This selection includes (parts of) two sections from a very long paper (c. 60 pp.). The first comes from near the beginning and the second is from the very end.
Already by the time of the first selection Block has introduced two distinctions made using some special terminology. Although you could probably guess the meanings of these terms from context, some explicit discussion may help, so here’s a glossary:
Distinction 1 (between two ways functionalism might go wrong): liberalism ascribes mental properties to things that do not in fact have them while chauvinism withholds mental properties from things that in fact have them.
Distinction 2 (between two varieties of functionalism): the difference between Functionalism (capitalized) and Psychofunctionalism corresponds to a difference between common-sense psychology and scientific psychology—while Functionalism is concerned with ties among conscious mental states, inputs, and outputs, Psychofunctionalism involves a wider range of ties including internal and conscious structures that are postulated by the theories of scientific psychology.
The machine tables Block speaks of are the same as those mentioned by Putnam, so you can think of the example on the last handout. Block offers a simpler and more concrete example (whose pricing suggests it had been around for a while when Block used it):
| inputs | |||||
| nickel | dime | ||||
| states | state 1 | no ouput | go to state 2 | dispense coke | go to state 1 |
| state 2 | dispense coke | go to state 1 |
dispense coke & nickel change | go to state 1 | |
§1.2. Not much more needs to be said in preparation for this example. But note that Putnam tried anticipate this sort of objection. (See his condition 3 and the reference to swarms of bees on p. 43.)
§3.1. (§3.2 in the original paper) This is all about the difficulty of finding a way between the errors of liberalism and chauvinism. The difficulty results from asking whether the abstraction of a functionalist description of states should be adopted for inputs and outputs, too.
If you are curious about the original version of this article, it is available online at: