Abstract
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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence |
| Publisher | AAAI |
| Pages | 108-113 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (Print) | 0262511061 |
| State | Published - Jan 1 1999 |
| Event | Proceedings of the 1999 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), 11th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-99) - Orlando, FL, USA Duration: Jul 18 1999 → Jul 22 1999 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence |
|---|
Other
| Other | Proceedings of the 1999 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), 11th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-99) |
|---|---|
| City | Orlando, FL, USA |
| Period | 7/18/99 → 7/22/99 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Artificial Intelligence
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Cite this
Cohen, P., & Litch, M. (1999). What are contentful mental states? Dretske's theory of mental content viewed in the light of robot learning and planning algorithms. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 108-113). (Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence). AAAI.