In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the prospects of developing a ‘naturalized epistemology’, though different authors tend to interpret this label in quite different ways. One goal of this paper is to sketch three projects that might lay claim to the ‘naturalized epistemology’ label, and to argue that they are not all equally attractive. Indeed, I'll maintain that the first of the three—the one I'll attribute to Quine—is simply incoherent. There is no way we could get what we want from an epistemological theory by pursuing the project Quine proposes. The second project on my list is a naturalized version of reliabilism. This project is not fatally flawed in the way that Quine's is. However, it's my contention that the sort of theory this project would yield is much less interesting than might at first be thought.

One standard objection to the view that phenomenal experience is functionally determined is based upon what has come to be called ‘The Absent Qualia Hypothesis’, the idea that there could be a person or a machine that was functionally exactly like us but that felt or consciously experienced nothing at all (see Block, 1980; Block and Fodor, 1980; Campbell, 1980; Nagel, 1980). Advocates of this hypothesis typically maintain that we can easily imagine possible systems that meet the appropriate functional specifications but that intuitively lack any phenomenal consciousness. Ned Block (1980), for example, asks us to suppose that a billion Chinese people are each given a two-way radio with which to communicate with one another and with an artificial (brainless) body. The movements of the body are controlled by the radio signals, and the signals themselves are made in accordance with instructions the Chinese people receive from a vast display in the sky which is visible to all of them. The instructions are such that the participating Chinese people together realize whatever programs the functionalist supposes underlie human phenomenal experience.

‘Psychological structures may be shown to grow and differentiate throughout life. Correspondingly, the brain has a much more lengthy and involved development than any other mechanism of the body. We know little yet of how this uniquely complex process is determined, but it is certain that the principles of embryogenesis apply in all growth, including psychological growth, and not just to the morphogenesis of the body of the embryo.’

This is not a scholarly research paper, but a ‘position paper’ outlining an approach to the study of mind which has been gradually evolving (at least in my mind) since about 1969 when I first become acquainted with work in Artificial Intelligence through Max Clowes. I shall try to show why it is more fruitful to construe the mind as a control system than as a computational system (although computation can play a role in control mechanisms).

In this paper we consider two key concepts from software engineering—‘specification’ and ‘implementation’—and explore their possible applications outside software engineering to other disciplines, notably the philosophy of action, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. Throughout, the emphasis is on the gain in conceptual clarity that can be afforded by these concepts; it is not so much a matter of new knowledge or new theories but of a reorganization of existing knowledge and theories in a way that facilitates the transfer of insights across a range of related fields.

Between the later views of Wittgenstein and those of connectionism1 on the subject of the mastery of language there is an impressively large number of similarities. The task of establishing this claim is carried out in the second section of this paper (with arguments in the fourth section lending further support).

David Marr (1982) provided an influential account of levels of description in classical cognitive science. In this paper we contrast Marr'ent with some alternatives that are suggested by the recent emergence of connectionism. Marr's account is interesting and important both because of the levels of description it distinguishes, and because of the way his presentation reflects some of the most basic, foundational, assumptions of classical AI-style cognitive science (classicism, as we will call it henceforth). Thus, by focusing on levels of description, one can sharpen foundational differences between classicism and potential non-classical conceptions of mentality that might emerge under the rubric of connectionism.