Implications of the Cognitive Sciences for the Philosophy of Science

Does recent work in the cognitive sciences have any implications for theories or methods employed within the philosophy of science itself? It does if one takes a naturalistic approach in which understanding the nature of representations or judgments of representational success in science requires reference to the cognitive capacities or activities of individual scientists. Here I comment on recent contributions from three areas of the cognitive sciences represented respectively by Paul Churchland's neurocomputational perspective, Nancy Nersessian's cognitive-historical approach, and Paul Thagard's computational philosophy of science. The main general conclusion is that we need to replace traditional linguistic notions of representation in science.