Functionalism about truth is the view that truth is an explanatorily significant but multiply-realizable property. According to this view the properties that realize truth vary from domain to domain, but the property of truth is a single, higher-order, domain insensitive property. We argue that this view faces a challenge similar to the one that Jaegwon Kim laid out for the multiple realization...

Wroe Alderson (1898–1965) is generally considered to be one of the giants of post-war marketing scholarship, a titanic thinker who did much to legitimize the study of marketing theory and thought. He is also widely regarded as someone who was incapable of communicating his ideas cogently. As Holbrook (2001: 37) unequivocally observes, ‘here was a writer who could not express himself clearly to ...

Philosophers have devoted a great deal of discussion to the question of whether an inverted spectrum thought experiment refutes functionalism. (For a review of the inverted spectrum and its many philosophical applications, see Byrne, 2004.) If Hoffman is correct the matter can be swiftly and conclusively settled, without appeal to any empirical data about color vision (or anything else). Assumi...

Kengo Miyazono, in his work Delusions and Beliefs, defends a teleo-functional account of delusions. In my contribution to this symposium, I question one Miyazono’s motivations for appealing teleo-functionalism over its main rival, dry-functionalism. Miyazono suggests that teleo-functionalism, unlike dry-functionalism, can the compatibility theses (i) delusions are genuine doxastic states (doxas...

Functionalism is the view that a system (or system component) grasps the meaning of its inputs to the extent that it produces the right outputs. If a system retrieves all and only relevant documents in response to a query, we say it understands the query. If a robot avoids bumping into walls, we say it understands its sensors and its environment. If a chess program beats the world champion, we ...