William J. Rapaport's Research Interests

The purpose of my book is to present arguments for this position, and to investigate its implications. Chapters discuss: models and semantic theories (with critical evaluations of work by Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, Brian Cantwell Smith, and Marx W. Wartofsky) the nature of "syntactic semantics" (including the relevance of Antonio Damasio's cognitive neuroscientific theories), conceptual-role semantics (with critical evaluations of work by Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, Gilbert Harman, David Lewis, Barry Loewer, William G. Lycan, Timothy C. Potts, and Wilfrid Sellars), the role of negotiation in interpreting communicative acts (including evaluations of theories by Jerome Bruner and Patrick Henry Winston), Hilary Putnam's and Jerry Fodor's views of methodological solipsism, implementation and its relationships with such metaphysical concepts as individuation, instantiation, exemplification, reduction, and supervenience (with a study of Jaegwon Kim's theories), John Searle's Chinese-Room Argument and its relevance to understanding Helen Keller (and vice versa), and Herbert Terrace's theory of naming as a fundamental linguistic ability unique to humans. Throughout, reference is made to our implemented computational theory of cognition: a computerized cognitive agent implemented in SNePS.