Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799
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Item Repositioning Cognitive Kinds(2022) Roige Mas, Aida; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forward a series of theoretical proposals aimed to advance our understanding of cognitive kinds. The first chapter introduces the general debates that provide the philosophical underpinnings for the topics addressed in each of the following chapters. Chapter two compares and distinguishes between modules of the mind and mechanisms-as-causings, arguing that they should not be conflated in cognitive science. Additionally, it provides a novel “toolbox” model of accounts of mechanisms, and discusses what makes any such account adequate. Chapter three addresses the question of whether there is a role within the new mechanistic philosophy of science for representations. It advances a proposal on how to carve working entity types, so that they may include representational explanans. Chapter four offers an account of mental disorders, one that captures the regulative ideal behind psychiatry’s inclusion of certain conditions as psychopathologies. Mental disorders are alterations in the production of some mental outputs (e.g. behaviors, beliefs, emotions, desires), such that their degree of reasons-responsiveness is extremely diminished with respect to what we would folk-psychologically expect it to be.Item Memorable Moments: A Philosophy of Poetry(2006-08-07) Ribeiro, Anna Christina Soy; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my dissertation I give a philosophical account of poetry from an analytic perspective--one that is also informed by studies in linguistic communication (pragmatics) and cognitive psychology, and that takes into account the many varieties of poetic traditions around the world. In chapter one I argue that philosophically rigorous study of poetry is long overdue, and that it should focus not on what poetry has in common with the other literary arts, but rather on what is distinct to it. In chapter two I give a cross-cultural history of poetry, showing the many types of features that are typical of the art form. From this history it emerges that beneath the variety of poetic traditions all over the globe lies a remarkably consistent set of features--the use of recurrence patterns. In chapter three I argue for an intentional-historical formalist definition of poetry according to which a poem is either (1) a verbal art object relationally or intrinsically intended to belong in the poetic tradition, or (2) a verbal art object intrinsically intended to involve use of repetition schemes (naïve poetry-making). In my fourth chapter I investigate the psychological reasons for poetry to have begun as and remained an art that relies on repetition devices, focusing on two non-literate groups: the illiterate trovadores of Northeastern Brazil, and pre-literate children. Both cases suggest an innate predisposition to attend to and produce linguistic recurrence structures of various, sometimes highly intricate, sorts. In my fifth chapter I consider the Relevance theory claim in pragmatics that, as a rule, repetition incurs extra linguistic processing effort, and that this must be outweighed by an increase in contextual effects, given the assumption of relevance. I argue that although this picture of poetic understanding is largely correct, repetition can also be seen as a cognitive facilitator, helping us draw connections that might have gone unnoticed without it. I conclude by exploring the contributions my approach to poetry may offer to other topics in aesthetics and philosophy art, such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and theories of interpretation.