The renowned philosopher Jerry Fodor, a leading figure in the study of the mind for more than twenty years, presents a strikingly original theory on the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of cognitivescience is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, deals out witty and pugnacious demolitions of (...) rival theories, and suggests that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations. This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford CognitiveScience Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitivescience will never be the same again. (shrink)
The last 15 years or so has seen the development of a fascinating new area of cognitivescience: the cognitivescience of religion (CSR). Scientists in this field aim to explain religious beliefs and various other religious human activities by appeal to basic cognitive structures that all humans possess. The CSR scientific theories raise an interesting philosophical question: do they somehow show that religious belief, more specifically belief in a god of some kind, is irrational? (...) In this paper I investigate this question and argue that CSR does not show that belief in god is irrational. (shrink)
Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitivescience, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitivescience with respect to generality and normativity. General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of cognitivescience. Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize expected utility, (...) and how norms should be established. These kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of progress in cognitivescience. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of findings in cognitivescience. (shrink)
Cognitivescience is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence, embracing psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. There are many important philosophical questions related to this investigation, but this short chapter will focus on the following three. What is the nature of the explanations and theories developed in cognitivescience? What are the relations among the five disciplines that comprise cognitivescience? What are the implications of cognitivescience research for general (...) issues in the philosophy of science? I will argue that cognitive theories and explanations depend on representations of mechanisms and that the relations among the five disciplines, especially psychology and neuroscience, depend on relations between kinds of mechanisms. These conclusions have implications for central problems in general philosophy of science such as the nature of theories, explanations, and reduction between theories at different levels. (shrink)
This is the first major textbook to offer a truly comprehensive review of cognitivescience in its fullest sense. Ranging across artificial intelligence models and cognitive psychology through to recent discursive and cultural theories Rom Harre offers a breathtakingly original yet accessible integration of the field. At its core this textbook addresses the question "is psychology a science?" with a clear account of scientific method and explanation and their bearing on psychological research. A pivotal figure in (...) psychology and philosophy for many decades Rom Harre has turned his unmatched breadth of reference and insight for students at all levels. Whether describing, language, categorization, memory, the brain or connectionism the book always links our intuitions about beliefs, desires and their social context to the latest accounts of their place in computational and biological models. Fluently written and well structured, this an ideal text for students. The book is divided into four basic modules, with three lectures in each; the reader is guided with helpful learning points, study and essay questions and key readings for each chapter. (shrink)
CognitiveScience is a major new guide to the central theories and problems in the study of the mind and brain. The authors clearly explain how and why cognitivescience aims to understand the brain as a computational system that manipulates representations. They identify the roots of cognitivescience in Descartes - who argued that all knowledge of the external world is filtered through some sort of representation - and examine the present-day role of (...) Artificial Intelligence, computing, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. Throughout, the key building blocks of cognitivescience are clearly illustrated: perception, memory, attention, emotion, language, control of movement, learning, understanding and other important mental phenomena. CognitiveScience: presents a clear, collaborative introduction to the subject is the first textbook to bring together all the different strands of this new science in a unified approach includes illustrations and exercises to aid the student. (shrink)
Abstract. Although the CognitiveScience of Religion (CSR), a current approach to the scientific study of religion, has exerted an influence in the study of religion for almost twenty years, the question of its compatibility or incompatibility with theism has not been the subject of serious discussion until recently. Some critics of religion have taken a lively interest in the CSR because they see it as useful in explaining why religious believers consistently make costly commitments to false beliefs. (...) Conversely, some theists have argued for the compatibility of religious belief with basic CSR results. In this article, we contribute to the incipient discussion about the worldview relevance of the CSR by arguing that while a theistic reading of the field only represents one interpretative option at most, antitheistic claims about the incompatibility of the CSR with theism look like they may be harder to maintain than first appearances might suggest. (shrink)
Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as (...) a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)
"Twin earth" examples have motivated a number of proposals for the lexicography of kind terms in natural languages. It is argued that these proposals create unacceptable difficulties for the analysis of de dicto propositional attitudes. A conservative solution of the twin earth problems is then proposed according to which they reflect pragmatic features of language use rather than semantic features of lexical content.
Paul Thagard has recently argued that thought experiments are dangerous and misleading when we try to use them as evidence for claims. This paper refutes his skepticism. Building on Thagard’s own work in cognitivescience, I suggest that Thagard has much that is positive to say about how thought experiments work. My last section presents some new directions for research on the intersection between thought experiments and cognitivescience.
The so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ (Gardner, 1985) in American psychology owed much to developments in adjacent disciplines, especially theoretical linguistics and computer science. Indeed, the cognitive revolution brought forth, not only a change in the conception of psychology, but also an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the mind, involving philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience along with computer science, linguistics and psychology. Many commentators agree in dating the conception of this inter-disciplinary approach, cognitivescience, to 11 September 1956, (...) the second day of a symposium on information theory held at MIT (Miller, 2003). Over the next twenty years or so, cognitivescience developed an institutional presence through research centres, conferences, journals, and a substantial infusion of funds from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (shrink)
In the current research on multi-agent systems (MAS), many theoretical issues related to sociocultural processes have been touched upon. These issues are in fact intellectually profound and should prove to be significant for MAS. Moreover, these issues should have equally significant impact on cognitivescience, if we ever try to understand cognition in the broad context of sociocultural environments in which cognitive agents exist. Furthermore, cognitive models as studied in cognitivescience can help us (...) in a substantial way to better probe multi-agent issues, by taking into account essential characteristics of cognitive agents and their various capacities. In this paper, we systematically examine the interplay among social sciences, MAS, and cognitivescience. We try to justify an integrated approach for MAS which incorporates different perspectives. We show how a new cognitive model, CLARION, can embody such an integrated approach through a combination of autonomous learning and assimilation. (shrink)
Readers of TopiCS are invited to join a debate about the utility of ideas and methods of complexity science. The topics of debate include empirical instances of qualitative change in cognitive activity and whether this empirical work demonstrates sufficiently the empirical flags of complexity. In addition, new phenomena discovered by complexity scientists, and motivated by complexity theory, call into question some basic assumptions of conventional cognitivescience such as stable equilibria and homogeneous variance. The articles and (...) commentaries that appear in this issue also illustrate a new debate style format for topiCS. (shrink)
This systematic investigation of computation and mental phenomena by a noted psychologist and computer scientist argues that cognition is a form of computation, that the semantic contents of mental states are encoded in the same general way as computer representations are encoded. It is a rich and sustained investigation of the assumptions underlying the directions cognitivescience research is taking. 1 The Explanatory Vocabulary of Cognition 2 The Explanatory Role of Representations 3 The Relevance of Computation 4 The (...) Psychological Reality of Programs: Strong Equivalence 5 Constraining Functional Architecture 6 The Bridge from Physical to Symbolic: Transduction 7 Functional Architecture and Analogue Processes 8 Mental Imagery and Functional Architecture 9 Epilogue: What is CognitiveScience the Science of? (shrink)
Introduction Alvin I. Goldman and Brian P. McLaughlin Section I: What Might Be the Role of CognitiveScience in Metaphysics? Chapter 1: Time Lost, Time Regained Craig Callender Chapter 2: CognitiveScience and Metaphysics: Partners in Debunking Jonathan Schaffer Section II: Ethics and CognitiveScience Chapter 3: Moral Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, and the Cognitive Sciences Peter Railton Chapter 4: Debunking and Vindicating in Moral Psychology Shaun Nichols Section III: God and Cognitive (...) class='Hi'>Science Chapter 5: On Perceiving God: Prospects for a CognitiveScience of Religious Experiences Mark Baker and Dean Zimmerman Chapter 6: God and CognitiveScience: A Bayesian Approach Alvin I. Goldman Section IV: Meaning, Linguistics, and Ontology Chapter 7: Cognitive Psychology and the Metaphysics of Meaning Mark Johnston and Sarah-Jane Leslie Chapter 8: Natural Language and Its Ontology Friederike Moltmann Section V: Modality and the Ontology of Bodily Feelings Chapter 9: Modal Prospection John McCoy, Laurie Paul, Tomer Ullman Chapter 10: Against Phenomenal Parsimony: A Plea for Bodily Feelings Frédérique de Vignemont Section VI: Sortals and Natural Kinds Chapter 11: Does the Identity of an Object Depend on Its Category? The Role of Sortals in Thought Lance J. Rips and Nick Leonard Chapter 12: What the Study of Psychological Essentialism May Reveal About the World Susan A. Gelman Section VII: Debunking and CognitiveScience Chapter 13: Debunking Arguments in Metaethics and Metaphysics Daniel Z. Korman Chapter 14: CognitiveScience for the Revisionary Metaphysician David Rose Chapter 15: Unbunking Arguments: A Case Study in Metaphysics and CognitiveScience Christopher Frugé. (shrink)
The rise of cognitive neuroscience is the most important scientific and intellectual development of the last thirty years. Findings pour forth, and major initiatives for brain research continue. The social sciences have responded to this development slowly--for good reasons. The implications of particular controversial findings, such as the discovery of mirror neurons, have been ambiguous, controversial within neuroscience itself, and difficult to integrate with conventional social science. Yet many of these findings, such as those of experimental neuro-economics, pose (...) very direct challenges to standard social science. At the same time, however, the known facts of social science, for example about linguistic and moral diversity, pose a significant challenge to standard neuroscience approaches, which tend to focus on "universal" aspects of human and animal cognition. A serious encounter between cognitive neuroscience and social science is likely to be challenging, and transformative, for both parties. Although a literature has developed on proposals to integrate neuroscience and social science, these proposals go in divergent directions. None of them has a developed conception of social life. This book surveys these issues, introduces the basic alternative conceptions both of the mental world and the social world, and show how, with sufficient modification, they can be fit together in plausible ways. The book is not a "new theory " of anything, but rather an exploration of the critical issues that relate to the social aspects of cognition which expands the topic from the social neuroscience of immediate interpersonal interaction to the whole range of places where social variation interacts with the cognitive. The focus is on the conceptual problems produced by any attempt to take these issues seriously, and also on the new resources and considerations relevant to doing so. But it is also on the need for a revision of social theoretical concepts in order to utilize these resources. The book points to some conclusions, especially about how the process of what was known as socialization needs to be understood in cognitivescience friendly terms. But there is no attempt to resolve the underlying issues within cognitivescience, which will doubtless persist. (shrink)
In this paper, I outline two strands of evidence for the conclusion that the dynamical approach to cognitivescience both seeks and provides covering law explanations. Two of the most successful dynamical models—Kelso’s model of rhythmic finger movement and Thelen et al.’s model of infant perseverative reaching—can be seen to provide explanations which conform to the famous explanatory scheme first put forward by Hempel and Oppenheim. In addition, many prominent advocates of the dynamical approach also express the provision (...) of this kind of explanation as a goal of dynamical cognitivescience. I conclude by briefly outlining two consequences. First, dynamical cognitivescience’s explanatory style may strengthen its links to the so-called “situated” approach to cognition, but, secondly, it may also undermine the widespread intuition that dynamics is related to emergentism in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)
Table of Contents Contributors Introduction I Epistemology 1 Visual Object Recognition by Irving Biederman 2 Deductive Reasoning by John H. Holland, Keith J. Holyoak, Richard E. Nisbett and Paul R. Thagard 3 Probabilistic Reasoning by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman 4 Our Native Inferential Tendencies by Hilary Kornblith 5 Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology by Alvin I. Goldman II Science and Mathematics 6 Observation Reconsidered by Jerry A. Fodor 7 Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor (...) by Paul M. Churchland 8 Explanatory Coherence by Paul R. Thagard 9 Scientific Discovery by Pat Langley, Herbert A. Simon, Gary L. Bradshaw and Jan M. Zytkow 10 Evidence against Empiricist Accounts of the Origins of Numerical Knowledge by Karen Wynn III Mind 11 Troubles with Functionalism by Ned Block 12 Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes by Paul M. Churchland 13 Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum by Jerry A. Fodor 14 Misrepresentation by Fred I. Dretske 15 How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality by Alison Gopnik 16 The Psychology of Folk Psychology by Alvin I. Goldman 17 Quining Qualia by Daniel C. Dennett 18 Neuropsychological Evidence for a Consciousness System by Daniel L. Schacter IV Metaphysics 19 Object Perception by Elizabeth S. Spelke 20 Ontological Categories Guide Young Children’s Inductions of Word Meaning by Nancy N. Soja, Susan Carey and Elizabeth S. Spelke 21 Some Elements of Conceptual Structure by Ray Jackendoff 22 Color Subjectivism by C. L. Hardin V Language 23 On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language by Noam Chomsky 24 On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs by David E. Rumelhart and James L. McClelland 25 Critique of Rumelhart and McClelland by Andy Clark 26 The Mental Representation of the Meaning of Words by Philip N. Johnson-Laird 27 Brain and Language by Antonia R. Damasio and Hanna Demasio 28 Meaning, Other People, and the World by Hilary Putnam VI Ethics 29 Ethics and CognitiveScience by Alvin I. Goldman 30 The Contribution of Empathy to Justice and Moral Judgment by Martin L. Hoffman 31 Situations and Dispositions by Owen Flanagan VII Conceptual Foundations 32 Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis by Stephen P. Stich 33 Individualism and Psychology by Tyler Burge 34 The Co-evolutionary Research Ideology by Patricia S. Churchland 35 On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism by Paul Smolensky 36 Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture by Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn 37 The Computer Model of the Mind by Ned Block 38 The Critique of Cognitive Reason by John R. Searle Index. (shrink)
This paper supports the basic integrity of the folk psychological conception of consciousness and its importance in cognitive theorizing. Section 1 critically examines some proposed definitions of consciousness, and argues that the folk- psychological notion of phenomenal consciousness is not captured by various functional-relational definitions. Section 2 rebuts the arguments of several writers who challenge the very existence of phenomenal consciousness, or the coherence or tenability of the folk-psychological notion of awareness. Section 3 defends a significant role for phenomenal (...) consciousness in the execution of a certain cognitive task, viz., classification of one's own mental states. Execution of this task, which is part of folk psychologizing, is taken as a datum in scientific psychology. It is then argued that the most promising sort of scientific model of the self-ascription of mental states is one that posits the kinds of phenomenal properties invoked by folk psychology. Cognitivescience and neuroscience can of course refine and improve upon the folk understanding of consciousness, awareness, and mental states generally. But the folk-psychological constructs should not be jettisoned; they have a role to play in cognitive theorizing. (shrink)
The dynamical hypothesis is the claim that cognitive agents are dynamical systems. It stands opposed to the dominant computational hypothesis, the claim that cognitive agents are digital computers. This target article articulates the dynamical hypothesis and defends it as an open empirical alternative to the computational hypothesis. Carrying out these objectives requires extensive clarification of the conceptual terrain, with particular focus on the relation of dynamical systems to computers.
This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitivescience 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 cognitivescience 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)
The computational view of mind rests on certain intuitions regarding the fundamental similarity between computation and cognition. We examine some of these intuitions and suggest that they derive from the fact that computers and human organisms are both physical systems whose behavior is correctly described as being governed by rules acting on symbolic representations. Some of the implications of this view are discussed. It is suggested that a fundamental hypothesis of this approach is that there is a natural domain of (...) human functioning that can be addressed exclusively in terms of a formal symbolic or algorithmic vocabulary or level of analysis. Much of the paper elaborates various conditions that need to be met if a literal view of mental activity as computation is to serve as the basis for explanatory theories. The coherence of such a view depends on there being a principled distinction between functions whose explanation requires that we posit internal representations and those that we can appropriately describe as merely instantiating causal physical or biological laws. In this paper the distinction is empirically grounded in a methodological criterion called the " cognitive impenetrability condition." Functions are said to be cognitively impenetrable if they cannot be influenced by such purely cognitive factors as goals, beliefs, inferences, tacit knowledge, and so on. Such a criterion makes it possible to empirically separate the fixed capacities of mind from the particular representations and algorithms used on specific occasions. In order for computational theories to avoid being ad hoc, they must deal effectively with the "degrees of freedom" problem by constraining the extent to which they can be arbitrarily adjusted post hoc to fit some particular set of observations. This in turn requires that the fixed architectural function and the algorithms be independently validated. It is argued that the architectural assumptions implicit in many contemporary models run afoul of the cognitive impenetrability condition, since the required fixed functions are demonstrably sensitive to tacit knowledge and goals. The paper concludes with some tactical suggestions for the development of computational cognitive theories. (shrink)
The cognitivescience of religion draws on insights from evolutionary psychology, and offers explanations of religious belief based on natural cognitive processes. This article examines a number of competing explanations of religious belief by considering it as a solution to the challenge of cooperation. The challenge of stopping individuals cheating within a cooperative group has been a problem throughout humanity’s evolutionary history. Empirical evidence drawn from fields such as anthropology and psychology suggests that religious beliefs are part (...) of an evolved cognitive system that motivates individuals to cooperate with other members of their group. Three possible evolutionary accounts, the memetic, by‐product, and adaptation accounts, are considered as evolved solutions to the challenge of cooperation. (shrink)
The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitivescience of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content biases (...) that also underlie the reception of ordinary religious concepts. (shrink)
Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of CognitiveScience invites readers to join in up-to-the-minute conceptual discussions of the fundamental issues, problems, and opportunities in cognitivescience. Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field, this vivid and engaging introductory text relates the story of the search for a cognitive scientific understanding of mind. This search is presented as a no-holds-barred journey from early work in artificial intelligence, through connectionist (artificial neural network) (...) counter-visions, and on to neuroscience, artificial life, dynamics, and robotics. The journey ends with some wide-ranging and provocative speculation about the complex coadaptive dance between mind, culture, and technology. Each chapter opens with a brief sketch of a major research tradition or perspective, followed by short yet substantial critical discussions dealing with key topics and problems. Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitivescience, Clark highlights challenging issues in an effort to engage readers in active debate. Topics covered include mental causation; machine intelligence; the nature and status of folk psychology; the hardware/software distinction; emergence; relations between life and mind; the nature of perception, cognition, and action; and the continuity (or otherwise) of high-level human intelligence with other forms of adaptive response. Numerous illustrations, text boxes, and extensive suggestions for further reading enhance the text's utility. Helpful appendices provide background information on dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, consciousness, and more. An exceptional text for introductory and more advanced courses in cognitivescience and the philosophy of mind, Mindware is also essential reading for anyone interested in these fascinating and ever-changing fields. (shrink)
While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitivescience, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitivescience is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology (...) of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitivescience and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitivescience a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitivescience as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitivescience in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)
It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitivescience consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitivescience is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism (...) that produces the phenomenon to be explained, the kind of unification afforded by the Bayesian framework to cognitivescience does not necessarily reveal aspects of a mechanism. Bayesian unification, nonetheless, can place fruitful constraints on causal–mechanical explanation. 1 Introduction2 What a Great Many Phenomena Bayesian Decision Theory Can Model3 The Case of Information Integration4 How Do Bayesian Models Unify?5 Bayesian Unification: What Constraints Are There on Mechanistic Explanation?5.1 Unification constrains mechanism discovery5.2 Unification constrains the identification of relevant mechanistic factors5.3 Unification constrains confirmation of competitive mechanistic models6 ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)
The relation between micro-objects and macro-objects advocated by Kim is even more problematic than Ross & Spurrett (R&S) argue, for reasons rooted in physics. R&S's own ontological proposals are much more satisfactory from a physicist's viewpoint but may still be problematic. A satisfactory theory of macroscopic ontology must be as independent as possible of the details of microscopic physics.
Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitivescience, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. Colour (...) Vision provides an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitivescience and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)
Questions about the function of consciousness have long been central to discussions of consciousness in philosophy and psychology. Intuitively, consciousness has an important role to play in the control of many everyday behaviors. However, this view has recently come under attack. In particular, it is becoming increasingly common for scientists and philosophers to argue that a significant body of data emerging from cognitivescience shows that conscious states are not involved in the control of behavior. According to these (...) theorists, nonconscious states control most everyday behaviors. Andy Clark does an admirable job of summarizing and defending the most important data thought to support this view. In this paper, I argue that the evidence available does not in fact threaten the view that conscious states play an important and intimate role in the control of much everyday behavior. I thereby defend a philosophically intuitive view about the functions of conscious states in action. (shrink)
The relationship between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is underdeveloped and complicated, for reasons we will explain in this chapter, and the philosophical discussion of this relationship has the same properties. Many reasons for the lack of development relate to a traditional philosophical issue: explanation. The explanatory structure of cognitivescience reasoning and argumentation is unusual and difcult to t into the traditional model of scientic explanation, though they do relate, in an odd way, to (...) the traditional “reasons” explanations discussed in the philosophy of social science, through the notion of “folk psychology.” The cognitivescience explanations themselves, as they relate to traditional “social science” topics, involve additional problems. They depend on a strategy of reducing complexity by beginning with those aspects of mind that can be most readily simplied, such as perception and body movements. Therefore, traditional social science topics, such as social interaction, which cannot be readily simplied, are something of an afterthought. (shrink)
This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and CognitiveScience describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)
CognitiveScience combines the interdisciplinary streams of cognitivescience into a unified narrative in an all-encompassing introduction to the field. This text presents cognitivescience as a discipline in its own right, and teaches students to apply the techniques and theories of the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of methods and tools that cognitive scientists use to study the mind. Thematically organized, rather than by separate disciplines, CognitiveScience (...) underscores the problems and solutions of cognitivescience, rather than those of the subjects that contribute to it - psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, etc. The generous use of examples, illustrations, and applications demonstrates how theory is applied to unlock the mysteries of the human mind. Drawing upon cutting-edge research, the text has been updated and enhanced to incorporate new studies and key experiments since the first edition. A new chapter on consciousness has also been added. (shrink)
Cognitivescience typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential (...) point is that intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is. (shrink)
Advocates of dynamical systems theory (DST) sometimes employ revolutionary rhetoric. In an attempt to clarify how DST models differ from others in cognitivescience, I focus on two issues raised by DST: the role for representations in mental models and the conception of explanation invoked. Two features of representations are their role in standing-in for features external to the system and their format. DST advocates sometimes claim to have repudiated the need for stand-ins in DST models, but I (...) argue that they are mistaken. Nonetheless, DST does offer new ideas as to the format of representations employed in cognitive systems. With respect to explanation, I argue that some DST models are better seen as conforming to the covering-law conception of explanation than to the mechanistic conception of explanation implicit in most cognitivescience research. But even here, I argue, DST models are a valuable complement to more mechanistic cognitive explanations. (shrink)
The notion of levels has been widely used in discussions of cognitivescience, especially in discussions of the relation of connectionism to symbolic modeling of cognition. I argue that many of the notions of levels employed are problematic for this purpose, and develop an alternative notion grounded in the framework of mechanistic explanation. By considering the source of the analogies underlying both symbolic modeling and connectionist modeling, I argue that neither is likely to provide an adequate analysis of (...) processes at the level at which cognitive theories attempt to function: One is drawn from too low a level, the other from too high a level. If there is a distinctly cognitive level, then we still need to determine what are the basic organizational principles at that level. (shrink)
Specifically designed to make the philosophy of mind intelligible to those not trained in philosophy, this book provides a concise overview for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences. Emphasizing the relevance of philosophical work to investigations in other cognitive sciences, this unique text examines such issues as the meaning of language, the mind-body problem, the functionalist theories of cognition, and intentionality. As he explores the philosophical issues, Bechtel draws connections between philosophical views and theoretical and experimental work (...) in such disciplines as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology. (shrink)
