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This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interest from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental powers of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimen tal, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. The present volume reflects the kind of insights that can be obtained when research workers in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and computer science explore problems of common concern. The issues here tend to fall into two broad but varied sets, namely: those concerned with content and concepts, on the one hand, and those concerned with semantics and epistemology, on the other. The collection begins with a prologue that focuses upon the relations between connectionism and alternative conceptions of nativism and ends with an epilogue that examines the significance of alternative conceptions of the Frame Problem for artificial intelligence. Because these papers are rich and diverse, they ought to appeal to a wide and heterogeneous audience. J.H.F.
List of contents
Prologue.- Connectionism and Three Levels of Nativism.- I / Concepts and Content.- Explanation and the Language of Thought.- Conceptual Dependency as the Language of Thought.- Functionalism and Inverted Spectra.- Concepts and Conceptual Change.- Beyond the Exclusively Propositional Era.- II / Semantics and Knowledge.- Can Semantics by Syntactic?.- Form and Content in Semantics.- Knowledge and the Regularity Theory of Information.- Melancholic Epistemology.- Human Understanding.- Epilogue.- Framing the Frame Problem.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.
