Georges Rey
Georges Rey is a
professor of
philosophy at the
University of Maryland.His book
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind takes the reader into the middle of contemporary (mid-1990) debates in
philosophy of mind. One major focus of Rey's effort is on the attempts of other philosophers of mind to be "eliminativists" or "
instrumentalists" with respect to the mental states (states like beliefs and desires) that we are subjectively aware of by way of
introspection. Rey suggests that people like
Daniel Dennett are wrong to view "beliefs" as only being useful instruments by which
Folk psychology allows us to predict future
human behaviors. Rey thinks philosophers like
Paul Churchland were wrong to try to eliminate "beliefs" from the Science of Mind by replacing them with
neural network processes. On the positive side, what Rey offers is a spirited defense of what he calls "mental realism", taking mental states like "
beliefs" as the basis for an algorithmic description of how human minds work. Rey builds on
Jerry Fodor's representational
theory of mind to produce his own version of a Computational/Representational Theory of Thought that tries to incorporate and extend our ordinary day-to-day world of mental experience: our beliefs, hopes, and desires. Rey provides both an initial outline of his plan of attack and a useful glossary of terms. He quickly dances past "The Temptations to Dualism"; anyone sympathetic to
David Chalmers or other modern dualists will be disappointed with the brush-off
dualism receives. Rey's chief concern is fighting the forces of
Eliminativism and issuing endless complaints about the weaknesses of
trainable neural networks. Halfway through the book Rey makes clear that he is proposing a theory of thought that will have to be built upon some foundation (such as neural networks), but he is uninterested in developing such a foundation. Rey takes a few tentative steps towards the daunting task of trying to describe an
algorithm by which
sensory experiences (inputs) can be translated into abstract mental
representations (elements of a Language of Thought) which can then be subjected to
computational processes and so produce new representations and human behaviors (outputs). Finally, Rey suggests how "Further Capacities" such as subjective
qualia might be incorporated into his theory.Books by Georges Rey
- Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: a Contentiously Classical Approach 1997
External links
(...as imported from WP)
article has not been saved locally
