יום ב' 16.03.2009 , 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 449 בנין גילמן

במסגרת קולוקוויום בר הילל

Professor Carl Craver,
Department of Philosophy, Purdue University

In Defence of Levels

Commentator: Oron Shagrir, The Hebrew Univeristy

התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:30, ליד חדר 449
ההרצאה תינתן בשפה האנגלית!

 

Few terms are more abused than "level." There are levels of abstraction, being, complexity, description, explanation, generality, regularity, organization, size, and theory. There are Marr's levels, Dennet's levels, Lycan's homuncular levels, and Oppenheim and Putnam's hierarchical levels. To make matters worse, the personal/subpersonal distinction, the role/occupant distinction, and the function/mechanism distinction are all frequently described using the levels metaphor. But the levels metaphor is undemanding, requiring only a set of relata and a means of ranking them as higher and lower than one another. I distinguish several senses of level common in neuroscience, and I identify one sense, levels of mechanisms, as especially important for thinking about the explanations and theories of contemporary neuroscience. I then show how confusion about interlevel relations sometimes results from failing to distinguish levels of mechanisms from levels of realization, on the one hand, and from personal and sub-personal levels on the other .

פרופ' ליאו קורי , יו"ר