Naturalizing the Mind (The Jean Nicod Lectures, 1995)

Dretske (philosophy, Stanford U.) develops a representational theory of those qualitative aspects of the mind that have defied traditional forms of naturalism, arguing that to understand the mind one must understand what the mind's job is and how it is performed by the nervous system. He focuses on what naturalistic representationalism reveals about introspective knowledge, intentionality, the biological function of conscious experience, and the possibility of knowing what alien experiences are like. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.