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Staff Seminar

21 October 2009, from 4pm to 6pm, in NK7 (New King’s Building)

Martin Mills, Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, will speak on the subject: Against Inference: towards an embodied model of intentionality.

Abstract: Recent developments in the brain sciences have seen a growing emphasis on the concept of ‘embodied cognition’ alongside the established computational models of cognitive processing that have dominated the brain sciences for the last thirty years. While embodied cognition theorists often present their models as serious alternatives to theories such as the computational theory of mind (CMT) (Valera, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), their contribution is often dismissed as peripheral to existing inferential theories of perception (ITP) (Goldman, 2009). In what follows, it will be argued that a certain kind of strong embodied cognition model – those that argue that perception is constituted by sensori-motor co-ordination (SMC) - present a radically different understanding of the basic nature of cognition, based on a distinct philosophical stance regarding the problem of intentionality. This issue, despite claims to the contrary by writers such as Dretske, remains effectively unresolved within the ITP theoretical architecture, which remains either profoundly limited or beset with implicit metaphysical claims. It is argued that SMC theory, by contrast, provides a satisfactory physicalist resolution of the intentionality problem, as well as providing an account of human cognition’s predictive capacities.

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