Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 302-304).

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 17, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 32-33).

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Bibliography: pages 136-144. / This thesis is an attempt to defend explanatory incompatibilism, the view that mechanistic and intentional explanations of behaviour are incompatible, against various sorts of objections which come in the form of rival compatibilist theories. In the first chapter the author outlines the prima facie case for explanatory incompatibilism. This prima facie case is then bolstered by a discussion of explanation in general, conditions of compatibility for different explanations of the same phenomenon, and then a more rigorous account of mechanistic and intentional explanations which allows for a formal presentation of an argument for their incompatibility. Chapters Two, Three and Four discuss some of the combatibilist theories which have been advanced. Chapter Two involves a discussion of the "Double-Language" version of compatibilism as advocated by Ryle and Melden. This version is rejected for two main reasons: (1) it fails to keep the two sorts of explanation sufficiently apart so as to render them compatible, and (2) it fails to show that intentional explanations are not a species of causal explanation. Chapter Three attempts to deal with the "Instrumentalist" version of compatibilism as advanced by Daniel Dennett. This is rejected because it fails to provide a rich enough account of rational action and it also leads to epiphenomenalism. In Chapter Four the author discusses the "Physicalist" approach to the question of compatibility as advocated by Alvin Goldman and Donald Davidson. But this version of compatibilism is found to be wanting because it also leads to the epiphenomenalism of the mental. Chapter Five, the conclusion, summarises the basic argument and attempts to develop the author's own account of what the necessary and sufficient conditions for intentional action are. This is found to involve· three main elements: physical indeterminism, intentional intelligibility, and then something like the concept of agent-causation. In the course of this account there is a brief discussion of the problem of other minds and an argument against the desire-belief model of action and its explanation based on its inability to cope with the problem of deviant causal chains. It is concluded that mechanistic and intentional explanations are indeed incompatible and something is said about the broad metaphysical view which is required to accommodate this fact.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004. / Thesis directed by W. David Solomon for the Department of Philosophy. "May 2004." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-239).

Fred Dretske (1981) claimed that the essence of the kind of cognitive activity that gives rise to Intentional mental states is a process by which the analogue information coming from a source-object is transformed into digital form. It is this analogue-to-digital conversion of data that enables us to form concepts of things. But this achievement comes with a cost, since the conversion must involve a loss of information. The price we pay for the lost information is a proportional diminishment in our ability to discriminate the source-object from others that may be similar to it. I argue that this fact underlies an important distinction between what a mental state may be about and to what the state may be directed, Aboutness and directedness are two of four Intentional dimensions on which this project concentrates. The other two are aspectual shape and misrepresentation. The distinction between aboutness and directedness is a part of a proposed approach to Intentionality based on the script theory of Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977). Scripts are schemata—organized knowledge structures that guide our understanding of the world around us. Schank and Abelson's basic ideas are extended to yield four different script-types: episodic (related to situations and events), instrumental (related to procedural knowledge), personal (representing an agent's goals and plans), and definitional (involved in object-recognition). The relationship between scripts and the Intentionality of thought is the main focus of this dissertation. An important secondary concern is the viability of externalism and internalism. It is argued that neither of these attitudes is independently adequate to provide a full account of Intentional content. Rather, the proper approach is to confine externalistic influences to aboutness and then characterize directedness in a manner that captures the world-according-to-the-agent. This strategy is implemented in the following way: aboutness is construed causally-evolutionarily; directedness is constructed with the help of the notion of an equivalence class; aspectual shape is shown to be a function of the kind of information a script provides; and an account of misrepresentation is given by comparing the different extensions generated from aboutness and directedness respectively.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-249). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 16, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-50).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Basel, 1938. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 125.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-192).