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Preface
This book is primarily a criticism of currently fashionable philosoph ical views held in and around the cognitive science community . They are the views of philosophers , including some of my former selves, ' but they are by no means held only by philosophers . I am dissatisfied with these views , and so this book consists of philosophical criticism , but I am by no means depressed by what some will regard as the " " negative outcome of my investigations . As I suggest in the last chapter, it is only by seeing that the currently fashionable views do not work that we can begin to see what the tasks of philosophy might really be. I was enabled to start work on what became this book by the generosi"ty of the National Endowment for the Humanities , which gave me a fellowship in 1982- 1983. I was able to tryout various versions of the book in different lecture series that I was invited to give . One of the earliest versions was tried out in Princeton , where I was briefly a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Humanities (in 1985) and had valuable oppnrh1nitip ~ to discuss my criticism of functionalism with Gil Harman , Saul Kripke , and David Lewis , among others. Later I tried out other versions at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Munich , where I received many valuable comments and criticisms . The final version of three chapters (chapters 1, 5, and 7) formed the substance of my Whidden Lectures at McMaster University in the fall of 1987. All of my colleagues have in one way or another contributed to my thinking on this topic (and none can be held responsible for the results ) . In particular , Burton Dreben persuaded me to undertake a radical reworking of the penultimate version . An earlier version was substantially rewritten as the result of criticisms by two close readers: Charles Travis and my dearest critic Ruth Anna Putnam . And I owe many thanks to the participants in m