The MIT Press Podcast

The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationships or elements of evolutionary theory. In A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (MIT Press, 2017), Karen Neander synthesizes a number of such elements into a causal-informational version of teleosemantics to explain sensory-perceptual content: for example, the content of a toad’s perception when it perceives what we would call a fly. Neander is a leader in the philosophy of mind, and this accessible yet precisely written book is the culmination of much of her work to date on the theory of intentionality.

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series, The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Nick Montfort examines the writings of previous futurist writers, thinkers, and designers to provide an understanding of how the future can be constructed. In so doing, Montfort argues that the future is something we can shape instead of only predict.

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the at times fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity. It covers some of the earliest and varied attempts to make the Chinese script fit for Western communication systems, taking the reader on a journey through Chinese telegraphy, Morse code, typewriters and early computing. In addition, Mullaney includes reference to the many failed attempts, ideas and approaches in the history of Chinese information technology through a series of lively and insightful stories and people. Perhaps most interestingly, Mullaney covers how various inbuilt linguistic inequalities in turn eventually led to the evolution of innovative strategies and technologies, including input method and predictive text.Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com.

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transactions, and social interactions, among other things, have roots in technological advances from other countries. In particular, 15 years before most Americans were online, the French government backed a communications technology, the Minitel, that revolutionized social, political, and financial interactions. In Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017), Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll discuss the creation and spread of the Minitel and the particular influence it had on France, and ultimately what we call the Internet. In so doing the authors offer lessons for current regulatory debates.

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so, how should it be countered? And: Is it possible to know something simply on the basis of another person’s say-so? In the background of all of these traditional questions is a broad concern thats not often explicitly addressed—the concern is with ignorance. We study the nature of knowledge so that we might better overcome ignorance. And yet ignorance is not often an explicit object of examination. In Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know (The MIT Press, 2017), Daniel DeNicola makes the case for placing ignorance at the center of epistemology. He argues that ignorance is not univocal; it comes in many forms, and the different forms need to be addressed in different ways.

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this category, but is no longer just a matter for the philosophers; it’s complicated enough to require highly interdisciplinary explanation.In his book, Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2016) Kees van Deemter approaches the problem from a computational angle, asking how we can develop algorithms to produce referring expressions that are communicatively successful, efficient, and potentially even human-like in their performance. He draws on a broad range of work from across cognitive science to address this question, and in doing so, also gives us an excellent example of how computational thinking can inform linguistic theorising.In this interview, we discuss several aspects of this work, including the role (and limitations) of the Gricean maxims, the challenge of audience design and shared knowledge, and how the salience of different properties of an entity can and does enter systematically into our choice of referring expression.

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are or at least seem to be incompatible in at least some respects. In Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models (MIT Press, 2014), David Danks proposes a version of this basic theory that links the mind closely with the computational framework used in machine learning: the idea that thinking involves manipulation of symbols encoded as graphical models. Danks, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that graphical models provide a unifying explanation of why we are able to move smoothly between different cognitive processes and why we are able to focus on features of situations that are relevant to our goals. While the book includes the mathematics behind graphical models, Danks explains his proposal in accessible yet precise terms for the non-mathematically trained reader. He discusses how graphical models work in causal reasoning, categorization, and other processes, how his view is related to more familiar cognitive frameworks, and some implications of his view for modularity and other traditional debates.

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new book Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016) is the first scholarly biography of this towering figure of twentieth century American science. Abrahams careful tracing of McCulloch’s broad disciplinary traverses is grounded in explication of heady theories and mathematical models of the brain. The growing historical scholarship on cybernetics rests on a curious threshold: its subject matter, rife with outsized personalities and uncannily forward-looking ideas, is ever poised to remain more ineluctably fascinating than scholarly analysis can render. Rather than attempting to beat the cyberneticians at their own game–self-consciously or not becoming participant observers in the reflexive system described by “second-order” cybernetics–this rich portrait offers pointed and entertaining insight into the role of style, sociability, and mentorship in twentieth century scientific life.

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT, 2014), Prasad looks at the linked histories of MRI research and development in India, UK, the USA to show how the patterns of exclusions created by imperialism continue to shape the topography of high-tech medicine. Pushing back against diffusion of science narratives, Prasad shows how the current story of the West (read: USA) as the center of MRI research and development was far from inevitable. The story was retrospectively, collectively created and has had the effect of obscuring the importance of transnational networks, idiosyncratic federal laws, corporate investments, and everyday habits of imagination in the production of medical technology. Prasad himself resists simple dichotomies because, as he writes, “The issue here is not simply the elision of the history of science in the non-West or its entrapment in within Eurocentric temporarily, but the very categories that the history of science takes as its objects of inquiry (80).”

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 2016), Hale, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, argues that we ought to act in environmentally friendly ways because it is the right thing to do. On his view, environmentally friendly action is motivated by reflecting on our reasons for acting, guided by a concern that our actions be acceptable to a wide range of parties. In this accessible discussion intended for a wide audience, Hale provides a fresh philosophical grounding for thinking about human action and inaction regarding the environment.