures structure and acquire knowledge of the world. It will positively engage all those for whom developments in the cognitive sciences are crucial for epistemology. It also poses a thoroughgoing challenge to those who hold that the practice of giving linguistically formulated reasons to support beliefs is fundamental for all knowing.
—Ronald N. Giere, Former Director, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science; Past President, The Philosophy of Science AssociationIn Plato's Camera, Paul Churchland advances a compelling philosophy that is both naturalistic and humane. Inspired by the structures and dynamics of neural representation and looking behind and beyond conceptions whose principal credential is their language-like forms or their entrenchment, it is wonderfully accessible, elegantly written, and brilliantly argued. Plato's Camera delivers powerful insights about nearly every major topic of metaphysics and epistemology.
—Robert McCauley, William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor and Director, Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory UniversityPlato's Camera is a startlingly original and deeply scientifically informed work that provides answers to the most fundamental questions of epistemology and philosophy of mind. How do action-oriented beings-in-time learn to negotiate reality? How do humans and other animals come to know the world, and what is it that we know? Paul M. Churchland is a Platonist and a pragmatist—in the lineage of Peirce, Quine, Sellars, and Rorty—and philosophy's foremost critic of the paradigm that models thought on language. We learn to negotiate reality by building n-dimensional maps that encode information about what in the world is 'timeless, changeless, and still.' Getting the universals right allows quick real-time adjustments to the particulars of experience. Hold on for the exciting and unexpected story of how the brain gets these jobs done. There are very few books in philosophy that deserve to be called 'deep.' Plato's Camera is deep.
—Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University; author of The Bodhisattva's Brain