“Simplicity and the Underintellectualization of Everyday Life”
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Eric Mandelbaum, Dept. of Philosophy, City University of New York—Maximally simple models of the mind have dominated both empiricist and rationalist theorizing. From behaviorism to associationism to Chomskian Minimalism to resource rational Bayesianism, simplicity assumptions have reigned. As a consequence, philosophers and cognitive scientists have used simplicity as a guide to mental ontology, especially those regarding mental structure and animal cognition. I offer a different perspective, in which the importance of a task is linked to the multiplicity of ways of accomplishing that task: the more important the problem, the more types of solutions evolution has created to solve it. Sometimes this is due to multiple mental mechanisms aimed at similar contents, and at others it's through redundant representations of the same contents. This type of importance/redundancy view leads to a much different picture of the mind, one that casts light on the underintellectualization of everyday life. From low-level perception to insect cognition, we should be inverting Morgan's canon, and the default assumption should be that even seemingly rote or foolish behavior is backed by interesting complex computational/intentional machinery.
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Free
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Open to the public
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51ԹϺ Dept. of Philosophy