Role functionalists identify pain with that higher-level relational property. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
This can be done by focusing on a general method for constructing functional definitions introduced by David Lewis (1972; building on an idea of Frank Ramsey's), which has become standard practice for functionalists of all varieties. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
They claim that the shared values which functionalists see as the glue holding society together donot really form a true consensus instead this is an artificial consensus in which the dominant groups or classes impose their values and rules upon the rest of the people. ❋ India (2009)
But it's unclear whether any such redescriptions are available to role (vs. realizer) functionalists. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
In response to these objections, analytic functionalists contend, as they did with the inverted and absent qualia objections, that zombies are not really conceivable, and thus there is no threat to functionalism and no explanatory gap. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
But neither alternative, for many functionalists, goes far enough to preserve the basic functionalist intuition that causal commonality trumps physical diversity in determining whether creatures can possess the same mental states. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
Other functionalists agree that we may advert to various norms of inference and action in attributing beliefs and desires to others, but deny that there is any in principle incompatibility between normative and empirical explanations. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
She opposed the functionalists who believed that the Final Solution evolved as the war progressed. ❋ Unknown (2009)
The primary challenge for future functionalists, therefore, will be to meet these objections to the doctrine, either by articulating a functionalist theory in increasingly convincing detail, or by showing how the intuitions that fuel these objections can be explained away. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
A machine table of this sort describes the operation of a deterministic automaton, but most machine state functionalists ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
It has been suggested that moral concepts are role concepts analogous to the concepts of various mental states as conceived by functionalists (Jackson and Pettit 1995). ❋ Unknown (2009)
But this requires any functional “theory” acceptable to analytic functionalists to include only generalizations about mental states, their environmental causes, and their joint effects on behavior that are so widely known and “platitudinous” as to count as analyzing our ordinary concepts of the mental states in question. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
As functionalists often put it, pain can be realized by different types of physical states in different kinds of creatures, or multiply realized. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
This claim was postulated in 1950s sociology by functionalists like Parsons when he claimed that institutions, like schooling and work, encouraged the adoption of certain values. ❋ Unknown (2009)
Some functionalists, however (e.g. Shoemaker 1984c), have suggested that if a creature has states that approximately realize our functional theories, or realize some more specific defining subset of the theory particularly relevant to the specification of those states, then they can qualify as being mental states of the same types as our own. ❋ Levin, Janet (2009)
It is fair to say that this move is one of the central innovations of philosophy of mind, a move to a large extent endorsed and developed later on by functionalists and cognitive scientists. ❋ Stoljar, Daniel (2009)
The functional role of mental kinds is explained by some functionalists in terms of the modularity of the mind (Fodor 1983). ❋ Bird, Alexander (2008)
But, argue functionalists, it is most unlikely that we could identify a single physical state that played this role in every actual and possible case of pain. ❋ Robb, David (2008)
Some, notably functionalists, bite the bullet and answer Yes. ❋ Kirk, Robert (2006)
Kim and Bickle insist that these successes are evidence that psychological functions are not as radically multiply realized as functionalists and anti-reductionists suggest. ❋ Bickle, John (2006)
