my mind on books

Our relation to our past is no more passive than is our relation to what we presently visually perceive; we are not the containers of memory-images that a true narrative would accurately describe. Rather, we are in a continual process of reconsideration, … of reflective restructuring, and of repositioning the actions, events, occurrences, interactions, efforts, aspirations, achievements, intentions — in short, our words, deeds, and everything in between that, taken together, form the teleological trajectories, the narrative threads, of our selves. … Memories, understood in this way, are not inert visual images filed into storage by time and date. They are remembered experiences of all composite kinds, and, like works of art and like human selves, they take on and cast off relational properties, networks of interconnections to other experiences both similar and different. (Hagberg,Describing Ourselves, p. 236)

Garry L. Hagberg, in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2008), explores Wittgenstein’s views on the self in relation to autobiographical writing.

The ‘Cartesian’ view of introspection as an internal act of inspecting determinate mental “objects” exerts a pervasive influence on concepts of the mind and self. According to Hagberg, Wittgenstein opposed this view without falling into the contrasting behaviorist camp that shares the presuppositions of the Cartesian, dualistic account. “Wittgenstein’s position … cuts beneath the metaphysical presuppositions of both of these polarized, antithetical theories of the self.” (p. 185) However, Wittgenstein’s own position resists any simple capsule formulation. As Hagberg states (p. 240), “the very phrase ‘Wittgenstein’s method’ can easily prove… misleading” but he points to a convergence between therapeutic philosophy and autobiography:

To see autobiography as philosophy is to see it as an ineliminable source of language-games of narrative self-description, and to see philosophy as autobiography is to see it, in turn, as the distinctive kind of self-analysis — the intricate, layered disentangling of the mind’s grammatically fueled impulses to misspeak, to mischaracterize itself — that Wittgenstein’s remarks on therapeutic philosophy articulate. (p. 256)

Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules and the Problem of the External World by Jack Lyons, coming Jan. 20 from Oxford University Press (with zombies in the title! But the index shows just about eight zombie references in the text.)

Amazon has “Search Inside” for this title, so a preview is available.

Product Description
Perception is our main source of epistemic access to the outside world. Perception and Basic Beliefs addresses two central questions in epistemology: which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified) and where does perception end and inferential cognition begin. Jack Lyons offers a highly externalist theory, arguing that what makes a belief a basic belief or a perceptual belief is determined by the nature of the cognitive system, or module, that produced the beliefs. On this view, the sensory experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs play no indispensable role in the justification of these beliefs, and one can have perceptual beliefs–justified perceptual beliefs–even in the absence of any sensory experiences whatsoever. Lyons develops a general theory of basic beliefs and argues that perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs. This results from the fact that perceptual modules are a special type of basic belief-producing modules. Importantly, some beliefs are not the outputs of this class of cognitive module; these beliefs are therefore non-basic, thus requiring inferential support from other beliefs for their justification. This last point is used to defend a reliabilist epistemology against an important class of traditional objections (where the agent uses a reliable process that she doesn’t know to be reliable).
Perception and Basic Beliefs brings together an important treatment of these major epistemological topics and provides a positive solution to the traditional problem of the external world.

The author’s homepage includes links to some of his recent papers.

Here are some of the recent books in philosophy of mind and some coming next year, based on a search of WorldCat.

The Achilles of rationalist psychology by Thomas M Lennon; Robert Stainton; (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2008).

Being reduced : new essays on reduction, explanation, and causation ed. by Jakob Hohwy; Jesper Kallestrup; (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Brainstorming Views and Interviews on the Mind.  by Shaun Gallagher (Imprint Academic, 2008).

The case for qualia ed. by Edmond Leo Wright; (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

Descartes and the passionate mind by Deborah J Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

The epicurean theory of mind, meaning, and knowledge by David Swift (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2008).

Folk psychological narratives : the sociocultural basis of understanding reasons by Daniel D Hutto (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

The Innate Mind: Foundations and the Future, Volume 3 ed. by Peter Carruthers; Stephen Laurence; Stephen P Stich; (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: An Encounter with Your Head by Raymond Tallis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

The mechanical mind in history ed. by Philip Husbands; Owen Holland; Michael Wheeler (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

Mental causation: a nonreductive approach by Neil Campbell (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

Mental causation : the mind-body problem by Anthony Dardis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Mind and common sense: philosophical essays on commonsense psychology ed. by Radu J Bogdan; (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

The mind in nature by C.B. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

On the philosophy of mind by Barbara Montero (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2008)

The subject’s point of view by Katalin Farkas (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Supersizing the mind : embodiment, action, and cognitive extension by Andy Clark (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Symbolic worlds: art, science, language, ritual by Israel Scheffler (Cambridge, [England]: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Symbols and embodiment: debates on meaning and cognition ed. by Manuel de Vega; Arthur M Glenberg; Arthur C Graesser; (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Theory of mind: how children understand others’ thoughts and feelings by Martin J Doherty (Hove; New York: Psychology Press, 2008).

Tropes, universals and the philosophy of mind : essays at the boundary of ontology and philosophical psychology ed. by Simone Gozzano; Francesco Orilia; (Frankfurt [Germany]: Ontos Verlag; Piscataway, NJ: [Distributed in] North and South America by Transaction Books, Rutgers University, 2008).

What should we do with our brain? by Catherine Malabou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

The wisdom of donkeys: finding tranquility in a chaotic world by Andy Merrifield (New York: Walker: Distributed to the trade by Macmillan, 2008).

2009

Against theory of mind ed. by Ivan Leudar; Alan Costall; (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). (May 2009)

Anti-externalism by Joseph Mendola (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). (Jan 2009)

Descartes’s changing mind by Peter K Machamer; J E McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). (July 2009)

Embodied minds in action Robert Hanna; Michelle Maiese (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). (March 2009)

Emotions and understanding: Wittgensteinian perspectives ed. by Ylva Gustafsson; Camilla Kronqvist; Michael McEachrane; (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). (April 2009)

Mind’s world : imagination and subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism by Alexander M Schlutz (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009). (Feb 2009)

The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind ed. by Brian P McLaughlin; Ansgar Beckermann; Sven Walter; (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). (March 2009)

The philosophy of mind: the metaphysics of consciousness by Dale Jacquette (London; New York: Continuum, 2009). (June 2009)

Understanding people : normativity and rationalizing explanation by Alan Millar (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2009). (Jan. 2009)

Andy Clark‘s new book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind), mentioned as a forthcoming title last March in David Chalmers’s blog, is now available. The foreword by Chalmers is online.

Product Description
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s notes, he saw it as a “record” of Feynman’s work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn’t happen only in our heads but that “certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world.” The pen and paper of Feynman’s thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than “brain-bound.” The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Oxford University Press has the Table of Contents.

It’s unclear how this book relates to Clark’s earlier Natural Born Cyborgs, but it appears to be a more academic/philosophical treatment of the extended-mind concept.

LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited is a new book by philosopher Jerry Fodor, though right now it is listed as “out of stock” at both Amazon and publisher Oxford University Press. A preview is available online through Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book.”

Product Description
Jerry Fodor presents a new development of his famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works. Fodor defends and extends the groundbreaking idea that thinking is couched in a symbolic system realized in the brain. This idea is central to the representational theory of mind which Fodor has established as a key reference point in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The foundation stone of our present cognitive science is Turing’s suggestion that cognitive processes are not associations but computations; and computation requires a language of thought.
So the latest on the Language of Thought hypothesis, from its progenitor, promises to be a landmark in the study of the mind. LOT 2 offers a more cogent presentation and a fuller explication of Fodor’s distinctive account of the mind, with various intriguing new features. The central role of compositionality in the representational theory of mind is revealed: most of what we know about concepts follows from the compositionality of thoughts. Fodor shows the necessity of a referentialist account of the content of intentional states, and of an atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. Not least among the new developments is Fodor’s identification and persecution of pragmatism as the leading source of error in the study of the mind today.
LOT 2 sees Fodor advance undaunted towards the ultimate goal of a theory of the cognitive mind, and in particular a theory of the intentionality of cognition. No one who works on the mind can ignore Fodor’s views, expressed in the coruscating and provocative style which has delighted and disconcerted countless readers over the years.

See also: “Language of thought” at Wikipedia