There are two great traditions in the philosophy of mind that continue to exercise their influence in the age of computing machines. These are the dualistic tradition associated especially with the name of René Descartes and the behavioristic tradition associated with B.F. Skinner. Dualism is strongly antireductionistic, insofar as mentality is taken to be different than and not reducible to behavior. Behaviorism, by contrast, is strongly reductionistic, taking mentalistic language to be at best no more than an abbreviated mode for the description of behavior and at worst just scientifically insignificant gibberish. The most important elements distinguishing dualism from behaviorism concern ontic (ontological) theses about the nature of minds and epistemic (epistemological) theses about how minds can be known. Descartes, for example, maintained that minds are thinking things (the kinds of things that can think), where access to knowledge about minds is available by means of introspection (envisioned as a kind of inner observation). Skinner, however, maintained that the concept of mind was dispensable in the scientific study of behavior, which only relies upon observation and experimentation. In one form or another, these traditions continue to exert their influence within the study of the mind, where the work of Alan Turing, for example, seems to fall within the behavioristic tradition, while that of Stevan Harnad appears to fall within the dualistic tradition instead. The position that I am elaborating here, however, suggests that neither behaviorism nor dualism--in their classic or contemporary guises--can solve the problem of the nature of the mind, which requires an alternative approach that regards behavior as evidence for the existence of nonreductive, semiotic modes of mentality.
The conception of minds as semiotic systems complements the connectionist conception, which views the brain as a neural network of numerous neurons capable of activation..............
