All of the chapters have been written especially for the book by the leading scholars in the field.Michael I. Posner is Professor of Psychology at the ...

The Foundations of Cognitive Science is a set of thirteen new essays on key topics in this lively interdisciplinary field, by a stellar international line-up of authors. Philosophers, psychologists, and neurologists here come together to investigate such fascinating subjects as consciousness; vision; rationality; artificial life; the neural basis of language, cognition, and emotion; and the relations between mind and world, for instance our representation of numbers and space. The contributors are Ned Block, Margaret Boden, Susan Carey, Patricia (...) Churchland, Paul Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Ilya Farber, James Higginbotham, Christopher Peacocke, Will Peterman, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle. Anyone interested in the exploration of the human mind will enjoy this book. (shrink)

This is an overview of recent philosophical discussion about connectionism and the foundations of cognitive science. Connectionist modeling in cognitive science is described. Three broad conceptions of the mind are characterized, and their comparative strengths and weaknesses are discussed: (1) the classical computation conception in cognitive science; (2) a popular foundational interpretation of connectionism that John Tienson and I call “non‐sentential computationalism”; and (3) an alternative interpretation of connectionism we call “dynamical cognition.” Also (...) discussed are two recent philosophical attempts to enlist connectionism in defense of eliminativism about folk psychology. (shrink)

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry (...) of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Kim. (shrink)

This is a revised version of the introductory essay in C. Eschenbach, C. Habel and B. Smith (eds.), Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Hamburg: Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft, 1994, the text of a talk delivered at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science in Buffalo in July 1994.

My interest in gathering together a collection of this sort was generated by a fortuitous combination of historical studies under Professor Keith Lehrer and studies in cognitive science under Professor R. Michael Harnish at the University of Arizona. Work on the volume began there while I was an instructor in the Department of Linguistics and was greatly encouraged by participants in the Faculty Seminar on Cognitive Science chaired by Professor Lance J. Rips. I wish to express (...) my appreciation to all of these and to many other individuals with whom I discussed the possibility of contribution to this work. I am especially grateful to the authors of the essays included here, as they showed more patience than I could have hoped for in seeing me through a number of uncertain stages in development of the project. My thanks are also due to my colleague Charles Reid for assistance in reviewing submissions, to Tim McFadden for computer resources, and again, to Keith Lehrer for continuing advice in arrangements for publication. Financial support for manuscript preparation was provided in part under University Research Grant No. 617 from the University Research Council, Youngstown State University. (shrink)

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of minds and intelligent behavior in human beings and animals. The challenge of integrating a study of the mind with a scientific world view has only recently attracted sustained effort. In this course, we will examine the various scientific methodologies that have been brought to bear to uncover the nature of the mind. We will critically assess the data and theoretical results that define contemporary cognitive science. Beyond the results of (...) experiments and the theories that are based on them, cognitive science proposes that there is an underlying framework that unifies the diverse methodologies we appeal to. We seek to understand this foundation. (shrink)

_Minds, Brains, Computers_ serves as both an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to the foundations of cognitive science.

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)

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 three papers in this special section of Cognitive Processing continue and extend the December 2005 issue, which was devoted in its entirety to reviews, research reports, and laboratory reports on the theme of ‘Memory and the Extended Mind: embodiment, cognition, and culture’ (Sutton 2005). Like the papers in that issue, these are revised versions of papers first presented at two workshops on ‘Memory, Mind, and Media’ in Sydney on November 29–30 and December 2–3, 2004. Where that issue focussed (...) specifically on memory, these three papers deal with more general issues in the foundations of cognitive science. (shrink)

Is the mind/brain a kind of a computer? In cognitive science, it is widely believed that cognition is a form of computation--that some physical systems, such as minds/brains, compute appropriate functions, whereas other systems, such as video cameras, stomachs or the weather, do not compute. What makes a physical system a computing system? In my dissertation I first reject the orthodox, Turing-machine style answer to this question. I argue that the orthodox notion is rooted in a misunderstanding of (...) our pre-theoretic notion of computation and of Turing's characterization of it. I then offer an alternative--semantic --theory of computation for physical systems. I suggest that to view a system as a computing system is to identify its processes and states, as computational, with respect to their semantic relations to external objects. Lastly, I examine the ramifications of my theses about computation for cognitive science. I argue that the level at which we specify psychological processes/mechanisms is defined over semantic, rather than syntactic or algorithmic, types. As a result of this, I go on to claim that cognitive scientists take semantic properties as those which explain behavior, not those which are in need of explanation. (shrink)

The following pages contend that, in spite of its intensive development, contemporary cognitive science has recently entered a phase of fairly acute uncertainty and confusion regarding some of its most essential foundations. They emphasize two aspects of this foundational crisis, specifically vindicating the existence of a crisis of naturalism and of a crisis of representationalism. Like any foundational crisis, this situation constitutes a serious threat to the significance of the empirical achievements of cognitive science. A (...) threat calling for renewed efforts to provide it with secure foundations that can only be obtained through acloser collaboration between empirical and foundational investigations, or, more concretely, between cognitive scientists and philosophers. They also outline a general strategy to address this threat, and illustrate itabout one aspect of particular importance of the naturalist crisis, namely the emergentist challenge to the orthodoxy of non reductive functionalism. They argue for the rejection of one version of this emergentist challenge,and they lay out a minimal condition that any other version of emergentism must meet. It is still unclear whether this condition is yet satisfactorily met by some version, and in particular by the sort of emergentism associated with the notion of dynamical system. Clarifyingthis issue should accordingly be seen as a top priority on the agenda of cognitive philosophy. (shrink)

Among the foundations of the sciences and the humanities should be counted the norms and values which they necessarily presuppose. This argument requires us to view science and scholarship (systematic cognitive activity) as deliberate and complex forms of human activity. Human action can be ('rationally') guided and legitimated only by reference to norms and values. It is shown that, historically, there are at least three distinct traditions: (1) The Platonic?Aristotelian, (2) the Baconian, and (3) the Weberian. The (...) first is based on the value of ?self?realization'; the second on welfare as a function of technological control; and the third on the justification of science through the Wertfreiheit of its practitioners. It is then argued that when we add (4), a set of general methodological norms, and (5), the ideal of academic freedom or autonomy, we have before us an ?ideology of cognitive activity? which it is now important to study, historically, critically, and constructively. For some such ideology is as indispensable as internal and external demands for legitimation (of science, etc.) are now both inescapable and justified. (shrink)

Among the foundations of the sciences and the humanities should be counted the norms and values which they necessarily presuppose. This argument requires us to view science and scholarship (systematic cognitive activity) as deliberate and complex forms of human activity . Human action can be ('rationally') guided and legitimated only by reference to norms and values. It is shown that, historically, there are at least three distinct traditions: (1) The Platonic-Aristotelian, (2) the Baconian, and (3) the Weberian. (...) The first is based on the value of 'self-realization'; the second on welfare as a function of technological control; and the third on the justification of science through the Wertfreiheit of its practitioners. It is then argued that when we add (4), a set of general methodological norms, and (5), the ideal of academic freedom or autonomy, we have before us an 'ideology of cognitive activity' which it is now important to study, historically, critically, and constructively. For some such ideology is as indispensable as internal and external demands for legitimation (of science, etc.) are now both inescapable and justified. (shrink)

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of inter-disciplinary research in the history of science. This volume of original essays surveys (...) foundational, theoretical, and philosophical issues across the discipline, and introduces the foundations of cognitive science, the principal areas of research, and the major research programs. With a focus on broad philosophical themes rather than detailed technical issues, the volume will be valuable not only to cognitive scientists and philosophers of cognitive science, but also to those in other disciplines looking for an authoritative and up-to-date introduction to the field. (shrink)

An anthology of core readings on cognitive psychology.

This chapter describes the conceptual foundations of cognitive science during its establishment as a science in the 20th century. It is organized around the core ideas of individual agency as its basic explanans and information-processing as its basic explanandum. The latter consists of a package of ideas that provide a mathematico-engineering framework for the philosophical theory of materialism.

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is arguably the best candidate for the first ever overarching attempt at a descriptive-explanatory science of the mind. This paper characterizes the key tenets of Hume’s undertaking and situates its central features in the context of then-contemporary science. According to the present argument, Hume’s science of man provides a chemical-organismic account of mental functioning that fits an intellectual environment dominated by post-Newtonian natural philosophy.

This volume, the fourth in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science published by OUP, examines the role of logic in cognitive psychology in light of recent developments. Gonzalo Reyes's new semantic theory has brought the fields of cognitive psychology and logic closer together, and has shed light on how children may master proper names and count nouns, and thus acquire knowledge. The chapters highlight the inadequacies of classical logic in its handling of ordinary language and reveals (...) the prospects of applying the new theory of kinds to cognitive psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)

Historiography of science faces a preliminary question of strategy. A continuist conception of the history of science poses research problems different from those of a dynamic conception, which acknowledges that not only our theoretical knowledge but also the explananda themselves may change under the influence of new scientific insights. Whereas continuist historiography may advance our understanding of (the historical background of) current theoretical problems, dynamic historiography may also make a creative contribution to the progress of present-day research. This (...) f act is illustrated in a discussion of the various treatments of paradigmatic episodes in the history of philosophical psychology collected in the book under review, ranging from Socratic and Platonic sources of cognitivism, through medieval and modem views on mental language, representation and consciousness, to such 20th-century contributions as those of Husserl, Titchener, and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.

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 cognitive science 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 Cognitive Science the Science of? (shrink)

Why should the subject of physics arise in a paper ostensibly concerned with cognitive science and evolutionary biology? If we were advocating a new physics of life and mind simply because we cannot devise an explanation of brain function within the framework of conventional physics, it would appear to reveal a fundamental flaw in the paradigm that we are discussing. If cognition is a biological process, and if biology is ultimately reducible to physics, should not physics be sufficient (...) to entail it? In fact, avoiding such an appearance of being “unscientific” motivates many brain scientists to find a way at all costs to couch their explanations of brain behavior in terms of the traditional concepts of physics. Curiously, they do so while failing to appreciate that the fundamental need for new physics is postulated not by the students of the processes of life and mind, but rather by some of the world’s most renowned physicists. In the present paper, I will use the expression “old physics” to include nineteenth century classical physics, general and special relativity, traditional quantum mechanics and chaotic dynamics. I subsume all of these under the umbrella of old physics because, in spite of their differences, they share a set of metaphysical presuppositions. I will argue that some of these suppositions are deeply flawed and that these flaws render old physics insufficient to portray reality coherently, and that abandoning these flawed concepts may provide new and viable theoretical foundations for both biology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Explanatory pluralism and the cognitive science of religion: or why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism -- Interpretation and explanation: problems and promise in the study of religion -- Crisis of conscience, riddle of identity: making space for a cognitive approach to religious phenomena -- Who owns culture? -- Overcoming barriers to a cognitive psychology of religion -- Years in: landmark empirical findings in the cognitive science of religion.

Machine generated contents note: Part 1 - The Constituent Disciplines of Cognitive Science -- Philosophical Epistemology -- Glossary -- 1.0 What is Philosophical Epistemology? -- 1.1 The reduced history of Philosophy Part I - The Classical Age -- 1.2 Mind and World - The problem of objectivity -- 1.3 The reduced history of Philosophy Part II - The twentieth century -- 1.4 The philosophy of Cognitive Science -- 1.5 Mind in Philosophy: summary -- 1.6 The Nolanian (...) Framework (so far) -- Psychology -- 2.0 Why is Psychology so difficult? -- 2.1 A brief history of Experimental Psychology -- 2.2 Methodologies in Psychology -- 2.3 Perception -- 2.4 Memory -- 2.5 Mind in Psychology -- Linguistics -- 3.0 Introduction -- 3.1 Why Linguistics? -- 3.2 Computation and Linguistics -- 3.3 The main grammatical theories -- 3.4 Language development and linguistics -- 3.5 Toward a definition of context -- 3.6 The multifarious uses of Language -- 3.7 Linguistics and Computational Linguistics -- 3.8 Language and other symbol systems -- 3.9 On the notion of context -- 3.10 Mind in Linguistics: summary -- Neuroscience -- 4.0 The constituent disciplines of Neuroscience -- 4.1 The methodology of Neuroscience -- 4.2 Gross Neuroanatomy -- 4.3 Some relevant findings -- 4.4 Connectionism (PDP) -- 4.5 The victory of Neuroscience? -- 4.6 Mind in Neuroscience: summary -- Artificial Intelligence -- 5.0 Introduction -- 5.1 Al and Cognitive Science -- 5.2 Skeptics and their techniques -- 5.3 Al as Computer Science -- 5.4 Al as software -- 5.5 The current methodological debate -- 5.6 Context, syntax and semantics -- 5.7 Mind in Al -- 5.8 Texts on Al -- Etholoqy and Ethnoscience -- 6.1 Etology -- 6.2 Ethnoscience -- 6.3 Mind in Ethology arid Ethnoscience -- Part II - A New Foundation for Cognitive Science -- - Symbol Systems -- 7.1 Characteristics of symbol systems -- 7.2 Context and the layers of symbol systems -- 7.3 Mind and symbol systems -- Consciousness and Selfhood -- 8.0 Introduction -- 8.1 Cognitive views -- 8.2 What is at stake? -- 8.3 Consciousness as treated in Philosophy -- 8.4 The Development of Selfhood -- 8.5 The minimal requirements for this theory -- 8.6 Self as a filter -- 8.7 Self and motivation -- 8.8 Conclusions -- 8.9 Recent developments -- Cognitive Science and the Search for Mind -- 9.1 Introduction -- 9.2 Review -- 9.3 A Theory of Mind anyone? -- 9.4 Foundational considerations -- 9.5 Coda: the Nolanian Framework. (shrink)

My purpose in this brief paper is to consider the implications of a radically different computer architecure to some fundamental problems in the foundations of Cognitive Science. More exactly, I wish to consider the ramifications of the 'Gödel-Minds-Machines' controversy of the late 1960s on a dynamically changing computer architecture which, I venture to suggest, is going to revolutionize which 'functions' of the human mind can and cannot be modelled by (non-human) computational automata. I will proceed on the (...) presupposition that the reader is familiar with some of the fundamentals of computational theory and mathematical logic. (shrink)

This paper traces the empiricist program from early debates between nativism and behaviorism within philosophy, through debates about early connectionist approaches within the cognitive sciences, and up to their recent iterations within the domain of deep learning. We demonstrate how current debates on the nature of cognition via deep network architecture echo some of the core issues from the Chomsky/Quine debate and investigate the strength of support offered by these various lines of research to the empiricist standpoint. Referencing literature (...) from both computer science and philosophy, we conclude that the current state of deep learning does not offer strong encouragement to the empiricist side despite some arguments to the contrary. (shrink)

The cognitive foundations of geometry have puzzled academics for a long time, and even today are mostly unknown to many scholars, including mathematical cognition researchers. -/- Foundations of Geometric Cognition shows that basic geometric skills are deeply hardwired in the visuospatial cognitive capacities of our brains, namely spatial navigation and object recognition. These capacities, shared with non-human animals and appearing in early stages of the human ontogeny, cannot, however, fully explain a uniquely human form of geometric (...) cognition. In the book, Hohol argues that Euclidean geometry would not be possible without the human capacity to create and use abstract concepts, demonstrating how language and diagrams provide cognitive scaffolding for abstract geometric thinking, within a context of a Euclidean system of thought. -/- Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on research from diverse fields including psychology, cognitive science, and mathematics, this book is a must-read for cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists of mathematics, alongside anyone interested in mathematical education or the philosophical and historical aspects of geometry. (shrink)

The rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by a considerable amount of philosophical activity. No other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. Philosophical work relevant to cognitive science has become a sprawling field (extending beyond analytic philosophy) which no one can fully master, although some try and keep abreast of the philosophical literature and of the essential scientific developments. (...) Due to the particular nature of its subject, it touches on a multitude of distinct special branches in philosophy and in science. It has also become quite a difficult, complicated and technical field, to the point of being nearly impenetrable for philosophers or scientists coming from other fields or traditions. Finally, it is contentious: Cognitive science is far from having reached stability, it is still widely regarded with suspicion, philosophers working within its confine have sharp disagreements amongst themselves, and philosophers standing outside, especially (but not only) of non-analytic persuasion, are often inclined to see both cognitive science and its accompanying philosophy as more or less confused or even deeply flawed. The sensible way to go under the circumstances, or so one might judge, would be to pick a sample of salient topics, in the present case, philosophical discussions of some central foundational issues, in the hope thereby of giving the reader a sense of what the field is about. This however is not the path I propose to take. There are two reasons for choosing another tack. The negative reason is that there is now available a plethora of excellent expositions, of any length one might desire, from one-page summaries to chapter- or volume-length introductions, of central topics in philosophy of mind (which constitutes in turn the core of what most philosophers think of as philosophy of cognitive science: more on this in a moment)1.. (shrink)