Along with the concept of difference, the ontological concept of repetition has many important drifts in Deleuze’s work. In this article, I shall analyze the concept of repetition that appears in Difference and Repetition, while also reviewing the precursory philosophies pertaining to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Péguy in relation to this topic. It will be shown that, although repetition is, in principle, an ontological category that fulfills an eminent role in relation to time and the constitution of subjectivity, it also has (...) been subject to an ethical drift that questions the claims of the moral law. This ethical drift places the concept of repetition in connection with issues and problems that would later appear in the ethico-political texts that Deleuze wrote along with Guattari. I will refer to this connection in greater depth at the end of the article, demonstrating how the structural framework of notions that make up the thinking about repetition is implicit in Deleuze’s later works on the concepts of minority and majority. (shrink)

We’ve seen a significant increase in the attention AI research is receiving this past decade, in large part due to some of the impressive feats of machine learning, particularly deep learning. This has resulted in something of a hype in the ability of AI’s in tackling various issues. The aim of the current essay is to examine the speculative questions “what would it mean for systems to transition from merely intelligently executing a task to knowledgably executing a task?” and “what (...) is the relation between consciousness and intelligence, such that specific evaluations about conscious AI might be made?” We offer what we hope is a roadmap for how to navigate asking these questions and a route forward in understanding how AI goes from intelligence to knowledge and potentially to some types of consciousness. (shrink)

En los escenarios universitarios cada vez resulta menos extraño toparse con investigaciones que indagan por la escritura filosófica proveniente de centros no hegemónicos de producción de conocimiento. Nosotros, que hemos tenido la oportunidad de acercarnos al pasado del ejercicio de la filosofía en el actual territorio colombiano, quisimos hacer una convocatoria pública de escritos dedicados a identificar temas, preguntas y formas en que la variopinta comunidad de la filosofía local está escribiendo su propia historia.

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

In current Western societies, increasing numbers of people express their desire to choose when to die. Allowing people to choose the moment of their death is an ethical issue that should be embedded in sound clinical and legal frameworks. In the case of persons with dementia, it raises further ethical questions such as: Does the person have the capacity to make the choice? Is the person being coerced? Who should be involved in the decision? Is the person’s suffering untreatable? The (...) use of Advance Euthanasia Directives (AED) is suggested as a way to deal with end-of-life wishes of persons with dementia. However, in the Netherlands—the only country in which this practice is legal—the experiences of patients, doctors, and relatives have been far from satisfactory.Our paper analyses this complex ethical challenge from a Dignity-Enhancing Care approach, starting from the Dutch experiences with AED as a case. We first consider the lived experiences of the different stakeholders, seeking out a dialogical-interpretative understanding of care. We aim to promote human dignity as a normative standard for end-of-life care practices. Three concrete proposals are then presented in which this approach can be operationalised in order to deal respectfully with the end-of-life choices of persons with dementia. (shrink)

En el Concilio Vaticano II, la Sagrada Escritura logró un protagonismo inusitado en la Iglesia y en la vida de los creyentes en Latinoamérica y El Caribe. ¿Cómo impactó en el Continente?, ¿cuáles fueron los efectos de la interpretación de la Biblia en la región? Un repaso de prácticas usuales llevadas a cabo antes del Concilio, cuando la Biblia se usó para legitimar el derecho a la conquista del Nuevo Mundo, como el examen de la actual diversificación hermenéutica, creadora de (...) nuevos horizontes de lectura, permiten al lector aprehender perspectivas insospechadas, suscitadas por la apropiación de la Escritura Sagrada en la Iglesia, donde se asoman los rostros y las voces silenciadas en largos siglos de olvido. Este recorrido lleva al lector por el método de interpretación textual de los evangelizadores de varias épocas; por el acceso al texto, para su lectura e interpretación y por la teología subyacente. (shrink)

The relation between ex falso and disjunctive syllogism, or even the justification of ex falso based on disjunctive syllogism, is an old topic in the history of logic. This old topic reappears in contemporary logic since the introduction of minimal logic by Johansson. The disjunctive syllogism seems to be part of our general non-problematic inferential practices and superficially it does not seem to be related to or to depend on our acceptance of the frequently disputable ex falso rule. We know (...) that the acceptance of the ex falso is a sufficient condition for the acceptance of the disjunctive syllogism, but the interesting question is: is the ex falso a necessary condition for the acceptance of the disjunctive syllogism? The aim of the present paper is to discuss some possible ways to define systems that combines the preservation of the disjunctive syllogism with the rejection of the ex falso. (shrink)

This paper shows the brain correlates of Cloninger’s personality model during the presentation of social scenarios under positive or negative valence situations. Social scenarios were constructed when participants played the Dictator game with two confederates that had two opposites roles as the cooperator and non-cooperator. Later the same day during a fMRI scanning session, participants read negative and positive situations that happened to confederates in the past. Participants were asked to think “how do you think those people felt during that (...) situation?” A dissimilarity matrix between stimuli were obtained from fMRI results. Results shown that Harm Avoidance trait people make use of right middle frontal gyrus and left superior frontal gyrus to discriminate between Coop and NoCoop. Cooperation as a trait makes use of the right superior temporal gyrus and the right precuneus to discriminate between Coop and NoCoop in positive social scenarios. Finally, Self-directedness trait people make use of the right inferior parietal lobe to discriminate between Coop and NoCoop in negative social scenarios and the right precuneus to discriminate between Coop and Strangers. An intuitive link between discrimination findings and behavioral patterns of those personality traits is proposed. (shrink)

This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitive science under the framework of mechanistic explanation: Answering the questions that define each one of Marr’s three levels is tantamount to describing the component parts and operations of mechanisms, as well as their organization, behavior, and environmental context. By explicating these questions and showing how they are answered in several different cognitive science research programs, this chapter resolves some of the ambiguities that remain in Marr’s account, and (...) shows that many different areas and traditions of cognitive scientific research can be unified under the mechanistic framework. (shrink)

Partiendo de los análisis de los epistemólogos de la virtud que sitúan la mentalidad abierta como virtud epistémica central el artículo muestra el indisoluble entrelazamiento entre sus dimensiones éticas y epistémicas. Se entiende la mentalidad abierta como virtud de acuerdo con una concepción falibilista de la experiencia y el conocimiento humano en el que se acentúa la capacidad de intervención del agente a través de sus disposiciones y hábitos. Finalmente, la argumentación conduce a una defensa ética del liberalismo político.

El presente artículo es el resultado de reflexiones teóricas-metodológicas alrededor del estudio del fenómeno religioso, específicamente el que concierne al de sistemas religiosos de inspiración afro en Colombia entre 2003-2023. El objetivo es analizar las problemáticas de la investigación sobre estos sistemas religiosos en diáspora dentro del contexto nacional. La discusión señala una serie de tensiones y contradicciones teóricas-metodológicas en las que se ven involucradas/os las/os investigadoras/es insertas/os en el mundo académico, las cuales inician desde el momento mismo en que (...) seleccionan su tema de investigación, los referentes teóricos-metodológicos, conceptuales y el tipo de escritura que habrán de emplear a lo largo de los distintos estudios. Así, quienes investigan sobre fenómenos religiosos son vistos con suspicacia dentro de la academia, una que persiste en oponer asuntos tales como objetividad/subjetividad, outsider/insider, ciencia/religión o verdad/creencia. Finalmente, estas discusiones devienen en cuestionamientos éticos del modo como se hace investigación sobre estas dinámicas socioculturales que adquieren relevancia en Colombia y el mundo contemporáneo. (shrink)

Expressivists claim that normative judgments (NJ) are non-cognitive states. But what kind of states are they, exactly? Expressivists need to provide us with an adequate account of their nature. Here, I argue that there are structural features that render this task rather daunting. The worry takes the form of a looming dilemma: NJ are either conative states (i.e. states with a world-to-mind direction of fit) or they are not. If they are, then they are either attitudes de se (i.e. attitudes (...) about oneself) or they are not. If they are, then they’re unable to account for disagreement. If they are not, then they're unable to account for agent-relative NJ. So NJ cannot be conative states (they cannot have a world-to-mind direction of fit). On the other hand, however, if NJ are not conative states (if they are states without a direction of fit, like affective or other sui generis non-cognitive, non-conative attitudes) then it remains a mystery how they support relations of disagreement. (shrink)

My aim is to depict Psathas’s position on ethnomethodology as a way of doing phenomenological sociology. On this, he contested with others who argued that ethnomethodology is not a phenomenological sociology at all. His claim was that ethnomethodology is a part of the phenomenological movement. In this dispute, he offered two kinds of arguments. On the one hand, he documented the strong phenomenological background of Garfinkel’s ideas. On the other hand, he found in Garfinkel’s own words expressions of gratitude to (...) Husserl, Gurwitsch, and Schutz, among other phenomenologists. However, having proved that there was a close relation of Garfinkel with ethnomethodology, Psathas went on to show that Garfinkel turned phenomenological ideas into something new; in particular, he turned phenomenology into an experimental science dealing with the natural attitude. This is a groundbreaking contribution that Psathas appreciated and comprehended as no one else. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the sharp contrast between the “short path” of Heideggerian ontology and the “long path” adopted by Ricoeur as a representation of the many necessary mediations in the constitution of his philosophical anthropology. Heidegger breaks into contemporary thought with the publication of his treatise “Being and Time” (1927) as a kind of direct settlement in the field of ontology. In contrast, Ricoeur is seen - and sees himself - as a thinker of conceptual mediations in his (...) long itinerary, since adherence to Husserlian phenomenology and subsequent hermeneutic inflection, passing through confrontations with Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralism and analytical philosophy, to the creation of the book “Oneself as Another” (1990). However, the two philosophers built their works on the common horizon of hermeneutics; therefore, are there possible points of convergence between them? And how could we interpret the relevance of this possible interlocution? These questions cannot be answered without a thorough comparative reading. This text does not intend to answer them, but only to suggest elements for further investigations. (shrink)

This paper considers the way mathematical and computational models are used in network neuroscience to deliver mechanistic explanations. Two case studies are considered: Recent work on klinotaxis by Caenorhabditis elegans, and a longstanding research effort on the network basis of schizophrenia in humans. These case studies illustrate the various ways in which network, simulation and dynamical models contribute to the aim of representing and understanding network mechanisms in the brain, and thus, of delivering mechanistic explanations. After outlining this mechanistic construal (...) of network neuroscience, two concerns are addressed. In response to the concern that functional network models are non-explanatory, it is argued that functional network models are in fact explanatory mechanism sketches. In response to the concern that models which emphasize a network’s organization over its composition do not explain mechanistically, it is argued that this emphasis is both appropriate and consistent with the principles of mechanistic explanation. What emerges is an improved understanding of the ways in which mathematical and computational models are deployed in network neuroscience, as well as an improved conception of mechanistic explanation in general. (shrink)

The Polish logician Roman Suszko has extensively pleaded in the 1970s for a restatement of the notion of many-valuedness. According to him, as he would often repeat, “there are but two logical values, true and false.” As a matter of fact, a result by W´ojcicki-Lindenbaum shows that any tarskian logic has a many-valued semantics, and results by Suszko-da Costa-Scott show that any many-valued semantics can be reduced to a two-valued one. So, why should one even consider using logics with more (...) than two values? Because, we argue, one has to decide how to deal with bivalence and settle down the tradeoff between logical 2-valuedness and truth-functionality, from a pragmatical standpoint. -/- This paper will illustrate the ups and downs of a two-valued reduction of logic. Suszko’s reductive result is quite non-constructive.We will exhibit here a way of effectively constructing the two-valued semantics of any logic that has a truth-functional finite-valued semantics and a sufficiently expressive language. From there, as we will indicate, one can easily go on to provide those logics with adequate canonical systems of sequents or tableaux. The algorithmic methods developed here can be generalized so as to apply to many non-finitely valued logics as well —or at least to those that admit of computable quasi tabular two-valued semantics, the so-called dyadic semantics. (shrink)

Whereas most branches of neuroscience are thought to provide mechanistic explanations, systems neuroscience is not. Two reasons are traditionally cited in support of this conclusion. First, systems neuroscientists rarely, if ever, rely on the dual strategies of decomposition and localization. Second, they typically emphasize organizational properties over the properties of individual components. In this paper, I argue that neither reason is conclusive: researchers might rely on alternative strategies for mechanism discovery, and focusing on organization is often appropriate and consistent with (...) the norms of mechanistic explanation. Thus, many explanations in systems neuroscience can also be viewed as mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus that the study of social institutions is one of the fundamental concerns of the social sciences. The idea that phenomenology has ignored this topic is also widely accepted. As against this view, the present paper aims at demonstrating that especially Schutzian phenomenology—that is, the social-phenomenological tradition started by Alfred Schutz and continued by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, among others—provides rich insights on the nature and workings of social institutions that could contribute to enriching the (...) current social-scientific debate on the issue. In order to show this, the authors attempt to unearth and systematically reconstruct Schutz’s and Berger and Luckmann’s insights on social institutions and to confront them with current approaches. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Este artículo pretende generar claridades sobre el planteamiento sistémico, llevado a los universos de la escuela y la familia. Se plantean lugares de encuentro entre estos dos sistemas interconexionados por el pensamiento sistémico y la comunicación, rescatando que la escuela y la familia han sido determinantes en la configuración de subjetividades y sociedades. Estas reflexiones permiten concluir que las manifestaciones recíprocas de la familia y la escuela esculpen maneras de ser y de estar en el mundo.

En los últimos años han aparecido publicaciones que intentan generar un marco para la aplicación de conocimientos neurocognitivos para la resolución de problemáticas sociales. Bajo el mote de “ciencias de comportamiento”, este campo de estudios que se presenta como profundamente interdisciplinario se propone aportar herramientas para resolver diversas problemáticas sociales, mediante la dilucidación de los mecanismos subyacentes a la conducta humana y su posterior operacionalización en forma de políticas públicas. Enfocamos nuestra mirada en ciertos aspectos epistemológicos e ideológicos que subyacen (...) a estas iniciativas, en particular su conceptualización de la crisis climática como un problema a resolver mediante los avances de las ciencias cognitivas. Observamos, ejemplificamos y problematizamos una serie de premisas: la conducta del individuo como expresión terminal de un proceso “interno” en el cual el ambiente y por extensión lo “social” están subordinados en cuanto a su jerarquía explicativa; la simplificación de las problemáticas a resolver en términos de sesgos y limitaciones cognitivas, de modo tal que los objetivos de la intervención sean los comportamientos y decisiones de actores individuales; la apelación a la biología como sustento explicativo de los constructos psicológicos utilizados a través de narrativas adaptacionistas sobre el desarrollo de funcionalidades cognitivas innatas. Sostenemos que la generación y aplicación de los conocimientos en este tipo de iniciativas se inscribe en una línea ideológica marcada, según la cual las causas principales de la crisis climática no se hallan en las dinámicas y contradicciones del sistema socioeconómico vigente, sino en las de los sistemas cognitivos individuales. (shrink)

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a parallel crisis emerged in the form of an “infodemic,” where misinformation proliferated through social media at an unprecedented scale. This article delves into the evolving landscape of reliable and misinformation sources reporting on the pandemic, examining their communication dynamics. Leveraging a comprehensive data set encompassing 437,832 news published online by media organizations from January 2020 to December 2021, I employ structural change analysis and network-based natural language processing to explore these dynamics. The findings illuminate the (...) contrasting approaches adopted by reliable sources, which prioritize scientific discourse, and misinformation, which exhibits high topic volatility—rapid change in the focus—suggesting that misinformation sources frequently shift their attention to different topics. Notably, this highlights a deliberate strategy employed by misinformation purveyors, that is, creating false crises without authoritative resolutions, thereby fostering a sense of lack of control, chaos, and uncertainty. Furthermore, the sentiment and morality analysis of COVID-19 news reveal that reliable news tends to maintain a balanced and neutral tone, while misinformation often exhibits a highly negative and morally charged narrative. These results carry significant implications for devising effective social countermeasures against misinformation at various stages of the pandemic. (shrink)

Texto de presentación para el monográfico _De São Paulo a Puebla: la izquierda iberoamericana entre el retorno y la transformación (1990-2024)._.

In this paper we study collective identity functions that deal with formation of clubs. Usually the choice offered to individuals is to cast a vote in favor of qualification or not, and the final outcome is qualification or non-qualification. In this context we show that independent collective identity functions are naturally characterized by voting rules, and in particular, consent rules can be represented by one single collection of weighted majorities. In addition, we consider the extended model where voters are allowed (...) to abstain and we distinguish between disqualification and a neutral outcome. We show that this environment allows agents to act in different capacities that cannot be distinguished in the original formulation of the problem. (shrink)

The most recent work by Jürgen Habermas tries to revalue religion in today's society. For this he tries to find genealogical connections between secular content and the worldviews that emerged in the Axial Age, including Jewish monotheism. In this article we try to propose that a genealogical approach to monotheism from the perspective of those involved would have to start from the context of undetected origin that constitutes the ethical universalism of Judaism: the Noahide code. To do this, we analyze (...) narrative and conceptual elements of axial and non-axial cultures and show their parallels with the seven laws of the children of Noah as the moral core of humanity. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to analyze the convergences and divergences between two conceptions of realism: Markus Gabriel’s “new realism” and Evandro Agazzi’s realism. Firstly, the main theses behind “new realism” will be presented, drawing on Gabriel’s text ‘_Why the World Does Not Exist’_ (2015), originally published in German as _Warum es die Welt nicht gibt_ in 2013. Secondly, the constitutive aspects of realism developed by Agazzi will be explored, primarily in works such as ‘_Temas y problemas de filosofía (...) de la física’_ (1978), ‘_Filosofia, scienza e verità’_, Rusconi, Milano (1989), ‘_El bien el mal y la ciencia_’ (1996), and ‘_Filosofía de la Naturaleza. Ciencia y Cosmología’_ (2000), among others. Finally, the convergences and divergences between these two conceptions of realism will be analyzed, allowing for an inference, based on sound reasoning, about the potential novelty of the so-called “new realism”. (shrink)

Música, filosofia e formação cultural - ensaios reúne as contribuições de renomados intelectuais interessados no estudo do significado e da aplicação da música nos processos formativos. Desloca o foco epistemológico da filosofia orientada pelo olhar para uma perspectiva que ressalta o ouvir. Discute as bases éticas e estéticas da educação, com destaque para o conceito de formação cultural, e analisa os múltiplos modos de compreender a experiência formativa da música, desde o clássico até o popular. É um livro que, além (...) de indicar as referências básicas para uma crítica da cultura do nosso tempo, também pode ser usado como material didático na formação de professores em diversas áreas do conhecimento, tais como a arte, a filosofia, a história, a sociologia e a pedagogia. (shrink)

El libro ofrece al lector un estudio comparativo exhaustivo entre Leviathan de Hobbes y El Critión de Gracián desde el inusual punto de vista de la sociología actual, inédito hasta la fecha.

Después de introducir el artículo (§1), repasaré los aspectos más generales y centrales de la literatura sobre la fundamentación (§2); esta tarea me parece valiosa ya que no existen revisiones generales y actualizadas en español sobre el tema. Después, argumentaré que la fundamentación no es una medida de complejidad física, y que, sin un vínculo necesario con la complejidad, quedan pocas razones para pensar que la fundamentación une a los diferentes estratos de la realidad física, que es una de las (...) motivaciones más importantes para introducir relaciones de dependencia (§3). (shrink)

Ofrecemos dos cartas inéditas entre los filósofos Manuel García Morente y Xavier Zubiri. La primera carta, escrita por el pensador giennense, viene a iluminar el itinerario de su conversión religiosa que le llevó a ordenarse sacerdote en la Iglesia católica. Dicho proceso espiritual había empezado a fraguarse el año anterior en París, durante el exilio que ambos pensadores habían compartido en la capital francesa, tras el estallido de la guerra civil española. En la segunda carta, fechada casi dos años y (...) medio después de la anterior, Zubiri dirige al pensador andaluz unas palabras entrañables en respuesta a la invitación recibida de asistir a su primera misa; una carta en la que el filósofo vasco desvela la inquebrantable amistad entre ambos pensadores, intensificada en los últimos años por la fe cristiana. (shrink)

We introduce and study a new approach to the theory of abstract algebraic logic (AAL) that explores the use of many-sorted behavioral logic in the role traditionally played by unsorted equational logic. Our aim is to extend the range of applicability of AAL toward providing a meaningful algebraic counterpart also to logics with a many-sorted language, and possibly including non-truth-functional connectives. The proposed behavioral approach covers logics which are not algebraizable according to the standard approach, while also bringing a new (...) algebraic perspective to logics which are algebraizable using the standard tools of AAL. Furthermore, we pave the way toward a robust behavioral theory of AAL, namely by providing a behavioral version of the Leibniz operator which allows us to generalize the traditional Leibniz hierarchy, as well as several well-known characterization results. A number of meaningful examples will be used to illustrate the novelties and advantages of the approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article, of essayistic-bibliographic character, seeks to reflect on the uses, powers and meanings of the term Aesthetic Education in scientific research, starting, firstly, from approaches on the concept of aesthetics from the texts The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Literary Creation, by Mikhail Bakhtin and Malaise dans l’ésthetique, by Jacques Rancière, to then mobilize, from a Latin American perspective, its relations with the field of education in dialogue with Latin American authors. The text is constituted as (...) a theoretical-methodological exercise to think the Aesthetic Education from angles and prisms still little investigated in the current literature on the subject. (shrink)

This paper inquires in a central question in the Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, that is, the end of the West and his inmediate concequence: the return schema. The evaluation that Nancy realize is associated to his affirmation about this question is that the West has finished product planetary extension of its foundational philosophical slogans. The main argument is that one of the most conspicuous causes of that finishing is the global structure, regulated by the exclusive pattern of the One, in any (...) case, neutralizer considered singular beings. It is argued that the main output to said planetary nancyana neutralization is the concept of a community of singular beings under the being-in-common that cover deploys unique and unrepeatable sense networks. (shrink)

Neste ensaio, gostaria de esclarecer, por meio da filosofia de Mayz Vallenilla, a estreita relação que existe entre técnica e alienação, como uma filosofia da técnica que se preocupa com o comportamento do homem, portanto, com sua alienação. Como resultado, este ensaio será dividido em três partes: na primeira seção, será desenvolvido um diálogo entre um historiador e um sociólogo, para construir uma breve história da técnica; na segunda seção apresentarei um diálogo sobre o conceito de alienação entre Marx e (...) Heidegger a partir do pensamento do filósofo venezuelano Mayz Vallenilla e na última seção apresentarei a conexão entre ética e meta-técnica como alternativa atraente à alienação técnica. (shrink)

A obra Hacking e dispositivos tecnológicos nos faz compreender que um computador não é somente uma máquina que corresponde aos cliques do mouse, mas uma realidade técnica que permite estar em contato com o universo inteiro. Essa realidade tem na internet um instrumento poderoso dotado de algoritmos por meio dos quais é possível conduzir nossas condutas por um universo grandioso no qual aprendemos a participar de grupos, a sorrir, a odiar, a amar, a trabalhar, comer, acordar, dormir, entre outros. Contudo, (...) é importante nos precavermos contra a tecnofobia, ou sentir que a internet é uma encarnação do mal. Não é isso, a internet abre espaços para ter bons encontros, conhecer os mais variados objetos técnicos e construir uma aprendizagem por meio da experimentação. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the basic research strategies and analytic techniques deployed in computational cognitive neuroscience. On the one hand, “top-down” strategies are used to infer, from formal characterizations of behavior and cognition, the computational properties of underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, “bottom-up” research strategies are used to identify neural mechanisms and to reconstruct their computational capacities. Both of these strategies rely on experimental techniques familiar from other branches of neuroscience, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, single-cell (...) recording, and electroencephalography. What sets computational cognitive neuroscience apart, however, is the explanatory role of analytic techniques from disciplines as varied as computer science, statistics, machine learning, and mathematical physics. These techniques serve to describe neural mechanisms computationally, but also to drive the process of scientific discovery by influencing which kinds of mechanisms are most likely to be identified. For this reason, understanding the nature and unique appeal of computational cognitive neuroscience requires not just an understanding of the basic research strategies that are involved, but also of the formal methods and tools that are being deployed, including those of probability theory, dynamical systems theory, and graph theory. (shrink)