This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches (...) the motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

In the late summer of 1998, the authors, a cognitive scientist and a logician, started talking about the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, and we have been talking ever since. This book is an interim report of that conversation. It argues that results such as those on the Wason selection task, purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in (...) psychology and cognitive science is completely mistaken. We aim to give the reader a more accurate picture of mathematical logic and, in doing so, hope to show that logic, properly conceived, is still a very helpful tool in cognitive science. The main thrust of the book is therefore constructive. We give a number of examples in which logical theorizing helps in understanding and modeling observed behavior in reasoning tasks, deviations of that behavior in a psychiatric disorder (autism), and even the roots of that behavior in the evolution of the brain. (shrink)

'Representation' is a concept which occurs both in cognitive science and philosophy. It has common features in both settings in that it concerns the explanation of behaviour in terms of the way the subject categorizes and systematizes responses to its environment. The prevailing model sees representations as causally structured entities correlated on the one hand with elements in a natural language and on the other with clearly identifiable items in the world. This leads to an analysis of representation and (...) cognition in terms of formal symbols and their relations. But human perception and cognition use multiple informational constraints and deal with unsystematic and messy input in a way best explained by Parallel Distributed Processing models. This undermines the claim that a formal representational theory of mind is 'the only game in town.' In particular it suggests a radically different model of brain function and its relation to epistemology from that found in current representational theories. (shrink)

In this study, Don Ross explores the relationship of economics to other branches of behavioral science, asking, in the course of his analysis, under what interpretation economics is a sound empirical science. The book explores the relationships between economic theory and the theoretical foundations of related disciplines that are relevant to the day-to-day work of economics -- the cognitive and behavioral sciences. It asks whether the increasingly sophisticated techniques of microeconomic analysis have revealed any deep empirical regularities -- (...) whether technical improvement represents improvement in any other sense. Casting Daniel Dennett and Kenneth Binmore as its intellectual heroes, the book proposes a comprehensive model of economic theory that, Ross argues, does not supplant, but recovers the core neoclassical insights, and counters the caricaturish conception of neoclassicism so derided by advocates of behavioral or evolutionary economics. Because he approaches his topic from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science, Ross devotes one chapter to the philosophical theory and terminology on which his argument depends and another to related philosophical issues. Two chapters provide the theoretical background in economics, one covering developments in neoclassical microeconomics and the other treating behavioral and experimental economics and evolutionary game theory. The three chapters at the heart of the argument then apply theses from the philosophy of cognitive science to foundational problems for economic theory. In these chapters, economists will find a genuinely new way of thinking about the implications of cognitive science for economics, and cognitive scientists will find in economic behavior, a new testing site for the explanations of cognitive science. (shrink)

Abstract Cognitive Science, it is argued, comprises two distinct projects. One is an Engineering project whose goal is understanding the in?the?head computational activities which ground intelligent behaviour. The other is a Descriptive project whose goal is the mapping of relations between thoughts as ascribed using the (sentential) apparatus of the propositional attitudes. Some theorists (e.g. Fodor, 1987) insist that the two projects are (in a sense to be explained) deeply related. This view is contested, and the consequences of its (...) abandonment examined. Such consequences are seen to include (i) the irrelevance of scientific arguments for Eliminative Materialism, (ii) a view concerning the proper roles of classical and connectionist work in Artificial Intelligence and (iii) the failure of an allegedly damning argument against connectionism (the so?called systematicity argument). (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is currently being tried to be used as a probe to unravel the mysteries of consciousness. Present paper deals with this probe, quantum mechanics and its usefulness in getting an insight of working of human consciousness. The formation of quantum mechanics based on certain axioms, its development to study the dynamical behavior and motions of fundamental particles and quantum energy particles moving with the velocity of light, its insistence on wave functions, its probability approach, its dependence on uncertainty (...) principles will all be critically discussed. The result of this discussion will be presented. Its limitations in unraveling the form, function and biological nature of consciousness will be presented. The alternative probe available and being used – the translation of Upanishadic insight and Advaita philosophy into cognitive science elements in delineating the definition, form and function of Consciousness will be given. The usefulness of this modeling and analysis in understanding the consciousness, mind and its functions in cognitive science and theory of human language acquisition and communication will also be presented. The physic-chemical nature of ideas, senses, thoughts, feelings, utterances will be grossly dealt with. The functions of consciousness and mind, in knowledge and language acquisition and communication will be dealt with. (shrink)

Cognitive science depends on abstractions made from the complex reality of human behaviour. Cognitive scientists typically wish the abstractions in their theories to be universals, but seldom attend to the ontology of universals. Two sorts of universal, resulting from Galilean abstraction and materialist abstraction respectively, are available in the philosophical literature: the abstract universal—the one-over-many universal—is the universal conventionally employed by cognitive scientists; in contrast, a concrete universal is a material entity that can appear within the set (...) of entities it describes, of which it represents the essential, paradigmatic case. The potential role of concrete universals in cognitive science is discussed. (shrink)

The computational view of mind rests on certain intuitions regarding the fundamental similarity between computation and cognition. We examine some of these intuitions and suggest that they derive from the fact that computers and human organisms are both physical systems whose behavior is correctly described as being governed by rules acting on symbolic representations. Some of the implications of this view are discussed. It is suggested that a fundamental hypothesis of this approach is that there is a natural domain of (...) human functioning that can be addressed exclusively in terms of a formal symbolic or algorithmic vocabulary or level of analysis. Much of the paper elaborates various conditions that need to be met if a literal view of mental activity as computation is to serve as the basis for explanatory theories. The coherence of such a view depends on there being a principled distinction between functions whose explanation requires that we posit internal representations and those that we can appropriately describe as merely instantiating causal physical or biological laws. In this paper the distinction is empirically grounded in a methodological criterion called the " cognitive impenetrability condition." Functions are said to be cognitively impenetrable if they cannot be influenced by such purely cognitive factors as goals, beliefs, inferences, tacit knowledge, and so on. Such a criterion makes it possible to empirically separate the fixed capacities of mind from the particular representations and algorithms used on specific occasions. In order for computational theories to avoid being ad hoc, they must deal effectively with the "degrees of freedom" problem by constraining the extent to which they can be arbitrarily adjusted post hoc to fit some particular set of observations. This in turn requires that the fixed architectural function and the algorithms be independently validated. It is argued that the architectural assumptions implicit in many contemporary models run afoul of the cognitive impenetrability condition, since the required fixed functions are demonstrably sensitive to tacit knowledge and goals. The paper concludes with some tactical suggestions for the development of computational cognitive theories. (shrink)

Mainstream social psychology focuses on how people characteristically violate norms of action through social misbehaviors such as conformity with false majority judgments, destructive obedience, and failures to help those in need. Likewise, they are seen to violate norms of reasoning through cognitive errors such as misuse of social information, self-enhancement, and an over-readiness to attribute dispositional characteristics. The causes of this negative research emphasis include the apparent informativeness of norm violation, the status of good behavior and judgment as unconfirmable (...) null hypotheses, and the allure of counter-intuitive findings. The shortcomings of this orientation include frequently erroneous imputations of error, findings of mutually contradictory errors, incoherent interpretations of error, an inability to explain the sources of behavioral or cognitive achievement, and the inhibition of generalized theory. Possible remedies include increased attention to the complete range of behavior and judgmental accomplishment, analytic reforms emphasizing effect sizes and Bayesian inference, and a theoretical paradigm able to account for both the sources of accomplishment and of error. A more balanced social psychology would yield not only a more positive view of human nature, but also an improved understanding of the bases of good behavior and accurate judgment, coherent explanations of occasional lapses, and theoretically grounded suggestions for improvement. Key Words: Bayesian inference; biases; normative models; personality; positive psychology; rationality; reasoning; social behavior; social judgment; social psychology. (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)

The essays in this volume are concerned with our everyday and developed scientific systems of explanation of human behavior in terms of beliefs, attitudes,...

This book illustrates the program of Logical-Informational Dynamics. Rational agents exploit the information available in the world in delicate ways, adopt a wide range of epistemic attitudes, and in that process, constantly change the world itself. Logical-Informational Dynamics is about logical systems putting such activities at center stage, focusing on the events by which we acquire information and change attitudes. Its contributions show many current logics of information and change at work, often in multi-agent settings where social behavior is essential, (...) and often stressing Johan van Benthem's pioneering work in establishing this program. However, this is not a Festschrift, but a rich tapestry for a field with a wealth of strands of its own. The reader will see the state of the art in such topics as information update, belief change, preference, learning over time, and strategic interaction in games. Moreover, no tight boundary has been enforced, and some chapters add more general mathematical or philosophical foundations or links to current trends in computer science. (shrink)

Human moral behaviour ranges from vicious cruelty to deep compassion, and any explanation of morality must address how our species is capable of such a range. Darwin argued that any social animal, with sufficient intellectual capacity, would develop morality. In agreement, I argue that human morality is unique in the animal kingdom not because of any particular moral capacity, but because some very abstract cognitive abilities that are unique to our species are layered on top of phylogenetically older emotional (...) instincts for aggression and for empathy. I review research on several components of empathy, intersubjectivity and theory of mind, detailing which of these capacities is uniquely human, and highlighting relevant neuroanatomy for each ability. Finally, I describe our abstract cognitive abilities for recursion and metarepresentation, and argue that these are uniquely human. When these abilities interact with our older social abilities (empathy, intersubjectivity) we are able to reason abstractly about others' mental states and how to affect them. Thus, it is these abstract cognitive capacities that give us the ability to be both cruel and compassionate, but it is our ancient ability for empathy that keeps us moral. Morality is, in a very real sense, a gift from our ancestors. (shrink)

Two studies investigated the development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. In Study 1, infants of 12,15 and 18 months were tested in a standard preferential looking experiment, in which they were shown paired line drawings of typical and scrambled bodies. Results indicated that the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes, while the younger infants did not show differential responding. In Study 2, 12- and 18-month-olds were tested with the (...) same procedure, except that the typical and scrambled body stimuli were photographic images. The results of Study 2 again indicated that only the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes. This finding contrasts sharply with infants' precocious preferences for human faces, suggesting that infants' learning about human faces and human bodies follow different developmental trajectories. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Drawing from ethnographic, empirical, and historical / cultural perspectives, we examine the extent to which visual aspects of music contribute to the communication that takes place between performers and their listeners. First, we introduce a framework for understanding how media and genres shape aural and visual experiences of music. Second, we present case studies of two performances, and describe the relation between visual and aural aspects of performance. Third, we report empirical evidence that visual aspects of performance reliably influence perceptions (...) of musical structure and affective interpretations of music. Finally, we trace new and old media trajectories of aural and visual dimensions of music, and highlight how our conceptions, perceptions and appreciation of music are intertwined with technological innovation and media deployment strategies. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that Hume endorses the claim that causal cognition can be fully explained in terms of nothing but custom and habit. Associative learning does, of course, play a major role in the cognitive psychology of the Treatise. But Hume recognizes that associations cannot provide a complete account of causal thought. If human beings lacked the capacity to reflect on rules for judging causes and effects, then we could not (as we do) distinguish between accidental and genuine (...) regularities, and Hume could not (as he does) carry out his science of human nature. One might reply that what appears to be rule-governed behavior might emerge from associative systems that do not literally employ rules. But this response fails: there is a growing consensus in cognitive science that any adequate account of causal learning must invoke active, controlled cognitive processes. (shrink)

In their article “The Concept of Voluntary Consent,” Robert Nelson and colleagues (2011) argue for two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for voluntary action: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. They propose an instrument to empirically measure voluntariness, the Decision Making Control Instrument. I argue that (1) their conceptual analysis of intentionality and controlling influences needs expansion in light of the growing use of behavioral economics principles to change individual and public health behaviors (growing in part by the designation (...) of “The Science of Behavior Change” as a new National Institutes of Health [NIH] Roadmap Activity); and (2) that their measure of voluntariness that relies on self-perceived intentionality and extent of control is unreliable, given findings from behavioral economics and cognitive science that show that our perceptions about the intentionality and control of our own and others’ decisions and actions are remarkably skewed and un-insightful. (shrink)

Within the perception-action framework, the underlying mechanisms of empathy and its related processes of moral behavior need to be investigated. fMRI studies have shown different frontal cortex activation patterns during automatic processing and judgment tasks when stimuli have moral content. Clinical neuropsychological studies reveal different patterns of empathic alterations after dorsolateral versus orbital frontal cortex damage, related to deficient cognitive and emotional processing. These processing streams represent different neural levels and mechanisms underlying empathy.

Adaptation to right-shifting prisms improves left neglect for mental number line bisection. This study examined whether adaptation affects the mental number line in normal participants. Thirty-six participants completed a mental number line task before and after adaptation to either: left-shifting prisms, right-shifting prisms or control spectacles that did not shift the visual scene. Participants viewed number triplets (e.g. 16, 36, 55) and determined whether the numerical distance was greater on the left or right side of the inner number. Participants demonstrated (...) a leftward bias (i.e. overestimated the length occupied by numbers located on the left side of the number line) that was consistent with the effect of pseudoneglect. The leftward bias was corrected by a short period of visuomotor adaptation to left-shifting prisms, but remained unaffected by adaptation to right-shifting prisms and control spectacles. The findings demonstrate that a simple visuomotor task alters the representation of space on the mental number line in normal participants. (shrink)

The study of coordination, collaboration, and cooperation brings to the fore a number of questions concerning the cognitive status of the various forms of behaviors that are involved. In this article, we will briefly consider coordination, collaboration, and cooperation in terms of their respective time courses and how they relate to such topics as intentionality, consciousness, role perspective, mental models, and mental simulation. Taken together, the study of coordination, collaboration, and cooperation provides a rich area for interaction between the (...) behavioral and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This is a review article of Ross (2005), a book which attempts to show the implications of cognitive science and economics for each other. Ross makes neoclassical economics central to the unification of the behavioural sciences, and defends its fundamental health against its critics. He locates the source of the empirical and conceptual problems besetting neoclassical economics in the mistaken assumption that the economic agents neoclassicism talks about refer directly to real, whole people. Ross argues that people (...) are atypical as economic agents; bugs and other non-social animals are much more typical, and neoclassical economics applies to them in a straightforward way. How then does economics apply to the atypical agents that people are? Ross’s answer builds on Ainslie (2001), who models people as being the result of strategic interactions between successive economic agents, and on Glimcher’s (2003) work on the neuroeconomics of game playing in monkeys which, Ross argues, can be extrapolated to humans. The author is impressed by the boldness of Ross’s vision, and the arguments offered to support it. However, doubts remain about Ross’s theory of the self, the lifespan of the proposed successive economic agents out of which real people are composed, the implicit suggestion that in economics approximations can be overcome, and finally the conclusiveness of Ross’s case against the need for revolutionary reappraisals of neoclassical economics. (shrink)

We argue that if a different definition of sentence complexity is adopted and processing capacity is assessed in a way that is consistent with that definition, then the Caplan & Waters distinction between interpretive versus postinterpretive processing is unnecessary insofar that it applies to the thematic role assignment in relative-clause sentences.

In this paper, I shall argue that both cognitivism and liberal contractualism defend a pre-moral conception of human desire that has its origin in the Hobbesian and Humean tradition that both theories share. Moreover, the computational and syntactic themes in cognitive science support the notion, which Gauthier evidently shares, that the human mind ¿ or, in Gauthier¿s case, the mind of ¿economic man¿ ¿ is a purely formal mechanism, characterized by logical and mathematical operations. I shall conclude that a (...) single conception of human behaviour runs through the various dominant psychological, moral and political theories of analytic inspiration. (shrink)

The dissociations among body representations that Dijkerman & de Haan (D&dH) describe are also supported by developmental evidence. Developmental dissociations among different types of body-related representations suggest distinct functional systems from the start, rather than progressive differentiation.

Questions about the function of consciousness have long been central to discussions of consciousness in philosophy and psychology. Intuitively, consciousness has an important role to play in the control of many everyday behaviors. However, this view has recently come under attack. In particular, it is becoming increasingly common for scientists and philosophers to argue that a significant body of data emerging from cognitive science shows that conscious states are not involved in the control of behavior. According to these theorists, (...) nonconscious states control most everyday behaviors. Andy Clark does an admirable job of summarizing and defending the most important data thought to support this view. In this paper, I argue that the evidence available does not in fact threaten the view that conscious states play an important and intimate role in the control of much everyday behavior. I thereby defend a philosophically intuitive view about the functions of conscious states in action. (shrink)

The paper aims at reconsidering the problem of “practical knowledge” at a proper level of generality, and at showing the role that personal abilities play in it. The notion of “practical knowledge” has for long been the focus of debates both in philosophy and related areas in psychology. It has been wholly captured by debates about ‘knowledge’ and has more recently being challenged in its philosophical foundations as targeting a specific attitude of ‘knowing-how’. But what are the basic facts accounted (...) in the “knowing-how” debate? The problem is much more fundamental than knowledge: it addresses the need for an explanation of intelligent or guided behaviour, that could account for some distinctive aspects involved in the performance, but without positing too much beyond the observable actions. This is what I call the problem of “practical mastery” (PM). PM raises three questions: what kind of behaviour require such an explanation? What is distinctive about practical mastery? What does it consist in: a form of knowledge, or something else? I argue here that the notion of ability offers a less restrictive, though no less powerful answer to these three questions. It can offer an independent objective grasp on the subjects of attribution. I conclude that the notion is central both to account for common-sense psychology and to understand what experimental psychology actually measures and tests for. (shrink)

Religious belief and behavior raises the following two questions: (Q1) Does God, or any other being or state that is integral to various religious traditions, exist? (Q2) Why do humans have religious beliefs and engage in religious behavior? How one answers (Q2) can affect how reasonable individuals can be in accepting a particular answer to (Q1). My aim in this chapter is to carefully distinguish the various ways in which an answer to Q2 might affect the rationality of believing in (...) God. A literature has sprouted around this exact issue, but it has heretofore focused almost exclusively on one way in which a genealogy for p can affect the rationality of believing p – namely, by the genealogy functioning within a debunking argument. However, there are other ways a genealogy can affect the rationality of a belief. I suggest that we should be interested in whether genealogies more broadly cast doubt on religious beliefs. My main goal is: (i) to argue that CSR does not cast doubt on theistic belief in a few of the primary ways that propositions can cast doubt on other propositions, including via a debunking argument; and (ii) to suggest that one plausible way in which CSR might cast doubt on theistic belief is by undermining various traditional theistic reasons, and to illustrate how this might work with one example of a traditional theistic reason – religious experience. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is usually defined as the theory and practice of interpretation. As a discipline it involves a long and complex history, starting with concerns about the proper interpretation of literary, sacred, and legal texts. In the twentieth century, hermeneutics broadens to include the idea that humans are, in Charles Taylor’s phrase, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor, 1985). In contrast to the narrowly prescriptive questions of textual interpretation, philosophical hermeneutics, as developed by thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, raises questions about the conditions (...) of possibility for human understanding — not how we should interpret or understand something, but what interpretation and understanding are and how they work. For the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the hermeneutical disciplines were very different from the disciplines of science, including the newly emerging science of psychology. In contrast to psychology, which, in part, attempts to explain the natural behaviour of human animals in causal terms, Dilthey (1926) thinks of the hermeneutical disciplines as attempting to under- stand the behaviour of human persons in terms of their experience and inner motivation. Inner life is not composed of a series of mechanistic starts and stops, but is woven together into a continuity (Zusammenhang) that has a structure, by.. (shrink)

The cognitive sciences may be understood to contribute to religion-and-science as a metadisciplinary discussion in ways that can be organized according to the three persons of narrative, encoding the themes of consciousness, relationality, and healing. First-person accounts are likely to be important to the understanding of consciousness, the "hard problem" of subjective experience, and contribute to a neurophenomenology of mind, even though we must be aware of their role in human suffering, their epistemic limits, and their indirect causal (...) role in human behavior and subsequent experience. Second-person discussions are important for understanding the empathic and embodied relationality upon which an externalist account of mind is likely to depend, increasingly uncovered and supported by social neuroscience. Third-person accounts can be better understood in uncovering the us/them distinctions that they encode and healing the dangerous tribalisms that put an interdependent and communal world increasingly at risk. (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)

Several philosophers have expressed concerns with some recent uses of the term ‘cognition’. Underlying a number of these concerns are claims that cognition is only located in the brain and that no compelling case has been made to use ‘cognition’ in any way other than as a cause of behavior that is representational in nature. These concerns center on two primary misapprehensions: First, that some adherents of dynamical cognitive science think DCS implies the thesis of extended cognition and the (...) rejection of representation, and second, that cognition is mistakenly equated with behavior. We make three points in response to these claims: First, there is no thoroughly entrenched conception of cognition as distinct from behavior that is being illegitimately disregarded. Second, we present Shapiro’s exposition of dynamical systems theory as revealing a misunderstanding of the way that dynamical models are used in explanations of cognition and related phenomena. Accordingly, a proper conception of DCS’s methods facilitates an appreciation of extended cognition as a legitimate phenomenon of scientific investigation. Finally, we demonstrate that practicing cognitive scientists and psychologists are far more pluralistic in the phenomena they apply ‘cognition’ to than is suggested by some. At the heart of our disagreement with these concerned folks is that although we think it likely that some cognitive phenomena are representational, non-extended, and only in-between the ears, we also think there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to believe that many cognitive phenomena are non-representational, extended, and not confined to the brain. (shrink)

An article by Alexandra Kirsch accepted for publication in Cognitive Processing occasioned debate among reviewers about broad methodological issues in cognitive science. One of these issues is the proper place of Popperian falsificationism in the interdisciplinary cluster. Another is the tension between abstract models and theories that apply to wide classes of cognitive systems, and models of more restricted scope intended to predict specifically human patterns of thought and behavior. The lead editorial in a Commentary debate invited (...) by the journal’s editors considers these issues from the perspective of a pragmatist philosophy of science inspired by Herbert Simon’s classic, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1969) reflections on the blurring of the distinction between science and engineering in cognitive science. (shrink)

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold – the explanation of speciation and adaptation in biology - to new domains. Fascinating pieces of work, the essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to_ Cognition, Evolution and Rationality_ use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioural functions. Cognitive (...) science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays in this collection investigate the workings of the mind through a variety of disciplines including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, game theory, robotics and computational neuroanatomy. Topics covered range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. With contributions from leading experts in the areas involved, this book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitive science. (shrink)

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold – the explanation of speciation and adaptation in biology - to new domains. Fascinating pieces of work, the essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to_ Cognition, Evolution and Rationality_ use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioural functions. Cognitive (...) science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays in this collection investigate the workings of the mind through a variety of disciplines including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, game theory, robotics and computational neuroanatomy. Topics covered range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. With contributions from leading experts in the areas involved, this book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitive science. (shrink)

Classical symbolic computational models of cognition are at variance with the empirical findings in the cognitive psychology of memory and inference. Standard symbolic computers are well suited to remembering arbitrary lists of symbols and performing logical inferences. In contrast, human performance on such tasks is extremely limited. Standard models donot easily capture content addressable memory or context sensitive defeasible inference, which are natural and effortless for people. We argue that Connectionism provides a more natural framework in which to model (...) this behaviour. In addition to capturing the gross human performance profile, Connectionist systems seem well suited to accounting for the systematic patterns of errors observed in the human data. We take these arguments to counter Fodor and Pylyshyn's (1988) recent claim that Connectionism is, in principle, irrelevant to psychology. (shrink)

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, 'impressively atful minds'. Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioural singularities - science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art - that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the (...) basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this book, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford. (shrink)

I offer a novel interpretation of Aristotle's psychology and notion of rationality, which draws the line between animal and specifically human cognition. Aristotle distinguishes belief (doxa), a form of rational cognition, from imagining (phantasia), which is shared with non-rational animals. We are, he says, “immediately affected” by beliefs, but respond to imagining “as if we were looking at a picture.” Aristotle's argument has been misunderstood; my interpretation explains and motivates it. Rationality includes a filter that interrupts the pathways between cognition (...) and behavior. This prevents the subject from responding to certain representations. Stress and damage compromise the filter, making the subject respond indiscriminately, as non-rational animals do. Beliefs are representations that have made it past the filter, which is why they can “affect [us] immediately.” Aristotle's claims express ceteris paribus generalizations, subject to exceptions. No list of provisos could turn them into non-vacuous universal claims, but this does not rob them of their explanatory power. Aristotle's cognitive science resolves a tension we grapple with today: it accounts for the specialness of human action and thinking within a strictly naturalistic framework. The theory is striking in its insight and explanatory power, instructive in its methodological shortcomings. (shrink)

Radical embodied cognitive science tries to understand as much cognition as it can without positing contentful mental entities. Thus, in one prominent formulation, REC claims that content is involved neither in visual perception nor in any more elementary form of cognition. Arguments for REC tend to rely heavily on considerations of ontological parsimony, with authors frequently pointing to the difficulty of explaining content in naturalistically acceptable terms. However, many classic concerns about the difficulty of naturalizing content likewise threaten the (...) credentials of intentionality, which even advocates of REC take to be a fundamental feature of cognition. In particular, concerns about the explanatory role of content and about indeterminacy can be run on accounts of intentionality as well. Issues about explanation can be avoided, intriguingly if uncomfortably, by dramatically reconceptualizing or even renouncing the idea that intentionality can explain. As for indeterminacy, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin point the way toward a response, appropriating an idea from Ruth Millikan. I take it a step further, arguing that attention to the ways that beliefs’ effects on behavior are modulated by background beliefs can help illuminate the facts that underlie their intentionality and content. (shrink)

Cognitive science has wholeheartedly embraced functional brain imaging, but introspective data are still eschewed to the extent that it runs against standard practice to engage in the systematic collection of introspective reports. However, in the case of executive processes associated with prefrontal cortex, imaging has made limited progress, whereas introspective methods have considerable unfulfilled potential. We argue for a re-evaluation of the standard ‘cognitive mapping’ paradigm, emphasizing the use of retrospective reports alongside behavioural and brain imaging techniques. (...) Using all three sources of evidence can compensate for their individual limitations, and so triangulate on higher cognitive processes. (shrink)

Bringing about desirable collisions (making interceptions) and avoiding unwanted collisions are critically important sensorimotor skills, which appear to require us to estimate the time remaining before collision occurs (time-to-collision). Until recently the theoretical approach to understanding time-to-collision estimation has been dominated by the tau-hypothesis, which has its origins in J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. The hypothesis proposes that a quantity (tau), present in the visual stimulus, provides the necessary time-to-collision information. Empirical results and formal analyses have now accumulated to (...) demonstrate conclusively that the tau-hypothesis is false. This article describes an alternative approach that is based on recent data showing that the information used in judging time-to-collision is task- and situation-dependent, is of many different origins (of which tau is just one) and is influenced by the information-processing constraints of the nervous system. (shrink)

Boyer & Petersen lay out a compelling theory for folk-economic beliefs, focusing on beliefs about markets. However, societies also allocate resources through mechanisms involving power and group decision-making, through the political economy. We encourage future work to keep folkpoliticaleconomic beliefs in mind, and sketch an example involving pollution and climate change mitigation policy.

Human behavior can be analyzed using game theory models. Complex games may involve different rules for different players and may allow players to change identity (and therefore, rules) according to complex contingencies. From this perspective, mating behaviors can be viewed as strategic “plays” in a complex “mating game,” with players varying tactics in response to changes in the game's payoff matrix.