Event Detail

Fri Oct 1, 2010
5101 Tolman
11 AM–1 PM
Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences
John Campbell (University of California, Berkeley)
Is thinking a motor process?

Feinberg (1978) and Frith (1992) proposed that ideas from classical motor control theory, such as the notion of efferent copy and comparator, can be applied to describe mental processes such as thinking. There has recently been a lot of protest about these ideas in the philosophical literature, as thinking itself is taken to be the central executive process required for and underlying motor processes. I defend the application of these ideas from classical motor control theory to the process of thinking itself, and argue that they illuminate not only ordinary thinking but many of the breakdowns in thinking found in schizophrenic and other psychiatric patients.