Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...) work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

In spite of of its name, cognitive science is not yet a fully coherent and integrated science but rather a fairly loose coalition of largely independent disciplines, some descriptive and empirical (cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology), some speculative and foundational (philosophy), others both speculative and applied (artificial intelligence). What brought these disciplines together and still sustains their interdisciplinary cooperation is the dedication to explain, simulate and technically reproduce the workings of the human mind according (...) to a distinct and rather well defined research program. This program has been so far the animating spirit and the integrative force in the formation and development of cognitive science. I will call it the 'core program.' Around the core program there is a much looser and less coherent outer paradigm, or set of paradigms, which historically has prepared the ground for the core program, to which the participating disciplines have contributed their insights, results and methods, and still do, and from which challenges to the core program have emerged and are likely to do so in the future. (shrink)

L’essai d'Albino Lanciani s'intitule « phénoménologie et sciences cognitives » mais l’on se serait satisfait d’un tout autre titre : « phénoménologie versus sciences cognitives », ou peut-être même plus légitimement, « Albino Lanciani contre les sciences cognitives ». Il ne s’agit en effet pas là d’une simple revue des points de désaccord entre approches cognitiviste et phénoménologique, mais d’un véritable bombardement du champ cognitiviste d’où la réflexion phénoménologique semble totalemen...

This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in (...) structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials or social groups. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’examiner certains des usages qui sont faits de Descartes en sciences cognitives. Il s’agit plus précisément de s’attacher à la façon dont se trouve pensé l’héritage du cartésianisme dans la science cognitive orthodoxe, souvent conçue comme « cartésienne ». Comment en vient-on à former cette idée de science cognitive cartésienne? Nous répondons en nous appuyant sur deux analyses, celles de Timothy van Gelder et de Michael Wheeler, avec pour objectif de mettre (...) au jour les aspects de la philosophie de Descartes qui sont ici mobilisés, ainsi que les opérations intellectuelles et pratiques qui permettent à ces auteurs d’extraire le cartésianisme de son milieu originel pour le placer sur le terrain de la science cognitive contemporaine. (shrink)

Where does the mind begin and end? Most philosophers and cognitive scientists take the view that the mind is bounded by the skull or skin of the individual. Robert Wilson, in this provocative and challenging 2004 book, provides the foundations for the view that the mind extends beyond the boundary of the individual. The approach adopted offers a unique blend of traditional philosophical analysis, cognitive science, and the history of psychology and the human sciences. The companion volume, (...) Genes and the Agents of Life, explores the theme in the biological sciences. Written with verve and clarity, this ambitious book will appeal to a broad swathe of professionals and students in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the history of the behavioural and human sciences. You can download the table of contents here. (shrink)

Au cours de notre histoire évolutive, le cerveau humain a été modelé en profondeur par et pour la vie en société. Nous sommes ainsi naturellement dotés de dispositions cognitives qui nous permettent de naviguer dans notre environnement social et contraignent la manière dont nous nous y comportons. Les sciences cognitives contemporaines nous offrent une compréhension de plus en plus détaillée des rouages de cette cognition sociale naturelle. Ces connaissances nouvelles doivent intéresser tous ceux qui cherchent à comprendre le fonctionnement et (...) les mystères de notre monde social. Il est donc temps de dépasser la méfiance que les sciences expérimentales suscitent encore trop souvent en sociologie. Proposant un parcours au travers de la psychologie cognitive, de la psychologie du développement, des neurosciences et de la primatologie, cet ouvrage expose ce que ces sciences sont susceptibles d’apporter à la sociologie. (shrink)

La reconnaissance accordée en sciences cognitives (Van Gelder et Varela) à l’analyse husserlienne du présent mental en termes de rétention et protension a manqué sa radicalité transcendantale, qui est aussi la limite de cette analyse. Si l’on recherche dans la subjectivité l’origine de notre sens du temps, il ne suffit pas de revenir au présent mental par réduction du temps objectif, il faut élargir aux aspects grammaticaux et aux rythmes biologiques l’éventail des moyens d’accès au temps d’un sujet incarné dans (...) le monde de la vie. (shrink)

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of (...) the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

When cognitive scientists are looking for the neural basis of consciousness or the computational processes underlying vision, what are they looking to find? I argue for a new account of this explanatory project in cognitive science (and the special sciences more generally) on which it is best understood on close analogy with causal explanation in the special sciences. Causal explanations cite causal difference-makers: they explain how certain events causally depend on other events. Generative explanations cite generative difference-makers: (...) they explain how certain events obtain in virtue of (and so are generated by) other events. I show how that this generative difference-making account (GDM) extends well regarded developments in philosophical work on causal explanation, helps to usefully clarify and expands the hypothesis space of a key project in cognitive science – that of understanding how underlying nonmental processes give rise to the mental, including consciousness. In section 2, I develop GDM by close analogy with causal explanation, and locate both of them as species of a more general project in the special sciences: that of discovering what makes a difference to what. In section 3, I motivate GDM by contrasting it with other rival accounts, including correlationist, identity, and grounding accounts, as well as Carl Craver’s constitutive relevance account. In section 4, I tie all of the strands of the preceding discussion together to show how GDM provides a new and compelling response to the so-called hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Le titre de cette étude suggère de traiter trois termes, à premier vue, sans aucun lien. En effet, quel peut être le lien entre l’homosexualité et la Bible? Ou celui entre l’homosexualité et les sciences cognitives? Et finalement, quel lien peut-il y avoir entre ces trois termes à première vue juxtaposés? Il y a une réponse à chacune de ces trois questions et nous proposons d’explorer ces réponses dans le cadre de cette étude. Notre thèse consiste à défendre que les (...) sciences et plus précisément les sciences cognitives peuvent contribuer à la discussion sur l’homosexualité dans un cadre théologique (et/ou ecclésial). (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scientific reasoning in children and lay persons (...) as well as in professional scientists. The editors' introduction lays out the background to the debates, and the volume includes a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the philosophy or psychology of scientific reasoning, as well as those, more generally, who are interested in the nature of the human mind. (shrink)

L’essai d'Albino Lanciani s'intitule « phénoménologie et sciences cognitives » mais l’on se serait satisfait d’un tout autre titre : « phénoménologie versus sciences cognitives », ou peut-être même plus légitimement, « Albino Lanciani contre les sciences cognitives ». Il ne s’agit en effet pas là d’une simple revue des points de désaccord entre approches cognitiviste et phénoménologique, mais d’un véritable bombardement du champ cognitiviste d’où la réflexion phénoménologique semble totalemen..

La référence au cartésianisme est constante dans les travaux contemporains de philosophie de l’esprit et de sciences cognitives. Sa fonction n’est pas de fournir une exégèse historique de Descartes ; elle est plutôt de dégager certains aspects de la conception cartésienne de l’esprit, ceux qui informeraient encore la recherche philosophique et scientifique actuelle, et qu’il resterait à dépasser. Ainsi l’adjectif cartésien n’est-il pas seulement utilisé pour faire directement référence à Descartes, mais aussi pour désigner les théories et les approches modernes (...) de l’esprit qui, tout en rompant avec le cartésianisme sur plusieurs points, auraient néanmoins hérité d’importantes erreurs cartésiennes. On remarquera en outre que dans cette logique, l’adjectif cartésien revêt un sens essentiellement critique. Et pour la plupart des théoriciens contemporains en effet, le cartésianisme est bien l’ennemi à combattre. La présente contribution se propose de dresser un portrait de cet ennemi, à partir de quelques-uns des usages qui sont faits de la notion de cartésianisme en philosophie de l’esprit et en sciences cognitives. Cette analyse, qui ne prétend pas à l’exhaustivité, nous permettra de faire apparaître les raisons et les enjeux de la référence à la figure cartésienne dans les réflexions des deux champs mentionnés. (shrink)

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in (...) the field, including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

On imagine mal de prime abord que je puisse être attentive sans que la conscience soit d’une manière ou d’une autre au rendez-vous! Je suis en train d’écouter le serveur plaisanter avec les clients, et on ne peut pas dire que je sois « inconsciente » au moment où j’écoute « attentivement » ses plaisanteries! Bien sûr, être conscient ne correspond pas ici à une conscience explicite, réflexive ou interrogatrice, davantage à une conscience en acte, plus minimale, une sorte de (...) présence en ligne... (shrink)

Porter son attention sur l'attention, voilà l'urgence de notre humanisation contemporaine. Les sciences l'ont compris, qui depuis plus d'un siècle multiplient les travaux en psychologie et en neurosciences sur cette fonction complexe et globale qui forme un réseau intégré transversal où jouent mémoire, perception, veille, émotion et décision ; les techniques méditatives ont aussi leur rôle à jouer, s'adressant moins à notre intellect, comme les sciences, qu'à l'attitude fondamentale face à la vie. Elles nous proposent une clé en matière de (...) pratique de la présence à soi. Devant l'impact croissant des sciences et la visibilité actuelle des techniques méditatives, quel rôle jouera la phénoménologie? Contrairement aux autres approches philosophiques, elle possède ce plus de tenir en un regard ouvert sur le monde : par son retour à l'expérience, elle fait alliance avec la visée expérimentale des sciences et, par sa méthode de suspension, elle entre en contact avec une quête contemplative qui est prise de recul. Elle joue ainsi un rôle-charnière pour repenser l'attention en en faisant une expérience d'ouverture au monde davantage qu'un état mental interne. La phénoménologie apporte quelque chose d'inédit : une éthique de l'attention, qui réforme celle-ci en " vigilance ". (shrink)

This chapter examines the core explanatory strategies of cognitive science and their application to the study of psychopathology. In addition to providing a taxonomy of different strategies, we illustrate their application, with special attention to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. We conclude by considering two challenges to the prospects of a developed cognitive science of psychopathology.

The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content biases (...) that also underlie the reception of ordinary religious concepts. (shrink)

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people (...) are willing to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Cognitive Science combines the interdisciplinary streams of cognitive science into a unified narrative in an all-encompassing introduction to the field. This text presents cognitive science as a discipline in its own right, and teaches students to apply the techniques and theories of the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of methods and tools that cognitive scientists use to study the mind. Thematically organized, rather than by separate disciplines, Cognitive Science (...) underscores the problems and solutions of cognitive science, rather than those of the subjects that contribute to it - psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, etc. The generous use of examples, illustrations, and applications demonstrates how theory is applied to unlock the mysteries of the human mind. Drawing upon cutting-edge research, the text has been updated and enhanced to incorporate new studies and key experiments since the first edition. A new chapter on consciousness has also been added. (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.

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology (...) of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)

Cognitive science has been beset for thirty years by foundational disputes about the nature and extension of cognition—e.g. whether cognition is necessarily representational, whether cognitive processes extend outside the brain or body, and whether plants or microbes have them. Whereas previous philosophical work aimed to settle these disputes, I aim to understand what conception of cognition scientists could share given that they disagree so fundamentally. To this end, I develop a number of variations on traditional conceptual explication, (...) and defend a novel explication of cognition called the sensitive management hypothesis. -/- Since expert judgments about the extension of “cognition” vary so much, I argue that there is value in explication that accurately models the variance in judgments rather than taking sides or treating that variance as noise. I say of explications that accomplish this that they are ecumenically extensionally adequate. Thus, rather than adjudicating whether, say, plants can have cognitive processes like humans, an ecumenically adequate explication should classify these cases differently: human cognitive processes as paradigmatically cognitive, and plant processes as controversially cognitive. -/- I achieve ecumenical adequacy by articulating conceptual explications with parameters, or terms that can be assigned a number of distinct interpretations based on the background commitments of participants in a discourse. For example, an explication might require that cognition cause “behavior,” and imply that plant processes are cognitive or not depending on whether anything plants do can be considered “behavior.” Parameterization provides a unified treatment of embattled concepts by isolating topics of disagreement in a small number of parameters. -/- I incorporate these innovations into an account on which cognition is the “sensitive management of organismal behavior.” The sensitive management hypothesis is ecumenically extensionally adequate, accurately classifying a broad variety of cases as paradigmatically or controversially cognitive phenomena. I also describe an extremely permissive version of the sensitive management hypothesis, arguing that it has the potential to explain several features of cognitive scientific discourse, including various facts about the way cognitive scientists ascribe representations to cognitive systems. (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)

By reconciling the linguistic device and the linguistic person, his book argues for a Vygotskyan cognitive science.

The so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ (Gardner, 1985) in American psychology owed much to developments in adjacent disciplines, especially theoretical linguistics and computer science. Indeed, the cognitive revolution brought forth, not only a change in the conception of psychology, but also an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the mind, involving philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience along with computer science, linguistics and psychology. Many commentators agree in dating the conception of this inter-disciplinary approach, cognitive science, to 11 September 1956, (...) the second day of a symposium on information theory held at MIT (Miller, 2003). Over the next twenty years or so, cognitive science developed an institutional presence through research centres, conferences, journals, and a substantial infusion of funds from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (shrink)

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. McCauley in (...) a*Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not* (2011). These contrasts involve tendentiously narrow or broad definitions of the terms “science” and “religion” and the obliteration of the complex historical and intellectual relations between the ideas and practices currently identified by those terms. (shrink)

The view of embodied cognition believes that cognition is embodied in nature, only the dynamics involved in the interaction between cognitive activities and the nervous system, body and environment, only by closely linking the correct evaluation of time-dependent and relationship, then only can make a correct understanding of cognitive activities. The core concepts of body and environment involved in embodied cognition are different from the body and environment in the usual sense. In terms of research methods, dynamic research (...) methods that are different from traditional computer simulations are also adopted. The article first integrates and analyzes the basic position and general propositions in the discipline, then the embodied cognition are explained based on author's understanding. In addition, the suitability of dynamic research methods, its advantages and disadvantages is analyzed, and finally, a brief summary of the current status of embodied cognition research. (shrink)

The development of modern science has depended strongly on specific features of the cultures involved; however, its results are widely and trans-culturally accepted and applied. The science and technology of electricity provides a particularly interesting example. It emerged as a specific product of post-Renaissance Europe, rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition that encourages explanations of nature in theoretical terms. It did not evolve in China presumably because such encouragement was missing. The trans-cultural acceptance of modern science and (...) technology is postulated to be due, in part, to the common biological dispositions underlying human cognition, with generalizable capabilities of abstract, symbolic and strategic thought. These faculties of the human mind are main prerequisites for dynamic cultural development and differentiation. They appear to have evolved up to a stage of hunters and gatherers perhaps some 100 000 years ago. However, the extent of the correspondence between some constructions of the human mind and the order of nature, as revealed by science, is a late insight of the last centuries. Quantum physics and relativity are particularly impressive examples. (shrink)

I want to make plausible the following claim:Analyzing scientific inquiry as a species of socially distributed cognition has a variety of advantages for science studies, among them the prospects of bringing together philosophy and sociology of science. This is not a particularly novel claim, but one that faces major obstacles. I will retrace some of the major steps that have been made in the pursuit of a distributed cognition approach to science studies, paying special attention to the (...) promise that such an approach holds out for bridging the rift between philosophy and the social studies of science. (shrink)