Plato's Camera : How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals

by Churchland, Paul M.

• ISBN13: 9780262016865
• ISBN10: 0262016869
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-20
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

In Plato's Camera, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation--or 'takes a picture'--of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. His account draws on the best of the recent philosophical literature on semantic theory, and on the most recent results from cognitive neurobiology. The resulting story throws immediate light on issues that have been at the center of philosophy for at least two millennia, such as how the mind represents reality, both in its ephemeral and in its timeless dimensions. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction: A Fast Overview	p. 1
Some Parallels and Contrasts with Kant	p. 1
Representations in the Brain: Ephemeral versus Enduring	p. 4
Individual Learning: Slow and Structural	p. 11
Individual Learning: Fast and Dynamical	p. 16
Collective Learning and Cultural Transmission	p. 25
Knowledge: Is It True, Justified Belief?	p. 30
First-Level Learning, Part 1: Structural Changes in the Brain and the Development of Lasting Conceptual Frameworks	p. 35
The Basic Organization of the Information-Processing Brain	p. 35
Some Lessons from Artificial Neural Networks	p. 38
Motor Coordination	p. 45
More on Colors: Constancy and Compression	p. 50
More on Faces: Vector Completion, Abduction, and the Capacity for 'Globally Sensitive Inference'	p. 62
Neurosemantics: How the Brain Represents the World	p. 74
How the Brain Does Not Represent: First-Order Resemblance	p. 78
How the Brain Does Not Represent: Indicator Semantics	p. 90
On the Identity/Similarity of Conceptual Frameworks across Distinct Individuals	p. 104
First-Level Learning, Part 2: On the Evaluation of Maps and Their Generation by Hebbian Learning	p. 123
On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A First Pass	p. 123
The Neuronal Representation of Structures Unfolding in Time	p. 139
Concept Formation via Hebbian Learning: Spatial Structures	p. 157
Concept Formation via Hebbian Learning: The Special Case of Temporal Structures	p. 165
A Slightly More Realistic Case	p. 170
In Search of Still Greater Realism	p. 174
Ascending from Several Egocentric Spaces to One Allocentric Space	p. 180
Second-Level Learning: Dynamical Changes in the Brain and Domain-Shifted Redeployments of Existing Concepts	p. 187
The Achievement of Explanatory Understanding	p. 187
On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A Second Pass (Conceptual Redeployments)	p. 196
On the Evaluation of Conceptual Frameworks: A Third Pass (Intertheoretic Reductions)	p. 204
Scientific Realism and the Underdetermination of Theory by Evidence	p. 215
Underdetermination Reconceived	p. 223
Third-Level Learning: The Regulation and Amplification of First- and Second-Level Learning through a Crowing Network of Cultural Institutions	p. 251
The Role of Language in the Business of Human Cognition	p. 251
The Emergence and Significance of Regulatory Mechanisms	p. 255
Some Prior Takes on This Epicerebral Process	p. 261
How Social-Level Institutions Steer Second-Level Learning	p. 268
Situated Cognition and Cognitive Theory	p. 274
Appendix	p. 279
References	p. 281
Index	p. 287
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