Perception Knowledge And Belief

Part I. Knowledge: 1. Conclusive reasons 2. Epistemic operators 3. The pragmatic dimension of knowledge 4. The epistemology of belief 5. Two conceptions of knowledge: rational vs. reliable belief Part II. Perception and Experience: 6. Simple seeing 7. Conscious experience 8. Differences that make no difference 9. The mind's awareness of itself 10. What good is consciousness Part III. Thought and Intentionality: 11. Putting information to work 12. If you can't make one, you don't know how it works 13. The nature of thought 14. Norms and the constitution of the mental 15. Minds, machines, and money: what really explains behavior.

This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic philosophy of mind. The essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness. Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links that can be made between the two. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students, and will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology.

This book offers a provocative, clear and rigorously argued account of the nature of perception and its role in the production of knowledge. Walter Hopp argues that perceptual experiences do not have conceptual content, and that what makes them play a distinctive epistemic role is not the features which they share with beliefs, but something that in fact sets them radically apart. He explains that the reason-giving relation between experiences and beliefs is what Edmund Husserl called 'fulfilment' - in which we find something to be as we think it to be. His book covers a wide range of central topics in contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and traditional phenomenology. It is essential reading for contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and phenomenologists alike.

Information; Knowledge and perception; Meaning and belief; Knowledge and the flow of information.

In this book I present what seem to me (at the moment) to be right an swers to some of the main philosophical questions about the topics men tioned in the title, and I argue for them where I can. I hope that what I say may be of interest both to those who have already studied these ques tions a lot and to those who haven't. There are several important topics in epistemology to which I give little or no attention here - such as the nature of a proposition, the major classifications of propositions (neces sary and contingent, a priori and a posteriori, analytic and synthetic, general and particular), the nature of understanding a proposition, the nature of truth, the nature and justification of the various kinds of in ference (deductive, inductive, and probably others) -but enough is cover ed, to one degree or another, that the book might be of use in a course in epistemology. Earlier versions of some of the material in Chapters II, III, and IV were some of the material in Ginet (1970). An earlier version of the part of Chapter VII on memory-connection was a paper that I profited from reading and discussing in philosophy discussion groups at Cornell Uni versity, SUNY at Albany, and Syracuse University in 1972-73. I do not like to admit how long I have been working on this book.

What distinguishes clever computers from stupid people (besides their components)? The author of Seeing and Knowing presents in his new book a beautifully and persuasively written interdisciplinary approach to traditional problems--a clearsighted interpretation of information theory.Psychologists, biologists, computer scientists, and those seeking a general unified picture of perceptual-cognitive activity will find this provocative reading.The problems Dretske addresses in Knowledge and the Flow of Information--What is knowledge? How are the sensory and cognitive processes related? What makes mental activities mental?--appeal to a wide audience. The conceptual tools used to deal with these questions (information, noise, analog versus digital coding, etc.) are designed to make contact with, and exploit the findings of, empirical work in the cognitive sciences. A concept of information is developed, one deriving from (but not identical with) the Shannon idea familiar to communication theorists, in terms of which the analyses of knowledge, perception, learning, and meaning are expressed.The book is materialistic in spirit--that is, spiritedly materialistic--devoted to the view that mental states and processes are merely special ways physical systems have of processing, coding, and using information.

This is the 2011 Aquinas Lecture delivered by John McDowell on February 27, 2011 at Marquette University. A central theme in much of Professor McDowell's work is the harmful effect, in modern philosophy and in the modern reception of pre-modern philosophy, of a conception of nature that reflects an understanding, in itself perfectly correct, of the proper goals of the natural sciences. He has argued that we can free ourselves from the characteristic sorts of philosophical anxiety by recalling the possibility of a less restrictive conception of what it takes for something to be natural.

Twelve original papers by Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, and others at the forefront of cognitive research.