furnishing the mind, by jesse prinz

jesse starts with the premise that concepts are essentially the constituents of our mental lives, and therefore, any satisfactory explanation of mentality should incorporate a satisfactory of concepts. to date, however, upon his estimation (and my own), no such account of concepts exists. he therefore sets up a list of desirata that an account of concepts should satisfy, including things like acquisition, publicity, intentionality, etc. then, he presents the current leading theories of concepts, providing both the positive and negative elements of each. he then combines the desirable features of each to develop a novel theory, called proxytype theory.

proxytype theory essentially posits that concepts are mechanisms of detection (used by minds) of statistical regularities in the world. they are "couched in representational codes that are specific to our perceptual systems," ie, the concept of G# is couched in our auditory system, whereas the concept BLUE is couched in our visual system. while i think this nicely accounts for any "perceptually available concept", which i loosely define here as concepts that not that concrete, it is harder to understand how such a theory could account for the concept JUSTICE. in which modality is such a concept stored?

that being said, i think he is on to something. brains seem to act largely as repositories of statistical regularities of the environment. their purpose is often considered to be twofold: (1) information processing, and (2) information storage. i argue that the feature that makes brains cool, and enables them to do such cool stuff that even the worlds most advanced computers aren't even close to (eg, laugh, recognize a face, etc.), is their incredible information storage capacity. in that sense, one could think of concepts as fuzzy blobs in neural activity space corresponding to some sort of environmental regularity. in other words, for any given concept C, there should be some pattern of neural activity A, corresponding to that concept. if one analyzed the neural activity of some subject S upon being presented with an object that has property C, assuming that S has concept C, then A should be present. furthermore, A should also be present in some other subject S2. something such as this must be true if both S and S2 share the concept C.

in light of that argument, of course modality specific concepts should evoke modality specific neural activities - there is no way to avoid this. this can also alleviate some of our fears about more abstract concepts, such as JUSTICE. some pattern of neural activity corresponds to that concept.

note that these patterns of neural activity need not be identical in each person. rather, some feature(s) of those patterns should be consistent for any instantiation of concept C, regardless of which person observes something with property C, and is "conscious" of observing C.

explaining the brain, by carl craver

craver's central hypothesis is that adequate explanations of how brain stuff is causally related to mental stuff are mechanistic in nature. apparently, philosophers have had some debate over similar issues in the past, and others have suggested other arguments (eg, the"covering law model" posits that "explanations explain...by showing that the phenomenon was to have been expected on the basis of the laws of nature". anyway, that explanations should incorporate mechanisms is fairly obvious to nearly all the good neuroscientists i know. this is clear upon reading any of their webpages, where they describe their research goals. for instance, the title of my thesis is something like, "inferring the neural mechanisms of..." (the ellipsis indicates that i think you don't care about the details). craver does however make a compelling argument to those people who haven't reached that conclusion just yet.

a central component of his argument is that these mechanisms must span multiple levels. for instance, if changes in neural circuitry are necessary for storing new information, then an adequate explanation should explain the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns of activity and synaptic plasticity, which are arguably different levels of explanation already. although this may again seem somewhat trivial, i think this is a valuable insight, even for those neuroscientists who agree about the mechanisms, as there is a significant "level-bias" in neuroscience research (ie, many investigators believe that explanations should lie at a particular level of description, eg, spatiotemporal patterns of spiking, versus across levels).

overall, i think he reaches a good conclusion, and makes a strong argument in support of it, so if you ask yourself, "what kind of explanations are adequate in (neuro)science" and your answer is not "mechanistic", i highly recommend this book. if, on the other hand, your answer is "mechanistic", it is somewhat less pertinent, but still an interesting read.