Research in cognitive science has often assumed the existence of a privileged level that unifies theoretical explanations arising from different disciplines. Philosophical accounts differ about the locus of those intertheory relations. In this paper, four different views are analyzed: classical, connectionist, pragmatist, and reductionist, as exemplified in the works of von Eckardt, Horgan and Tienson, Hardcastle, and Bickle, respectively. Their divergences are characterized in terms of the possibility of such a privileged level. The classical view favors a privileged (...) computational level. The connectionist revision tries to draw biological intuitions into computational models to provide a link between neurons and computations. The pragmatist approach rejects the idea of a privileged level and offers a more eclectic view of cognitive theory building. The reductionist account pursues theoretical unification by means of the reduction of higher level theories to basic level ones. /// La investigatión en ciencia cognitiva suele asumir la existencia de un nivel privilegiado que unifica las explicaciones teóricas provenientes de distintas disciplinas. Las interpretaciones filósoficas difieren respecto al locus de tales relaciones interteóricas. En este artículo se analizan cuatro concepciones: clásica, conexionista, pragmática y reduccionista, ejemplificadas respectivamente en las obras de von Eckardt, Horgan y Tienson, Hardcastle y Bickle. Sus divergencias se caracterizan en términos de la posible existencia del nivel privilegiado. El enfoque clásico propugna un nivel privilegiado computacional. La revisión conexionista importa intuiciones de la biología a los modelos computacionales, con la intentión de vincular lo neuronal con lo computacional. El enfoque pragmático rechaza la idea de un nivel privilegiado y ofrece una visión más ecléctica de la teorización cognitiva. La conceptión reduccionista promueve la unificatión teórica mediante la reductión de teorías de alto nivel a teorías de nivel básico. (shrink)

The debate between the defenders of explanatory unification and explanatory pluralism has been ongoing from the beginning of cognitive science and is one of the central themes of its philosophy. Does cognitive science need a grand unifying theory? Should explanatory pluralism be embraced instead? Or maybe local integrative efforts are needed? What are the advantages of explanatory unification as compared to the benefits of explanatory pluralism? These questions, among others, are addressed in this Synthese’s special issue. (...) In the introductory paper, we discuss the background of the questions, distinguishing integrative theorizing from building unified theories. On the one hand, integrative efforts involve collaboration between various disciplines, fields, approaches, or theories. These efforts could even be quite temporary, without establishing any long-term institutionalized fields or disciplines, but could also contribute to developing new interfield theories. On the other hand, unification can rely on developing complete theories of mechanisms and representations underlying all cognition, as Newell’s “unified theories of cognition”, or may appeal to grand principles, as predictive coding. Here, we also show that unification in contemporary cognitive science goes beyond reductive unity, and may involve various forms of joint efforts and division of explanatory labor. This conclusion is one of the themes present in the content of contributions constituting the special issue. (shrink)

Scientific understanding in the field of cognitive sciences is a multifaceted concept that necessitates reflecting on the integration of various explanations. In this paper, I argue that different kinds of explanations regarding cognitive sciences can be integrated into an account of explanatory scientific understanding, as proposed by Khalifa. Moreover, I propose that scientific understanding should be distinct from mere knowledge and should be conceptualized as a nexus of explanation. This paper explores the theoretical foundations of scientific understanding, discusses (...) different types of explanations in cognitive sciences, criticises a reduction problem in Khalifa’s account and elucidates how these explanations can be effectively integrated to foster a holistic understanding of cognitive phenomena. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the aim of this paper is to enrich our comprehension of cognitive sciences and promote a more unified perspective on scientific understanding. (shrink)

The mechanistic approach in the cognitive and biological sciences emphasizes that scientific explanations succeed by analyzing the mechanisms underlying phenomena across multiple levels. In this paper, we propose a formal strategy to establish such multi-level mechanistic models, which are foundational to mechanistic explanations. Our objectives are twofold: First, we introduce the novel "mLCA" (multi-Level Coincidence Analysis) script, which transforms binary data tables from tests on mechanistic systems into mechanistic models consistent with those tables. Second, we provide several philosophical insights (...) derived from the outcomes generated by this script and its underlying algorithm. Using illustrative examples, we defend the following claims: 1. Inference methods for generating mechanistic models generally require information on how causal factors are assigned to different levels within data tables generated by multi-level structures. 2. The mLCA script successfully produces appropriate mechanistic models from binary data tables, demonstrating the practical application of the philosophical mechanistic approach in the sciences. 3. The number of solutions generated by mLCA increases significantly as the number of relevant factors grows, reflecting adaptations in causal inference methods to meet the demands of multi-level mechanistic modeling. 4. Any further reduction of solutions, if possible, involves pragmatic considerations, a point that carries profound implications for the broader ambitions of the mechanistic approach. By addressing these points, our paper contributes both to the development of practical algorithmic tools and to a deeper philosophical understanding of multi-level mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

This paper examines the widespread intuition that the dynamical approach to cognitive science is importantly related to emergentism about the mind. The explanatory practices adopted by dynamical cognitive science rule out some conceptions of emergence; covering law explanations require a deducibility relationship between explanans and explanandum, whereas canonical theories of emergence require the absence of such deducibility. A response to this problem – one which would save the intuition that dynamics and emergence are related – is (...) to reconstrue the concept of emergence as a relationship between laws. I call this “nomological emergence” and comment on the extent to which dynamicists would find it acceptable. Alternatively, dynamical cognitive science might be viewed as fitting better with the kind of “functional reductionism” which has recently been developed by authors such as Jaegwon Kim. Which of these two alternatives is preferable remains an open question pending the further development of dynamical cognitive science, particularly in its “non-classical” forms. (shrink)

This chapter argues that much discussion between philosophers and neuroscientists is infected by philosophical assumptions about the nature of reduction. Instead we should pursue an unbiased examination of the methods used throughout relevant areas of neuroscience. The chapter focuses on reductionist work in the neurobiological discipline of molecular and cellular cognition. It is argued that reduction is a matter of causal intervention into low level mechanisms, and tracking of the effects of these interventions through levels. When interventions provide (...) evidence that activity in the proposed reductive mechanism co-varies reliably with activity in the target property, such that appealing to higher-level mechanisms will not add any extra explanatory power, reduction can succeed. This is explicitly contrasted with functionalisation and a posteriori approaches to reduction. (shrink)

Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas (...) like emergence and downward causation, are congruent with enactivism. Attention to enactivist ideas, moreover, may serve as a heuristic for mechanistic investigations of cognition. Nevertheless, I show how enactivism and approaches that prioritise mechanistic modelling may diverge in starting assumptions about the nature of cognitive phenomena, such as where the constitutive boundaries of cognition lie. (shrink)

I begin by tracing some of the confusions regarding levels and reduction to a failure to distinguish two different principles according to which theories can be viewed as hierarchically arranged — epistemic authority and ontological constitution. I then argue that the notion of levels relevant to the debate between symbolic and connectionist paradigms of mental activity answers to neither of these models, but is rather correlative to the hierarchy of functional decompositions of cognitive tasks characteristic of homuncular functionalism. (...) Finally, I suggest that the incommensurability of the intentional and extensional vocabularies constitutes a strongprima facie reason to conclude that there is little likelihood of filling in the story of Bechtel''s missing level in such a way as to bridge the gap between such homuncular functionalism and his own model of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

It is demonstrated that the reduction of a physical theory S to another one, T, in the sense that S can be derived from T holds in general only for the mathematical framework. The interpretation of S and the associated central terms cannot all be derived from those of T because of the qualitative differences between the cognitive levels of S and T. Their cognitively autonomous status leads to an epistemic as well as an ontological pluralism. This pluralism (...) is consistent with the unity of nature in the sense of a substantive monism. (shrink)

We support the development of non-reductive cognitive science and the naturalization of phenomenology for this purpose, and we agree that the ‘relational turn’ defended by Gallagher is a necessary step in this direction. However, we believe that certain aspects of his relational concept of nature need clarification. In particular, Gallagher does not say whether or how teleology, affect, and other value-related properties of life and mind can be naturalized within this framework. In this paper, we argue that (1) (...) given the phenomenological standards recognized by Gallagher, his commitment to a naturalized phenomenology should entail a commitment to a naturalized concept of value; and (2) the kind of ‘relational nature’ described by Gallagher in his paper is insufficient for this purpose. (shrink)

The notion of reduction continues to play a key role in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science. Supporters of reductionism claim that psychological properties or explanations reduce to neural properties or explanations, while antireductionists claim that such reductions are not possible. In this book, I apply recent developments in philosophy of science, particularly the mechanistic explanation paradigm and the interventionist theory of causation, to reassess the traditional approaches to reduction in philosophy of mind. (...) I then elaborate and defend a pluralistic framework for philosophy of mind, and show how reductionist ideas can be incorporated into it. This leads to a novel synthesis of pluralism and reductionism that I call pluralistic physicalism. (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)

John Bickle's Psychoneural reduction: the new wave (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) aims to resurrect reductionism within philosophy of mind. He develops a new model of scientific reduction, geared to enhancing our understanding of how theories in neuroscience and cognitive science are interrelated. I put this discussion in context, and assess the prospects for new wave reductionism, both as a general model of scientific reduction and as an attempt to defend reductionism in the philosophy of (...) mind. (shrink)

One of the central aims of the neo-mechanistic framework for the neural and cognitive sciences is to construct a pluralistic integration of scientific explanations, allowing for a weak explanatory autonomy of higher-level sciences, such as cognitive science. This integration involves understanding human cognition as information processing occurring in multi-level human neuro-cognitive mechanisms, explained by multi-level neuro-cognitive models. Strong explanatory neuro-cognitive reduction, however, poses a significant challenge to this pluralist ambition and the weak autonomy (...) of cognitive science derived therefrom. Based on research in current molecular and cellular neuroscience, the framework holds that the best strategy for integrating human neuro-cognitive theories is through direct reductive explanations based on molecular and cellular neural processes. It is my aim to investigate whether the neo-mechanistic framework can meet the challenge. I argue that leading neo-mechanists offer some significant replies; however, they are not able yet to completely remove strong explanatory reductionism from their own framework. (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)

1. Introduction: memory and interdisciplinarity (footnote 1) Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, in a daunting range of disciplines, and with a vast array of methods. Is there any sense at all in which memory theorists - from neurobiologists to narrative theorists, from the developmental to the postcolonial, from the computational to the cross-cultural - are studying the same phenomena? This exploratory review paper sketches the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on memory, (...) both within the various cognitive sciences and across the gulfs between the cognitive and the social sciences. (shrink)

A dualistic, discarnate picture haunts contemporary cognitive science of religion. Cognitive scientists of religion generally assert or assume a reductive physicalism, primarily through unconscious mental mechanisms that detect supernatural agency where none exists and a larger purpose to life when none exists. Accompanying this focus is a downplaying of conscious reflection in religious belief and practice. Yet the mind side of dualism enters into CSR in interesting ways. Some cognitive scientists turn practitioners of religion into dualists (...) who allegedly believe in disembodied spirits. By emphasizing supernatural agency, CSR neglects nonpersonal powers and meanings in religion, both in terms of magical thinking and practice and of nonpersonal conceptions of divinity. Additionally, some cognitive scientists of religion declare that all humans are innate dualists. They use this alleged dualism to explain beliefs about both an afterlife and transfers of consciousness. Finally, some call on this dualism to serve a salvific function, trying to salvage some meaning to human life. (shrink)

Psychology is the study of thinking, and cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence that also includes philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. In these investigations, many philosophical issues arise concerning methods and central concepts. The Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science contains 16 essays by leading philosophers of science that illuminate the nature of the theories and explanations used in the investigation of minds. Topics discussed include representation, mechanisms, (...) reduction, perception, consciousness, language, emotions, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Key Features - Comprehensive coverage of philosophy of psychology and cognitive science - Distinguished contributors: leading philosophers in this area - Contributions closely tied to relevant scientific research. (shrink)

I argue that bounded agents face a systematic accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition. Agents must choose whether to structure their cognition in ways likely to promote coherence or accuracy. I illustrate the accuracy-coherence tradeoff by showing how it arises out of at least two component tradeoffs: a coherence-complexity tradeoff between coherence and cognitive complexity, and a coherence-variety tradeoff between coherence and strategic variety. These tradeoffs give rise to an accuracy-coherence tradeoff because privileging coherence over complexity or strategic variety often leads (...) to a corresponding reduction in accuracy. I conclude with a discussion of two normative consequences for the study of bounded rationality: the importance of procedural rationality and the role of coherence in theories of bounded rationality. (shrink)

The recent trend in cognitive robotics experiments on language learning, symbol grounding, and related issues necessarily entails a reduction of sensorimotor aspects from those provided by a human body to those that can be realized in machines, limiting robotic models of symbol grounding in this respect. Here, we argue that there is a need for modeling work in this domain to explicitly take into account the richer human embodiment even for concrete concepts that prima facie relate merely to (...) simple actions, and illustrate this using distributional methods from computational linguistics which allow us to investigate grounding of concepts based on their actual usage. We also argue that these techniques have applications in theories and models of grounding, particularly in machine implementations thereof. Similarly, considering the grounding of concepts in human terms may be of benefit to future work in computational linguistics, in particular in going beyond “grounding” concepts in the textual modality alone. Overall, we highlight the overall potential for a mutually beneficial relationship between the two fields. (shrink)

The 4E approach in (philosophy of) cognitive science—based on ideas that the mind is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted—is so diverse that it defies straightforward explanation. This paper considers the most ecumenical explanation of the extant concept of the 4E approach. Purported explanations of 4E based on contested definitions of cognition, contrasts with non-4E approaches, or essential and unifying features (including embodiment) either fail to capture the correct extension for the concept of 4E or lead to incoherence. The (...) incoherence is generated by a failure to abide by several desiderata for non-revisionist conceptual explanations: informativeness, non-contentiousness, and identification of any unifying features if they exist. By contrast, a family resemblance conception of 4E constrained by ties of historical influence satisfies these desiderata. The 4E approach should be understood as a set of family resemblances of overlapping ideas, hypotheses, theories and conceptual frameworks about the mind, as well as methods for its study. The family resemblances span several dimensions, including but not limited to a rejection of dualism, non-representational explanations of the mind, phenomenological methods, the importance of embodiment, a dynamical systems perspective, and an evolutionary perspective on the mind. This family resemblance conception is complemented by a historical dimension: the concept of 4E cognitive science emerged in the period following the cognitive revolution of the 1950s. The advantages of this explanation are that it abides by the established use of ‘4E’, explains 4E’s apparent diversity, and warns against reductive explanations. (shrink)

Philosophy interfaces with cognitive science in three distinct but related areas. First, there is the usual set of issues that fall under the heading of philosophy of science (explanation, reduction, etc.), applied to the special case of cognitive science. Second, there is the endeavor of taking results from cognitive science as bearing upon traditional philosophical questions about the mind, such as the nature of mental representation, consciousness, free will, perception, emotions, memory, etc. (...) Third. (shrink)

(June 2013) “The mind-body problem in cognitive neuroscience”, Philosophia Scientiae 17/2, Gabriel Vacariu and Mihai Vacariu (eds.): 1. William Bechtel (Philosophy, Center for Chronobiology, and Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego) “The endogenously active brain: the need for an alternative cognitive architecture” 2. Rolls T. Edmund (Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Oxford, UK) “On the relation between the mind and the brain: a neuroscience perspective” 3. Cees van Leeuwen (University of Leuven, Belgium; (...) Riken Brain Science Institute, Japan) “Brain and mind” 4. Kari Theurer (Trinity College) and John Bickle (Philosophy, Mississippi State University) “What’s old is new again: Kemeny-Oppenheim reduction at work in current molecular neuroscience” 5. Bernard Andrieu (Staps Université de Lorraine) “Sentir son cerveau? Les dispositifs neuro-expérientiels en 1er personne” 6. Corey Maley and Gualtiero Piccinini (Philosophy, University of Missouri – St. Louis) “Get the latest upgrade: Functionalism 6.3.1” 7. Paula Droege (Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University) “Memory and consciousness” 8. Gabriel Vacariu and Mihai Vacariu (Philosophy, University of Bucharest) “Troubles with cognitive neuroscience”. (shrink)

This paper is aimed at identifying how a model’s explanatory power is constructed and identified, particularly in the practice of template-based modeling (Humphreys, Philos Sci 69:1–11, 2002; Extending ourselves: computational science, empiricism, and scientific method, 2004), and what kinds of explanations models constructed in this way can provide. In particular, this paper offers an account of non-causal structural explanation that forms an alternative to causal–mechanical accounts of model explanation that are currently popular in philosophy of biology and cognitive (...) science. Clearly, defences of non-causal explanation are far from new (e.g. Batterman, Br J Philos Sci 53:21–38, 2002a; The devil in the details: asymptotic reasoning in explanation, reduction, and emergence, 2002b; Pincock, Noûs 41:253–275, 2007; Mathematics and scientific representation 2012; Rice, Noûs. doi:10.1111/nous.12042, 2013; Biol Philos 27:685–703, 2012), so the targets here are focused on a particular type of robust phenomenon and how strong invariance to interventions can block a range of causal explanations. By focusing on a common form of model construction, the paper also ties functional or computational style explanations found in cognitive science and biology more firmly with explanatory practices across model-based science in general. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology, classically conceived as the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and not as mere introspection, contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see “References” below.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g. 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g. 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus (...) explicitly uses it (e.g. 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional AI, Gallagher and Zahavi wish to indicate a positive and constructive place for it within cognitive science. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau‐Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. The book is presented as an “introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science” written from a phenomenological perspective. It seeks to justify the use of phenomenology in cognitive science by showing what kinds of questions it asks and answers, the variety of uses to which it has recently been put and the fruitfulness of some of its findings. The catalog of topics, for the most part, matches other introductions to the philosophy of mind, such as questions of method, consciousness, perception, intentionality, embodiment, action, agency and other minds. One issue presented here that is not generally dealt with in existing philosophy of mind and cognitive science texts is temporality, a mainstay of the continental tradition. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the main tenets of phenomenological method. Here, one encounters expected components of phenomenology: the epoché (described below), phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and so on. This traditional fare is soon followed by some potential surprises, namely, attempts to “naturalize” phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of ‘neurophenomenology’. Each of these is a bit surprising because Husserl was a vocal critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing phenomenology. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, strict adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. Naturalizing phenomenology means recognizing that “the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation” (p.. (shrink)

The entropy-reduction hypothesis claims that the cognitive processing difficulty on a word in sentence context is determined by the word's effect on the uncertainty about the sentence. Here, this hypothesis is tested more thoroughly than has been done before, using a recurrent neural network for estimating entropy and self-paced reading for obtaining measures of cognitive processing load. Results show a positive relation between reading time on a word and the reduction in entropy due to processing that (...) word, supporting the entropy-reduction hypothesis. Although this effect is independent from the effect of word surprisal, we find no evidence that these two measures correspond to cognitively distinct processes. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is positioned to make distinctive contributions to cognitive science by providing perspective on its conceptual foundations and by advancing normative recommendations. The philosophy of science I embrace is naturalistic in that it is grounded in the study of actual science. Focusing on explanation, I describe the recent development of a mechanistic philosophy of science from which I draw three normative consequences for cognitive science. First, insofar as cognitive mechanisms (...) are information‐processing mechanisms, cognitive science needs an account of how the representations invoked in cognitive mechanisms carry information about contents, and I suggest that control theory offers the needed perspective on the relation of representations to contents. Second, I argue that cognitive science requires, but is still in search of, a catalog of cognitive operations that researchers can draw upon in explaining cognitive mechanisms. Last, I provide a new perspective on the relation of cognitive science to brain sciences, one which embraces both reductive research on neural components that figure in cognitive mechanisms and a concern with recomposing higher‐level mechanisms from their components and situating them in their environments. (shrink)

‘Naturalizing phenomenology’ by limiting it to the ontology of the sciences is problematic on both metaphysical and phenomenological grounds. While most assessments of the prospects for a ‘naturalized phenomenology’ have focused on approaches based in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, problems also arise for non-reductive approaches based in Heideggerian existential phenomenology. ‘Heideggerian cognitive science’ faces a dilemma. On the one hand, if it is directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, and this subjectivity is assumed to be ontologically irreducible to (...) its physical enablers yet still metaphysically dependent on them, then Heideggerian cognitive science will either leave that metaphysical dependence an unexplained instance of supervenience, or ground it in speculation about brute metaphysical laws that have an unclear relationship to the ontology of the sciences. On the other hand, if Heideggerian cognitive science is not directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, but is instead merely aimed at the development of a Heideggerian phenomenological psychology, then it doesn’t fully address the ontological implications of phenomenology’s transcendental approach, and so, while it might succeed in explaining the realization of psychological phenomena scientifically, the existence of subjectivity will remain inexplicable based on the ontology of the sciences. Neither strategy succeeds in ‘naturalizing phenomenology’: either rejects scientific naturalism, or makes its requirements trivial, while either rejects the transcendental dimension of phenomenology, or fails to address its ontological implications. (shrink)

The question about epistemic nature of norms is a special case of discussing the non-standard definition of knowledge. Is it possible to expand the understanding of knowledge beyond the proposi­tions expressed by narrative sentence and describing what takes place? Might a moral norm, an aesthetic ideal, a religious symbol be taken as specific types of knowledge? Thesis on the special epistemological status of science, its empirical basis and methods lies in the basis of naturalistic revision of epistemology by Quine. (...) White, on the contrary, considers scientific observations and moral experiences equal means to justify objective and normative content in science as well as in morality and art. With regard to the contemporary expansion of the subject matter of epistemology White is more advantageous, although both sides ultimately do not extend beyond reduction of all cultural phenomena to the facts of individual consciousness. The resolution of the dispute under consideration can be provided by the turn of epistemological reflection to the study of the cognitive content of cultural objectivizations of human activity and communication, to the analysis of specific forms of representation and functions of whatever cognitive phenomena in the social artifacts. On the one hand, this extends the subject-matter of traditional epistemology by involving all the diversity of consciousness and on the other hand, this prepares methodological insights for cultural and reli­gious studies, ethics, aesthetics, and political science. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of nature and he resists reduction of phenomenology to computational-neural science. However, classic, reductionist science, at least in contemporary computational guise, has the resources to accommodate insights from transcendental phenomenology. Reductionism should be embraced, not feared.

In this paper, we use motion tracking technology to document the birth of a brand new language: Nicaraguan Sign Language. Languages are dynamic entities that undergo change and growth through use, transmission, and learning, but the earliest stages of this process are generally difficult to observe as most languages have been used and passed down for many generations. Here, we observe a rare case of language emergence: the earliest stages of the new sign language in Nicaragua. By comparing the signing (...) of the oldest and youngest signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language, we can track how the language itself is changing. Using motion tracking technology, we document a decrease in the size of articulatory space of Nicaraguan Sign Language signers over time. The reduction in articulatory space in Nicaraguan Sign appears to be the joint product of several decades of use and repeated transmission of this new language. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this (...) implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds. (shrink)

Several of Beller, Bender, and Medin’s (2012) issues are as relevant within cognitive science as between it and anthropology. Knowledge-rich human mental processes impose hermeneutic tasks, both on subjects and researchers. Psychology's current philosophy of science is ill suited to analyzing these: Its demand for ‘‘stimulus control’’ needs to give way to ‘‘negotiation of mutual interpretation.’’ Cognitive science has ways to address these issues, as does anthropology. An example from my own work is about how (...) defeasible logics are mathematical models of some aspects of simple hermeneutic processes. They explain processing relative to databases of knowledge and belief—that is, content. A specific example is syllogistic reasoning, which raises issues of experimenters’ interpretations of subjects’ reasoning. Science, especially since the advent of understandings of computation, does not have to be reductive. How does this approach transfer onto anthropological topics? Recent cognitive science approaches to anthropological topics have taken a reductive stance in terms of modules. We end with some speculations about a different cognitive approach to, for example, religion. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume explore some of the powers and limitations of the concept of mechanism for the scientific understanding of cognitive systems, and aim at bringing together some of the most recent developments in the philosophical understanding of the relation of cognition to neuroscience. Earlier versions of most papers have been presented at a workshop held in Paris on June 19th, 2006, which was organized by Institut Jean Nicod and supported by RESCIF (R seau des sciences (...) cognitives en Ile-de-France). (shrink)

Most research in the natural sciences passes through repeated cycles of a analytic reduction to the next lower level of organization, then resynthesis to the original level, then new analyticareduction, and so on. A residue of unexplained phenomena at the original level appears at first to require a holistic description independent of the lower level, but the residue shrinks as knowledge increases.This principle is well illustrated by recent studies from the social organization of insects, several examples of which are (...) cited here. In theory it should also apply to human social organization. Culture is biological: meaning in culture can be approached as the outcome of mechanism-based causation, because culture stems from individual cognition, which has a biological basis. It would seem to follow that the most effective way to study culture is across all levels of organization from gene to society, passing repetitively through a cycle of reduction and synthesis in the manner of the natural sciences. Reductionistic analysis is favored by the tendency of semantic memory and culture to occur in discrete units that are arranged hierarchically. (shrink)

The main aim of the paper is to defend (the possibility of) reductionism in the neuroscience--cognitive science case. This is done in three steps. First an ontological and methodological picture is presented which acknowledges the level structure of reality but claims that because every higher level is evolutionarily preceded by the lower level(s), reductionism is as viable strategy as anything else. Secondly, a direct challenge to the two popular doctrines, namely emergentism and supervenience, is presented, the point being (...) that we don't have clear conception of what "emerging" is or how specifically to explain what something's "depending on" something or "determining" something is (in the case of supervenience). In the third part the so-called modified structuralist framework (from the structuralist philosophy of science) is proposed as an alternative model to the old Nagelian one, a model which can serve reductionistic purposes well because it admits many kinds of reduction, from approximate to very strict ones. (shrink)

Resistance to the idea that phenomenology can be relevant to cognitive scientific explanation has faced two objections advanced, respectively, from both sides of the issue: from the scientific perspective it has been suggested that phenomenology, understood as an account of first-person experience, is ultimately reducible to cognitive neuroscientific explanation; and from a phenomenological perspective it has been argued that phenomenology cannot be naturalized. In this context it makes sense to consider that the notion of scientific reduction is (...) linked to a classic scientific conception of nature. I argue that if properly understood, the proposal to rethink the concept of nature itself, in enactivist phenomenological approaches, undermines the reductionist program and redefines what it means for phenomenology to be naturalized. (shrink)

The philosophy of science has lost its self-confidence, witness the lack of advanced textbooks in contrast to the abundance of elementary textbooks. Structures in Science is an advanced textbook that explicates, updates, accommodates, and integrates the best insights of logical-empiricism and its main critics. This `neo-classical approach' aims at providing heuristic patterns for research. The book introduces four ideal types of research programs and reanimates the distinction between observational laws and proper theories. It explicates various patterns of explanation (...) by subsumption and specification as well as structures in reductive and other types of interlevel research. Its analysis of theory evaluation leads to new characterizations of confirmation, empirical progress, and pseudoscience. Partial analogies between progress in nomological research and progress in explicative and design research emerge. Finally, special chapters are devoted to design research programs, computational philosophy of science, the structuralist approach to theories, and research ethics. (shrink)

Although having conscious experiences is a fundamental feature of our everyday life, our understanding of what consciousness is is very limited. According to one of the main conclusions of contemporary philosophy of mind, the qualitative aspect of consciousness seems to resist functionalisation, i.e. it cannot be adequately defined solely in terms of functional or causal roles, which leads to an epistemic gap between phenomenal and scientific knowledge. Phenomenal qualities, then, seem to be, in principle, unexplainable in scientific terms. As a (...) reaction to this pessimistic conclusion it is a major trend in contemporary science of consciousness to turn away from subjective experiences and re-define the subject of investigations in neurological and behavioural terms. This move, however, creates a gap between scientific theories of consciousness, and the original phenomenon, which we are so intimately connected with. The thesis focuses on this gap. It is argued that it is possible to explain features of consciousness in scientific terms. The thesis argues for this claim from two directions. On the one hand, a specific identity theory is formulated connecting phenomenal qualities to certain intermediate level perceptual representations which are unstructured for central processes of the embedding cognitive system. This identity theory is hypothesised on the basis of certain similarities recognised between the phenomenal and the cognitive-representational domains, and then utilised in order to uncover further similarities between these two domains. The identity theory and the further similarities uncovered are then deployed in formulating explanations of the philosophically most important characteristics of the phenomenal domain—i.e. why phenomenal qualities resist functionalisation, and why the epistemic gap occurs. On the other hand, the thesis investigates and criticises existing models of reductive explanation. On the basis of a detailed analysis of how successful scientific explanations proceed a novel account of reductive explanation is proposed, which utilises so-called prior identities. Prior identities are prerequisites rather than outcomes of reductive explanations. They themselves are unexplained but are nevertheless necessary for mapping the features to be explained onto the features the explanation relies on. Prior identities are hypothesised in order to foster the formulation of explanatory claims accounting for target level phenomena in terms of base level processes—and they are justified if they help projecting base level explanations to new territories of the target level. The thesis concludes that the identity theory proposed is a prior identity, and the explanations of features of the phenomenal domain formulated with the aid of this identity are reductive explanations proper. In this sense, the thesis introduces the problem of phenomenal consciousness into scientific discourse, and therefore offers a bridge between the philosophy and the science of consciousness: it offers an approach to conscious experience which, on the one hand, tries to account for the philosophically most important features of consciousness, whereas, on the other hand, does it in a way which smoothly fits into the everyday practice of scientific research. (shrink)

Aku Visala takes a closer look at the role of naturalism in CSR. The cognitive-evolutionary study of religion takes itself as “naturalizing” not only the study of religion, but the humanities as a whole. Apart from the obvious denial of non-supernatural causal factors, it is sometimes difficult to see whether this naturalization involves anything more than a general rhetorical strategy meant to play up the “science” part. In his paper, Visala seeks to identify the basic philosophical assumptions of (...) the naturalization project, present some critical points about them, and suggest what he considers to be more plausible assumptions instead. The basic assumptions of the naturalization project include a commitment to a specific kind of unity of science, a commitment to a certain kind of inter-level reduction and explanatory fundamentalism and a deep suspicion towards causal factors above the cognitive/psychological level. He suggests that these commitments suffer from a number of problems and the goals of the cognitive-evolutionary study can be achieved just as well, or even better, by adopting weaker and more plausible commitments. Here he briefly discusses some new accounts of mechanistic explanation, Robert McCauley’s model of inter- and intra-level relationships and the idea of explanatory pluralism. He conjectures that loosening the “naturalistic” constraints of the cognitive-evolutionary study of religion might result in a more pluralistic approach to religion. (shrink)

What role does mathematics play in cognitive science today, what role should mathematics play in cognitive science tomorrow? The cautious short answers are: to the factual question, a rather modest role, except in peripheral areas; to the normative question, a far greater role, as the periphery’s place is reevaluated and as both cognitive science and mathematics grow. This paper aims at providing more detailed, perhaps more contentious answers.

The need for representations and computations over their contents in psychological explanations is often cited as both the mark of the genuinely cognitive and a source of skepticism about the reducibility of cognitive theories to neuroscience. A generic version of this anti-reductionist argument is rejected in this paper as unsound, since (i) current thinking about associative learning emphasizes the need for cognitivist resources in theories adequate to explain even the simplest form of this phenomena (Pavlovian conditioning), and yet (...) (ii) the most widely accepted recent theory of associative learning, which utilizes cognitivist resources, has already been reduced to a purely neurophysiological account. Psychoneural reduction of genuinely cognitivist theories is thus already an accomplished scientific fact, despite pronouncements by anti-reductionists about its conceptual impossibility or empirical implausibility. In addition, the specific form of reduction involved in this case (“combinatorial” reduction) provides a promising model for further cognitivist-to-neuroscience theory reductions. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

According to a brief and very general definition Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary scientific study of how information is represented and transformed in a human nervous system. “Information”, “representation” and “transformation” are keywords here. Many disciplines bring considerable contribution to Cognitive Science. Logic is one of them. Logic investigates these rules which allow us to recognize valid reasonings and distinguish them from those that fail to fulfill the condition of valid- ity. Thus logic investigates some representation (...) (or representations) of reasoning. Significant part of information transformed in nervous system is related to reasoning and inference. This fact opens special perspectives on applying Logic in Cognitive Science both in representing as well as in transforming information. Any formal logical system constitutes a kind of representation of a class of propositions considered as sentence content. In this way each logical system provides a representation of a broad class of belief states. At the same time any inference relation, related to a given logical system, represents a transformation of some type of information. As a consequence it would be hard to find logical investigations which could not be applied in Cognitive Science. Such an idea guided us while we were preparing the present volume. (shrink)

Recent work in the methodology of connectionist explanation has I'ocrrsccl on the notion of levels of explanation. Specific issucs in conncctionisrn hcrc intersect with rvider areas of debate in the philosophy of psychology and thc philosophy of science generally. The issues I raise in this chapter, then, are not unique to cognitive science; but they arise in new and important contexts when connectionism is taken seriously as a model of cognition. The general questions are the relation between (...) levels and the status of levels which have no obvious relation to others. In speaking of levels, what is the connection, if there is one, between explanation and ontology? Which, if any, conccpt of reduction is applicable to connectionist systems? What kind of legitinrtcy can the constructs of common sense psychology, or of that vclsion ol intentional realism represented by classical symbol-systems n I, hirvc irr ir full-scale connectionist theory of mind? (shrink)

The philosophy of science has lost its self-confidence. Structures in Science (2001) is an advanced textbook that explicates, updates and integrates the best insights of logical empiricism and its main critics. This "neo-classical approach" aims at providing heuristic patterns for research.The book introduces four ideal types of research programs (descriptive, explanatory, design and explicative) and reanimates the distinction between observational laws and proper theories without assuming a theory-free language. It explicates various patterns of explanation by subsumption and specification (...) as well as structures in reductive and other types of interlevel research. Its threefold analysis of theory evaluation leads to new characterizations of confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation. What emerges are partial analogies between progress in nomological research, presented in detail in From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (2000) and progress in explicative and design research. Finally, special chapters are devoted to design research programs, computational philosophy of science, the structuralist approach to theories, and research ethics.The present synopsis of Structures in Science highlights the main topics, the final emphasis being on design research and research ethics. (shrink)

Towards the end of Beyond Reduction Horst hypothesizes that ‘it is a general design principle of the cognitive architecture of humans that the mind possesses multiple models for understanding and interacting practically with different aspects of the world’. The suggestion is made following a discussion of recent research in cognitive science. According to Horst, the hypothesis is also consistent with what recent non-reductionist tendencies in the philosophy of science teach us. Taken together, Horst claims these (...) two sets of evidence motivate a new post-reductionist approach to the philosophy of mind. After outlining the route Horst takes to reach this claim, I shall raise a worry I have about the claim and the route taken to it.Beyond Reduction is in three parts. Part one frames the debate. In Chapter 1 Horst notes how naturalism is a view to which nearly all philosophers of mind, some of whom hold quite disparate views, would subscribe. He formulates a schema for naturalism that he thinks most would accept: ‘naturalism about domain D is the view that all features of D are to be accommodated within the framework of nature as it is understood by the natural sciences’. Horst acknowledges that the schema under-describes matters. The notion of ‘accommodation’ may be understood as involving either explanation or metaphysical determination; it is also unclear how we are to understand ‘the …. (shrink)

This paper surveys applications of logical methods in the cognitive sciences. Special attention is paid to non-monotonic logics and complexity theory. We argue that these particular tools have been useful in clarifying the debate between symbolic and connectionist models of cognition.

Though nativist hypotheses have played a pivotal role in the development of cognitive science, it remains exceedingly obscure how they—and the debates in which they figure—ought to be understood. The central aim of this paper is to provide an account which addresses this concern and in so doing: a) makes sense of the roles that nativist theorizing plays in cognitive science and, moreover, b), explains why it really matters to the contemporary study of cognition. I conclude (...) by outlining a range of further implications of this account for current debate in cognitive science. (shrink)