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)

Mapping a public discourse with the tools of computational text analysis comes with many contingencies in the areas of corpus curation, data processing and analysis, and visualisation. However, the complexity of algorithmic assemblies and the beauty of resulting images give the impression of ‘objectivity’. Instead of concealing uncertainties and artefacts in order to tell a coherent and all-encompassing story, retaining the variety of alternative assemblies may actually strengthen the method. By utilising the mobility of digital devices, we could create mutable (...) mobiles that allow access to our laboratories and enable challenging rearrangements and interpretations. (shrink)

W artykule jest analizowana Piotra Chojnackiego teoria filozofii przyrody. Teoria ta była istotnym składnikiem rozwijanego w polskim środowisku filozoficznym tomizmu lowańskiego, który znajduje się aktualnie w kryzysie. Pokazuję, że ta metafilozoficzna teoria jest eklektycznym zestawieniem elementów pozytywizmu, neokantyzmu i arystotelizmu. Argumentuję, że przyczyną kryzysu tomizmu lowańskiego był eklektyczny charakter tej filozofii. Aczkolwiek we współczesnej filozofii dochodzi do rehabilitacji eklektyzmu, to jednak z uwagi na dominujący scjentyzm i naturalizm perspektywy rozwoju filozofii przyrody inspirowanej programem neotomizmu lowańskiego wydają się mocno ograniczone.

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)

In "Things and Places," Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual ...

Although the study of visual perception has made more progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely vision is tied to general cognition. This paper sets out some of the arguments for both sides and defends the position that an important part of visual perception, which may be called early vision or just vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant expectations, knowledge and utilities - in other words it (...) is cognitively impenetrable. That part of vision is complex and articulated and provides a representation of the 3-D surfaces of objects sufficient to serve as an index into memory, with somewhat different outputs being made available to other systems such as those dealing with motor control. The paper also addresses certain conceptual and methodological issues, including the use of signal detection theory and event-related potentials to assess cognitive penetration of vision. A distinction is made among several stages in visual processing. These include, in addition to the inflexible early-vision stage, a pre-perceptual attention allocation stage and a post-perceptual evaluation, memory-accessing, and inference stage which provide several different highly constrained ways in which cognition can affect the outcome of visual perception. The paper discusses arguments that have been presented in both computer vision and psychology showing that vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of problem solving". It is suggested that these cases do not show cognitive penetration, but rather they show that certain natural constraints on interpretation, concerned primarily with optical and geometrical properties of the world, have been compiled into the visual system. The paper also examines a number of examples where instructions and "hints" are alleged to affect. (shrink)

Nicolas d'Autrécourt (c. 1298-1369) is one of the most daring thinkers in the history of philosophy, and Zénon Kaluza, who has devoted to him nearly thirty years of study, presents him to us through his sources, his doctrines and his manuscripts. The reader will find studies on some of the most relevant philosophical doctrines (such as perception, the final causality, the categories and the eternity of the world) as well as a new edition of the Prologues of the Exigit ordo, (...) enriched with a running commentary. The texts gathered here-some of which have been published previously but are difficult to access and others which have been unpublished until now-reveal a philosopher who wished to free philosophy from institutional constraints and dared to criticize Aristotle's metaphysics, at the risk of upsetting traditions and contradicting the dogmas of the faith, and who was condemned by the theological authorities of his time. Nicolas d'Autrécourt (c. 1298-1369) est l'un des penseurs les plus audacieux de l'histoire de la philosophie, et Zénon Kaluza, qui lui a consacré près de trente ans d'études, nous le fait découvrir par ses sources, ses doctrines et ses manuscrits. Ce livre propose notamment des analyses sur des thèmes importants (tels que la perception, la causalité finale, les catégories ou l'éternité du monde) ainsi qu'une nouvelle édition des Prologues de l'Exigit ordo, enrichie d'un commentaire suivi. Les études-dont certaines sont parues mais difficiles d'accès et d'autres sont inédites-dévoilent la figure d'un philosophe désirant de libérer la philosophie des contraintes institutionnelles et de critiquer la métaphysique d'Aristote, au risque de bouleverser les traditions, de contredire les dogmes de la foi et se voir condamner par les autorités théologiques de son temps. (shrink)

The paper presents some ethical aspects of the credit rating agencies (CRAs) market in the light of the latest economic crisis of 2008. A historical background is also shown and how the CRA market emerged. It is emphasised how the functioning of CRAs contributed to the outbreak of the crisis and what were the consequences of over- or underestimated rating grades. The downgrading of a country has a significant influence on the deterioration of the economic condition. Simultaneously, it afflicts the (...) citizens, who have to pay for it e.g. with higher tax rates. It is believed that overestimated ratings lead to a speculative bubble, which ends up with the crisis. The paper indicates the problems connected with the way that CRAs operate and how they relate to business ethics. The fact that those institutions are profitprofile entities, which earn their income from clients, whose financial instruments are assessed, may bring about a conflict of interests. Moreover, it is outlined how the governmental policies of countries left CRAs without any particular control, which in the end was a significant factor, too. Finally, some potential solutions are discussed, and how the approach of CRA managers should change in order to prevent the market from similar situations in the future. (shrink)

6. Seeing With the Mind’s Eye 1: The Puzzle of Mental Imagery .................................................6-1 6.1 What is the puzzle about mental imagery?..............................................................................6-1 6.2 Content, form and substance of representations ......................................................................6-6 6.3 What is responsible for the pattern of results obtained in imagery studies?.................................6-8..

Author presents reflection on the evolution of political terms and notions throughout Russian history. In this study, as its main focus is the reconstruction of the development process of concepts and notions pertaining to the political whole. Nevertheless, these issues do surface in the context of conceptualizing the political community, as an important aspect of both political organization and political action. In Russia, certain concepts pertaining to some aspects of freedom did develop, but what never emerged was the general idea (...) of freedom as the central political issue. On the other hand, the issue of authority emerged as an independent field of thought, as a result of the despotic and anti-despotic interpretations of terms used to describe the political system. (shrink)

How we see and how we visualize: why the scientific account differs from our experience.

It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning by using mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite more than thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind to what is called the cognitive architecture, and (...) ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind, the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if taken literally, as a claim about how images are physically instantiated in the brain, and that the literal view fails for a number of empirical reasons – for example, because of the cognitive penetrability of the phenomena cited in its favor. Similarly, while it is arguably the case that imagery and vision involve some of the same mechanisms, this tells us very little about the nature of mental imagery and does not support claims about the pictorial nature of mental images. Finally, I consider whether recent neuroscience evidence clarifies the debate over the nature of mental images. I claim that when such questions as whether images are depictive or spatial are formulated more clearly, the evidence does not provide support for the picture-theory over a symbol-structure theory of mental imagery. Even if all the empirical claims were true, they do not warrant the conclusion that many people have drawn from them: that mental images are depictive or are displayed in some (possibly cortical) space. Such a conclusion is incompatible with what is known about how images function in thought. We are then left with the provisional counterintuitive conclusion that the available evidence does not support rejection of what I call the “null hypothesis”; namely, that reasoning with mental images involves the same form of representation and the same processes as that of reasoning in general, except that the content or subject matter of thoughts experienced as images includes information about how things would look. (shrink)

This paper argues that a theory of situated vision, suited for the dual purposes of object recognition and the control of action, will have to provide something more than a system that constructs a conceptual representation from visual stimuli: it will also need to provide a special kind of direct (preconceptual, unmediated) connection between elements of a visual representation and certain elements in the world. Like natural language demonstratives (such as `this' or `that') this direct connection allows entities to be (...) referred to without being categorized or conceptualized. Several reasons are given for why we need such a preconcep- tual mechanism which individuates and keeps track of several individual objects in the world. One is that early vision must pick out and compute the relation among several individual objects while ignoring their properties. Another is that incrementally computing and updating representations of a dynamic scene requires keeping track of token individuals despite changes in their properties or locations. It is then noted that a mechanism meeting these requirements has already been proposed in order to account for a number of disparate empiri- cal phenomena, including subitizing, search-subset selection and multiple object tracking (Pylyshyn et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 48(2) (1994) 260). This mechanism, called a visual index or FINST, is brie. (shrink)

It is argued that the traditional distinction between artificial intelligence and cognitive simulation amounts to little more than a difference in style of research - a different ordering in goal priorities and different methodological allegiances. Both enterprises are constrained by empirical considerations and both are directed at understanding classes of tasks that are defined by essentially psychological criteria. Because of the different ordering of priorities, however, they occasionally take somewhat different stands on such issues as the power/generality trade-off and on (...) the relevance of the sort of data collected in experimental psychology laboratories. (shrink)

I recently discovered that work I was doing in the laboratory and in theoretical writings was implicitly taking a position on a set of questions that philosophers had been worrying about for much of the past 30 or more years. My clandestine involvement in philosophical issues began when a computer science colleague and I were trying to build a model of geometrical reasoning that would draw a diagram and notice things in the diagram as it drew it (Pylyshyn, Elcock, Marmor, (...) & Sander, 1978). One problem we found we had to face was that if the system discovered a right angle it had no way to tell whether this was the intersection of certain lines it had drawn earlier while constructing a certain figure, and if so which particular lines they were. Moreover, the model had no way of telling whether this particular right angle was identical to some bit of drawing it had earlier encountered and represented as, say, the base of a particular triangle. There was, in other words, no way to determined the identity of an element (I use the term “element” when referring to a graphical unit such as used in experiments. Otherwise when speaking informally I use the term “thing” on the grounds that nobody would mistake that term for a technical theoretical construct. Eventually I end up calling them “Visual Objects” to conform to usage in psychology) at two different times if it was represented differently at those times. This led to some speculation about the need for what we called a “finger” that could be placed at a particular element of interest and that could be used to identify it as particular token thing (the way you might identify a particular feature on paper by labeling it). In general we needed something like a finger that would stay attached to a particular element and could be used to maintain a correspondence between the individual element that was just noticed now and one that had been represented in some fashion at an earlier time. The idea of such fingers (which.... (shrink)

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal (...) thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level. (shrink)

In Gregory, Richard. Oxford Companion to the Mind (Second Edition, 2006) Oxford University Press.

Marr (1982) may have been one of the rst vision researchers to insist that in modeling vision it is important to separate the location of visual features from their type. He argued that in early stages of visual processing there must be “place tokens” that enable subsequent stages of the visual system to treat locations independent of what specic feature type was at that location. Thus, in certain respects a collinear array of diverse features could still be perceived as a (...) line, and under certain conditions could function as such in perceptual phenomena like the Poggendorf illusion. (shrink)

Each of the chapters in this volume devotes considerable attention to defining and elaborating the notion of the frame problem-one of the hard problems of artificial intelligence. Not only do the chapters clarify the problems at hand, they shed light on the different approaches taken by those in artificial intelligence and by certain philosophers who have been concerned with related problems in their field. The book should therefore not be read merely as a discussion of the frame problem narrowly conceived, (...) but also as a general analysis of what could be a major challenge to the design of computer systems exhibiting general intelligence. (shrink)

Few areas of study have led to such close and intense interactions among computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers as the area now referred to as cognitive science. Within this discipline, few problems have inspired as much debate as the use of notions such as meaning, intentionality, or the semantic content of mental states in explaining human behavior. The set of problems surrounding these notions have been viewed by some observers as threatening the foundations of cognitive science as currently conceived, and (...) by others as providing a new and scientifically sound formulation of certain classical problems in the philosophy of mind. The chapters in this volume help bridge the gap among contributing disciplines-computer science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience-and discuss the problems posed from various perspectives. (shrink)

influence. One of the principal characteristics that distinguishes Cognitive Science from more traditional studies of cognition within Psychology, is the extent to which it has been influenced by both the ideas and the techniques of computing. It may come as a surprise to the outsider, then, to discover that there is no unanimity within the discipline on either (a) the nature (and in some cases the desireabilty) of the influence and (b) what computing is –- or at least on its.

The task of tracking a small number (about four or five) visual targets within a larger set of identical items, each of which moves randomly and independently, has been used extensively to study object-based attention. Analysis of this multiple object tracking (MOT) task shows that it logically entails solving the correspondence problem for each target over time, and thus that the individuality of each of the targets must be tracked. This suggests that when successfully tracking objects, observers must also keep (...) track of them as unique individuals. Yet in the present studies we show that observers are poor at recalling the identity of successfully tracked objects (as specified by a unique identifier associated with each target, such as a number or starting location). Studies also show that the identity of targets tends to be lost when they come close together and that this tendency is greater between pairs of targets than between targets and nontargets. The significance of this finding in relation to the multiple object tracking paradigm is discussed. (shrink)

The paper attempts to analyze in some detail the main problems encountered in reasoning using diagrams, which may cause errors in reasoning, produce doubts concerning the reliability of diagrams, and impressions that diagrammatic reasoning lacks the rigour necessary for mathematical reasoning. The paper first argues that such impressions come from long neglect which led to a lack of well-developed, properly tested and reliable reasoning methods, as contrasted with the amount of work generations of mathematicians expended on refining the methods of (...) reasoning with formulae and predicate calculus. Next, two main groups of problems occurring in diagrammatic reasoning are introduced. The second group, called diagram imprecision, is then briefly summarized, its detailed analysis being postponed to another paper. The first group, called collectively the generalization problem, is analyzed in detail in the rest of the paper. The nature and causes of the problems from this group are explained, methods of detecting the potentially harmful occurrences of these problems are discussed, and remedies for possible errors they may cause are proposed. Some of the methods are adapted from similar methods used in reasoning with formulae, several other problems constitute new, specifically diagrammatic ways of reliable reasoning. (shrink)

In the past decade there has been renewed interest in the study of mental imagery. Emboldened by new findings from neuroscience, many people have revived the idea that mental imagery involves a special format of thought, one that is pictorial in nature. But the evidence and the arguments that exposed deep conceptual and empirical problems in the picture theory over the past 300 years have not gone away. I argue that the new evidence from neural imaging and clinical neuropsychology does (...) little to justify this recidivism because it does not address the format of mental images. I also discuss some reasons why the picture theory is so resistant to counterarguments and suggest ways in which non-pictorial theories might account for the apparent spatial nature of images. (shrink)