REFLECTIONS ON NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL RELIABILISM

Marcello Guarini, Joshua Chauvin, Julie Gorman

2011

Abstract

Reliabilism is a philosophical theory of knowledge that has traditionally focused on propositional knowledge. Paul Churchland has advocated for a reconceptualization of reliabilism to “liberate it” from propositional attitudes (such as accepting that p, believing that p, knowing that p, and the like). In the process, he (a) outlines an alternative for the notion of truth (which he calls “representational success”), (b) offers a non-standard account of theory, and (c) invokes the preceding ideas to provide an account of representation and knowledge that emphasizes our skill or capacity for navigating the world. Crucially, he defines reliabilism (and knowledge) in terms of representational success. This paper discusses these ideas and raises some concerns. Since Churchland takes a neurocomputational approach, we discuss our training of neural networks to classify images of faces. We use this work to suggest that the kind of reliability at work in some knowledge claims is not usefully understood in terms of the aforementioned notion of representational success.

References

  1. Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating Reasons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  2. Churchland, P. M. (2007). Neurophilosophy at Work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  4. Goldman, A. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. Goldman, A. (1992). Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  6. Goldman, A. (2002). Pathways to Knowledge, Private and Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  7. Laakso, A. and Cottrell, G. (2006). Churchland on Connectionism. In Keeley, B.L. (Ed), Paul Churchland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Guarini M., Chauvin J. and Gorman J. (2011). REFLECTIONS ON NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL RELIABILISM . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8425-40-9, pages 711-716. DOI: 10.5220/0003293307110716


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart11,
author={Marcello Guarini and Joshua Chauvin and Julie Gorman},
title={REFLECTIONS ON NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL RELIABILISM},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2011},
pages={711-716},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003293307110716},
isbn={978-989-8425-40-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - REFLECTIONS ON NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL RELIABILISM
SN - 978-989-8425-40-9
AU - Guarini M.
AU - Chauvin J.
AU - Gorman J.
PY - 2011
SP - 711
EP - 716
DO - 10.5220/0003293307110716