Online research in philosophy

Categories, as mental structures, are more than simply sums of property frequencies. A number of recent studies have supported the view that the properties of categories may be organised along functional lines and possibly dependency structures more generally. The study presented here investigates whether earlier findings reflect something unique in the English language/North American culture or whether the functional structuring of categories is a more universal phenomenon. A population of English-speaking Americans was compared to a population of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong (...) Chinese. The findings clearly support the view that functional influences on category centrality are universal (or at least common to Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese and English-speaking Americans), albeit with specific cross-cultural/cross-linguistic group differences in the particular properties that are considered central to categories. (shrink)

The self-advertising, at least, suggests that 'situated cognition' involves the most fundamental conceptual re-organization in AI and cognitive science, even appearing to deny that cognition is to be explained by mental representations. In their defence of the orthodox symbolic representational theory, A. Vera and H. Simon (1993) have rebutted many of these claims, but they overlook an important reading of situated arguments which may, after all, involve a revolutionary insight. I show that the whole debate turns on puzzles (...) familiar from the history of philosophy and psychology and these may serve to clarify the current disputes. (shrink)