Our volume is just out! Thanks to all contributors for their excellent work.
Some of the early versions of the papers in this volume were presented during workshops in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland that we have organized over a number of years, and a certain kind of dualism that seems to correspond to the two kinds of naturalism discussed above is reflected in the names of these workshops. They started out as the Kazimierz Naturalized Epistemology Workshop (KNEW) back in 2005. After some time, roughly at the point when we decided that there was enough material about normativity to think of editing a volume about it (which appeared as
Beyond Description), we retained only the acronym, as we felt that epistemology was already successfully naturalized. The unofficial expansion was Kazimierz Naturalized Everything Workshop, while the official one – Kazimierz Naturalist Workshop. We wanted to stress that we are no longer so much interested in meta-philosophical reflection about the status of naturalism as in the real work done.
Because many of the participants of the workshops have decided to come regularly, we believe we can say that there is something that brings them together; this is exactly the second kind of naturalism, as described above. For the present volume, we asked some of our regulars to contribute chapters related to naturalistic approaches to the mind.
Naturalism is currently the most vibrantly developing approach to philosophy, with naturalised methodologies being applied across all the philosophical disciplines. One of the areas naturalism has been focussing upon is the mind, traditionally viewed as a topic hard to reconcile with the naturalistic worldview. A number of questions have been pursued in this context. What is the place of the mind in the world? How should we study the mind as a natural phenomenon? What is the significance of cognitive science research for philosophical debates? In this book, philosophical questions about the mind are asked in the context of recent developments in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, psychology, and the project of the naturalisation. Much of the focus is upon what we have learned by studying natural mental mechanisms as well as designing artificial ones. In the case of natural mental mechanisms, this includes consideration of such issues as the significance of deficits in these mechanisms for psychiatry. The significance of the evolutionary context for mental mechanisms as well as questions regarding rationality and wisdom is also explored. Mechanistic and functional models of the mind are used to throw new light on discussions regarding issues of explanation, reduction and the realisation of mental phenomena. Finally, naturalistic approaches are used to look anew at such traditional philosophical issues as the correspondence of mind to world and presuppositions of scientific research.
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Naturalizing the Mind
Marcin Miłkowski and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Chapter One 12
Reverse Engineering in Cognitive Science
Marcin Miłkowski
Chapter Two 30
Carving the Mind by its Joints: Culture-bound Psychiatric
Disorders as Natural Kinds
Samuli Pöyhönen
Chapter Three 49
Naturalizing Wisdom
Mark Alfino
Chapter Four 71
A Biological Perspective on the Nature of Cognition:
Some Remarks for a Naturalistic Program
Alvaro Moreno
Chapter Five 86
Do Animals See Objects?
Paweł Grabarczyk
Chapter Six 103
Grounding the Origins of the State in the Evolution of the Mind
Benoît Dubreuil
Chapter Seven 119
Realization and Robustness: Naturalizing Nonreductive
Physicalism
Markus I. Eronen
Chapter Eight 138
Can the Mental be Causally Efficacious?
Panu Raatikainen
Chapter Nine 167
On Reduction and Interfield Integration in Neuroscience
Witold M. Hensel
Chapter Ten 182
Challenges to Cartesian Materialism: Understanding
Consciousness and the Mind-World Relation
Jonathan Knowles
Chapter Eleven 203
Qualia as Intrinsic Properties
Tadeusz Ciecierski
Chapter Twelve 216
A HOT Solution to the Problem of the Explanatory Gap
Dimitris Platchias
Chapter Thirteen 232
Naturalizing Epistemology for Autonomous Systems
Jaime Gomez Ramirez
Chapter Fourteen 248
How Truth could be Reduced? Field’s Deflationism as a Kind
of Supervenience Thesis
Krystyna Bielecka
Chapter Fifteen 262
How to Naturalize Truth
María J. Frápolli
