This study investigated the roles of the executive functions of inhibition and switching, and of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities, in insight and non-insight tasks. A total of 18 insight tasks, 10 non-insight tasks, and measures of individual differences in working memory capacities, switching, and inhibition were administered to 120 participants. Performance on insight problems was not linked with executive functions of inhibition or switching but was linked positively to measures of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities. Non-insight task (...) performance was positively linked to the executive function of switching (but not to inhibition) and to verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities. These patterns regarding executive functions were maintained when the insight and non-insight composites were split into verbal and spatial insight and non-insight composite scores. The results are discussed in relation to dual processing accounts of thinking. (shrink)

We trace how cognition arises beyond the skin. Experimental work on insight problem solving is used to examine how external artifacts can be used to reach the goal of assembling a `cheap necklace'. Instead of asking how insight occurs `in the head', our participants in Experiment 1 can either draw solution attempts or manipulate real objects . Even though performance with real chain links is significantly more successful than on paper, access to objects does not make this insight problem simple: (...) objects themselves do not shape cognition. This challenges extended mind views. While failure often results from the inappropriate application of hill-climbing, material artifacts can trigger solutions. In Experiment 2, we used `open link' conditions of the concretized problem to prompt participants to act . Solutions arrived via insight, serendipity, or trial-and-error. By investigating how objects are used, we show that they do more than supplement neural events. Rather, participants monitor and anticipate the effects of action within an organism-environment system. By analogy, language too draws on experience of monitoring real-time effects as bodily dynamics play out in a normative and cultural world. In engaging with public language, it is likely that verbal patterns function by constraining anticipatory cognitive processes. (shrink)

We trace how cognition arises beyond the skin. Experimental work on insight problem solving is used to examine how external artifacts can be used to reach the goal of assembling a ‘cheap necklace’. Instead of asking how insight occurs ‘in the head’, our participants in Experiment 1 can either draw solution attempts or manipulate real objects. Even though performance with real chain links is significantly more successful than on paper, access to objects does not make this insight problem simple: objects (...) themselves do not shape cognition. This challenges extended mind views. While failure often results from the inappropriate application of hill-climbing, material artifacts can trigger solutions. In Experiment 2, we used ‘open link’ conditions of the concretized problem to prompt participants to act. Solutions arrived via insight, serendipity, or trial-and-error. By investigating how objects are used, we show that they do more than supplement neural events. Rather, participants monitor and anticipate the effects of action within an organism-environment system. By analogy, language too draws on experience of monitoring real-time effects as bodily dynamics play out in a normative and cultural world. In engaging with public language, it is likely that verbal patterns function by constraining anticipatory cognitive processes. (shrink)

É bem conhecida a oposição estabelecida por Kant entre experiência possível e dialética, na medida em que esta última é caracterizada como a “lógica da ilusão”. Ao mesmo tempo, o modo de pensar metafísico, que ocorre dialeticamente, em sentido kantiano, é uma tendência inevitável da razão, expressa na exigência formal de completude das categorias. Como o pensar, enquanto exercício livre da razão, é em si mesmo mais amplo do que a atividade de conhecer, própria do entendimento, o pensar contém o (...) conhecimento, embora este se qualifique pelas regras e pelos limites determinantes da objetividade. A pergunta que tentaremos formular é se essa relação continente-conteúdo não poderia configurar também uma dependência da experiência em relação ao raciocínio dialético, que estaria de algum modo indicada na função reguladora das idéias da razão. Nesse caso, a oposição formal entre conhecer e pensar seria inseparável da inclusão estrutural (dependência) da experiência no âmbito da razão. Na raiz do problema estaria talvez a tensão (dialética) entre a aspiração subjetiva de totalidade e as exigências objetivas de limitação e segmentação da experiência e a forma da experiência teria de ser finalmente concebida a partir de um fundo de inteligibilidade problemática. Dialectics and experienceThe separation of possible experience as objective knowledge and dialetics as a non-objective or non-theoretical knowledge is one of the most important aspects of kantian critical philosophy. But Kant also says that the activity of reason, as a pure thinking, has more amplitude than understanding knowledge. So we could say that theoric knowledge would depend on rational ( and non-theoretical) knowledge, as something contained in it. If we accept that, the consequence would be a relation of dependence between the form of objective knowledge and the background of a problematic – even doubtful – inteligible knowledge. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s concepts shed light on the phenomenon of schizophrenia in at least three different ways: with a view to empathy, scientific explanation, or philosophical clarification. I consider two different “positive” wittgensteinian accounts―Campbell’s idea that delusions involve a mechanism of which different framework propositions are parts, Sass’ proposal that the schizophrenic patient can be described as a solipsist, and a Rhodes’ and Gipp’s account, where epistemic aspects of schizophrenia are explained as failures in the ordinary background of certainties. I argue that (...) none of them amounts to empathic-phenomenological understanding, but they provide examples of how philosophical concepts can contribute to scientific explanation, and to philosophical clarification respectively. (shrink)

An important contribution to the foundations of probability theory, statistics and statistical physics has been made by E. T. Jaynes. The recent publication of his collected works provides an appropriate opportunity to attempt an assessment of this contribution.

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past which are alterable, and argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past. (shrink)