TY - GEN
T1 - What are contentful mental states? Dretske's theory of mental content viewed in the light of robot learning and planning algorithms
AU - Cohen, Paul
AU - Litch, Mary
PY - 1999/1/1
Y1 - 1999/1/1
N2 - One concern of philosophy of mind is how sensorimotor agents such as human infants can develop contentful mental states. This paper discusses Fred Dretske's theory of mental content in the context of results from our work with mobile robots. We argue that Dretske's theory, while attractive in many ways, relies on a distinction between kinds of representations that cannot be practically maintained when the subject of one's study is robotic agents. In addition, Dretske fails to distinguish classes of representations that carry different kinds of mental content. We conclude with directions for a theory of mental content that maintains the strengths of Dretske's theory.
AB - One concern of philosophy of mind is how sensorimotor agents such as human infants can develop contentful mental states. This paper discusses Fred Dretske's theory of mental content in the context of results from our work with mobile robots. We argue that Dretske's theory, while attractive in many ways, relies on a distinction between kinds of representations that cannot be practically maintained when the subject of one's study is robotic agents. In addition, Dretske fails to distinguish classes of representations that carry different kinds of mental content. We conclude with directions for a theory of mental content that maintains the strengths of Dretske's theory.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:0032596642
SN - 0262511061
T3 - Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
SP - 108
EP - 113
BT - Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
PB - AAAI
T2 - Proceedings of the 1999 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), 11th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-99)
Y2 - 18 July 1999 through 22 July 1999
ER -