Durand of St.-Pourçain on Cognitive Acts: Their Cause, Ontological Status, and Intentional Character
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present dissertation concerns cognitive psychology--theories about the nature and\nmechanism of perception and thought--during the High Middle Ages (1250-1350). \nMany of the issues at the heart of philosophy of mind today--intentionality,\nmental representation, the active/passive nature of perception--were also\nthe subject of intense investigation during this period. I provide an\nanalysis of these debates with a special focus on Durand of\nSt.-Pourçain, a contemporary of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.\nDurand was widely recognized \nas a leading philosopher until the advent of the early modern\nperiod, yet his views have been largely neglected in the last century.\nThe aim of my dissertation, then, is to provide a new understanding of\nDurand's cognitive psychology and to \nestablish a better picture of developments in cognitive psychology during\nthe period.\n\nMost philosophers in the High Middle Ages held, in one form or another, the\nthesis that most forms of cognition (thought, perception) involve the\nreception of the form of the object into the mind. Such forms in\nthe mind explain what a given episode of cognition is about, its content.\nAccording to what has been called the conformality theory of content, the\ncontent of our mental states is fixed by this form in the mind. \nDurand rejects this thesis, and one of the primary theses that I\npursue is that Durand replaces the conformality theory of content\nwith a causal theory of content, according to which the content of\nour mental states is fixed by its cause. When I think about Felix\nand not Graycat, this is to be explained not by the fact that I have\nin my mind the form of Felix and not Graycat, but rather by the fact \nthat Felix and not Graycat caused my thought.\n\nThis is both a controversial interpretation and, indeed, a controversial\ntheory. It is a controversial interpretation because Durand seems to reject \nthe thesis that objects are the causes of our mental states. In the first \nhalf of the present dissertation, I argue that Durand does not \nreject this thesis but he rejects another nearby thesis: that objects as \ncauses give to us 'forms'. On Durand's view, an object causes a mental \nstate even though it does not give to us a new 'form'. In the second half \nof the dissertation I defend Durand's causal theory of content \nagainst salient objections to it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".