Minds and Computers : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

behaviourism, philosophical (analytic)
a semantically reductive and
ontologically eliminative theory of mind, according to which our
mental state terms don’t actually pick anything out but are simply
useful shorthand locutions for referring to complex sets of dispos-
itions to behave.
behaviourism, psychological
a methodological view concerning how
psychological investigation should proceed, according to which
psychology should treat exclusively of observable behaviour.
Influenced by positivism.
causal theory (of mind)
the view that mental states are characterised
exclusively in terms of their causal role with respect to mediating
relations between stimulus and behaviour.
ceteris paribus
all other things being equal.
Chinese room
a thought experiment which seeks to show that no
amount of syntactic manipulation, in isolation from the external
world, is su
fficient to generate semantics.
cognitive architecture
the structure and nature of the information
processing systems of a cognitive agent – the organisational and
implementation features of the information processing hardware of
a cognitive agent.
computation
the sequence of operations of a register machine.
computationalism
the philosophical theory of mind according to
which minds are akin to the software being run on the hardware, or
wetware, of the brain – a kind of functionalism which allows for the
possibility of computational artificial intelligence.
computer
the physical implementation of – or, more accurately,
approximation to – a universal machine.
conditional
a statement of the form ‘If . . . then . . .’.
conjunction
a logical operation represented by the natural language
term ‘and’.