Evolutionary psychology purports to explain human capacities as adaptations to an ancestral environment. A complete explanation of human language or human reasoning as adaptations depends on assessing an historical claim, that these capacities evolved under the pressure of natural selection and are prevalent because they provided systematic advantages to our ancestors. An outline of the character of the information needed in order to offer complete adaptation explanations is drawn from Robert Brandon (1990), and explanations offered for the evolution of language (...) and reasoning within evolutionary psychology are evaluated. Pinker and Bloom's (1992) defense of human language as an adaptation for verbal communication, Robert Nozick's (1993) account of the evolutionary origin of rationality, and Cosmides and Tooby's (1992) explanation of human reasoning as an adaptation for social exchange, are discussed in light of what is known, and what is not known, about the history of human evolution. In each case, though a plausible case is made that these capacities are adaptations, there is not enough known to offer even a semblance of an explanation of the origin of these capacities. These explanations of the origin of human thought and language are simply speculations lacking the kind of detailed historical information required for an evolutionary explanation of an adaptation. (shrink)

Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where (...) it comes from. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a ...

A leading contributor to artificial intelligence offers insight into the numerous ways in which the mind works to demonstrate how emotions and feelings are just ...

In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

In this ambitious book, Paul Thagard develops a theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction that is precise enough to be stated formally, yet general enough to have application to an array of philosophical problems. Working within the framework of cognitive naturalism, Thagard aims to reunite philosophy and psychology by employing “a computational theory of coherence to illuminate both the psychological task of understanding human thinking and the philosophical task of evaluating how people ought to think”. The formal theory of coherence (...) is presented in chapter 2, and is used in chapter 3 to characterize the main kinds of epistemic coherence: explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual. Over the next few chapters, Thagard applies these to a variety of venerable philosophical problems, including the nature of reality, the existence of God, the problem of other minds, and the ethics of capital punishment and abortion. In a very interesting chapter, the theory of coherence is extended to account for the role of emotion in human cognition and later applied to understanding judgments of beauty and humor. One should consider this book not as giving the final word on these matters, but as showcasing the promise of cognitive naturalism. (shrink)

Ever since the publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn's highly influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there has been considerable investigation of the nature of scientific revolutions. In this book Paul Thagard, analyzing historical examples of radical scientific transformations, presents an account of conceptual revolutions based on the Theory of Explanatory Coherence and on the assumption that thinking is computational, such that the "cognitive architecture" underlying theory construction and change can be replicated in the computer program ECHO.

Despite the growing appreciation of the relevance of affect to cognition, analogy researchers have paid remarkably little attention to emotion. This paper discusses three general classes of analogy that involve emotions. The most straightforward are analogies and metaphors about emotions, for example "Love is a rose and you better not pick it." Much more interesting are analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example in empathy in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional reactions (...) in similar situations. Finally, there are analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surprise and amusement. (shrink)

Since Plato, most philosophers have drawn a sharp line between reason and emotion, assuming that emotions interfere with rationality and have nothing to contribute to good reasoning. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, Plato compared the rational part of the soul to a charioteer who must control his steeds, which correspond to the emotional parts of the soul (Plato 1961, p. 499). Today, scientists are often taken as the paragons of rationality, and scientific thought is generally assumed to be independent of (...) emotional thinking. (shrink)