Online research in philosophy

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

What would it be like to have never learned English, but instead only to know Hopi, Mandarin Chinese, or American Sign Language? Would that change the way you think? Imagine entirely losing your language, as the result of stroke or trauma. You are aphasic, unable to speak or listen, read or write. What would your thoughts now be like? As the most extreme case, imagine having been raised without any language at all, as a wild child. What—if anything—would it be (...) like to be such a person? Could you be smart; could you reminisce about the past, plan the future? (shrink)

Experimental memory research has traditionally focused on the individual, and viewed social influence as a source of error or inhibition. However, in everyday life, remembering is often a social activity, and theories from philosophy and psychology predict benefits of shared remembering. In a series of studies, both experimental and more qualitative, we attempted to bridge this gap by examining the effects of collaboration on memory in a variety of situations and in a variety of groups. We discuss our results in (...) terms of a functional view of collaborative remembering, and consider when and in what ways remembering with others might help or hinder memory. (shrink)

y arguments about the intrinsically interactional nature of development (e.g. Johnston, 1988; Lehrman, 1953; Lemeri983O te learning takes place and an environment to be learned. The use of the term Cngnz`rii*e Psyc/10/0g_v.· An Inrerrzational Review. Edited by Michael W. Eysenck @1990 by John Wiley & Sons Ld..

A current debate within the cognitive development literature addresses how best to characterize conceptual change. Within one proposal, development primarily consists of a series of radical conceptual shifts or restructurings in which the most current understanding is inexplicable within (incommensurate with) prior conceptual structure. Alternatively, development is discussed as more gradual enrichment of multiple existing early explanatory systems, allowing for commensuarability over time and change. This paper examines the literature in this debate with specific focus on naive biological understanding, and (...) discusses a series of studies on preschoolers’ inductive inferences across biological and non-biological kinds. Children were taught a series of biological properties for a human being (e.g. eating, sleeping etc.), and asked to generalize these properties to both biological (e.g. dogs, worms) and non-biological kinds (e.g. clouds, tables). The results of these studies support the gradualenrichment proposal. Specifically, 4-year-olds seem to possess a limited, but coherent and independent biological theory which may form the basis of mature understanding of biological kinds. These results are discussed in terms of multiple explanatory systems which both preschoolers and adults can employ across development to effectively guide their decisions within a given domain. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. (shrink)

H actually ran the program on a number of large pieces of English text, though from my point of view, it’s the ability and the willingness to do this that is the motivation of learning Perl. H’s Perl code takes all periods ‘.’ to mark sentence breaks, and of course not all periods really do mark sentence breaks: the previous one earlier in this sentence does not, nor does the period after an abbreviation, most of the time—though the next one (...) does, e.g. The task of writing a program that can distinguish sentence-final periods from all other periods is quite an interesting and challenging one. (shrink)