Millikan's Theory Representations are for Millikan part of a larger group of entities
for which she considers there is no generic name in English, and which
would include "[n]atural signs, animals' signs, people's signs,
indexes, signals, indicators, symbols, representations, sentences,
maps, charts, pictures" [LTOBC, 85]. For want of a better term,
Millikan calls these entities signs, and claims that what is common to
all signs is their being, to a greater or lesser degree, intentional.
That is, what all signs have in common, in a family resemblance way,
is their bearing a certain relationship to entities other than
themselves - a relationship which is usually characterized as "being
about something else", "meaning something else". In what follows, I
will consider what the nature of this "being about something else" is
according to Millikan. I will pay particular attention to mental, or
inner, representations, despite the fact that Millikan believes
"articulate conventional signs" - that is, I take it, verbal
utterances - to be the paradigm case of signs. For, like Searle,
Millikan regards verbal utterances and other external verbal-like
modes of representation (such as writing), to have an intentionality
derived from the original intentionality of states of mind, and thus
explainable in terms of the latter.
Intentionality is, according to Millikan, a question of degree:
indeed, she rejects Brentano's original motivation for reintroducing
the term, which was to establish a criterion for the mental, thus
creating "a clean gap" between the mental a...
... middle of paper ...
... to consciousness, and vice versa. Certainly, it does seem
rather counterintuitive to see intentionality as (exclusively)
ethologically motivated. Moreover, it is not very clear what the
teleological purpose of consciousness might be - what proper function
of our cognitive systems is fulfilled by our being conscious?
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[1] However, as we shall see, Millikan conceives of intentionality in
a broad and a narrow sense, and in it will be the narrow, more
intuitive sense of the word that we will be concerned with in dealing
with representations.
[2] Which of course does not mean that desires are always fulfilled -
as Millikan strikingly puts it, "many desires, like sperm, emerge in a
world that does not permit their proper functions to be performed".
The human mind is one of the most complex structures the gods had created. It is difficult to understand each brain process as every human being possesses his or her own distinguished thought patterns with different levels of complexities. A person’s mind greatly influences his behavior, which eventually transforms into his habit by becoming embedded into his character. Today, the world of psychology tries to understand everything that a mind can create. However, even before the field of Psychology was introduced and brought into practice, some American writers threw a spotlight on the mechanism of the human brain in their works. On top of this list is an American writer, Edgar Allan
Philio Gabriel (2010) stated that John Stuart Mill was a very intelligent philosopher of history. He studied since young and ended his working life by working with the parliament. Throughout his lifetime, as a philosopher he brought and suggested the concept of liberty in the society.
To conclude this essay, I like to emphazise that Rosenthal's HOT is more of an empirical hypothesis, rather than an analysis of the term ‘consciousness.’ His aim is precisely to explain the phenomena of consciousness in relation to other mental states, such as thought and perception, and while achieving this, he has elaborated a theoretical structure for comprehending the functions of our mind.
A review of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, in which McGinn elaborates on his theory of the mind.
Abercrombie states that the human brain plays an active role in shaping the information presented to us, based on one’s past experiences. Kahneman claims that the human mind uses two systems of thinking, System 1 and System 2, where System 2 is more active and effortful than System 1. I attempt to illustrate how Abercrombie and Kahneman's ideal concepts of the perception of reality are applicable to real situations, by referring to the following three readings: Jung’s “The Personal and the Collective Unconscious,” Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The three readings relate to Abercrombie and Kahneman, considering the overlapping concepts of reality, that words and metaphors structure our understanding of what is real, reality can be altered from different perspectives, and that ignorance can actually be bliss.
Danesi, M. (1998). Sign, thought, & culture: A basic course in semiotics. Canadian Scholarsí Press: Toronto, Ontario.
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An important first step in this discussion is to firmly establish that a stop sign is, in fact, a sign. This may seem obvious, as, after all, it does have the word "sign" in its name, this in an important technical consideration that must be made before we can proceed. According to Charles Pierce, one of the major pioneers of the field of semiotics, a sign has three fundamental parts. These are: the object, the representamen, and the interpretant. The representamen is what most people w...