In recent years there has been some hard-won but still limited agreement that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences. This realization comes in the wake of dismissive gestures made by philosophers of mind who mistakenly associate phenomenological method with untrained psychological introspection (e.g., Dennett 1991). For very different reasons, resistance is also found on the phenomenological side of this issue. There are many thinkers well versed in the Husserlian tradition who are not (...) willing to consider the validity of a naturalistic science of mind. For them cognitive science is too computational or too reductionistic to be seriously considered as capable of explaining experience or consciousness. In some cases, when phenomenologists have seriously engaged the project of the cognitive sciences, rather than pursing a positive rapprochement with this project, they have been satisfied in drawing critical lines that identify its limitations.On the one hand, such negative attitudes are understandable from the perspective of the Husserlian rejection of naturalism, or from strong emphasis on the transcendental current in phenomenology. (shrink)

Beller, Bender, and Medin question the necessity of including social anthropology within the cognitive sciences. We argue that there is great scope for fruitful rapprochement while agreeing that there are obstacles (even if we might wish to debate some of those specifically identified by Beller and colleagues). We frame the general problem differently, however: not in terms of the problem of reconciling disciplines and research cultures, but rather in terms of the prospects for collaborative deployment of expertise (methodological (...) and theoretical) in problem-driven research. For the purposes of illustration, our focus in this article is on the evolution of cooperation. (shrink)

The Sphex story is an anecdote about a female digger wasp that at first sight seems to act quite intelligently, but subsequently is shown to be a mere automaton that can be made to repeat herself endlessly. Dennett and Hofstadter made this story well known and widely influential within the cognitive sciences, where it is regularly used as evidence that insect behavior is highly rigid. The present paper discusses the origin and subsequent empirical investigation of the repetition reported (...) in the Sphex story. The repetition was first observed by Henri Fabre in 1879, and the last empirical study I found was published in 1985. In contrast to the story's clear message, the actual results have always been equivocal: the endless repetition is not standard. In addition, this repetition itself has become a minor aside in the literature on digger wasps when put in the perspective of many other examples of adaptiveness and flexibility. Nevertheless, the story and its message have to this day persevered within the cognitive sciences. For some reason, the counterevidence has been neglected time and again. The paper closes by presenting two different but compatible hypotheses that could explain why humans keep repeating this particular anecdote. (shrink)

e argue that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences, and that it can also learn from the empirical research conducted in those sciences. We discuss the project of naturalizing phenomenology and how this can be best accomplished. We provide several examples of how phenomenology and the cognitive sciences can integrate their research. Specifically, we consider issues related to embodied cognition and intersubjectivity. We provide a detailed analysis of issues related (...) to time-consciousness, with reference to understanding schizophrenia and the loss of the sense of agency. We offer a positive proposal to address these issues based on a neurobiological dynamic-systems model. (shrink)

This article reviews some of the ways in which philosophical problems concerning music can be informed by approaches from the cognitive sciences (principally psychology and neuroscience). Focusing on the issues of musical expressiveness and the arousal of emotions by music, the key philosophical problems and their alternative solutions are outlined. There is room for optimism that while current experimental data does not always unambiguously satisfy philosophical scrutiny, it can potentially support one theory over another, and in some cases (...) allow us to synthesize or reject traditional philosophical differences. (shrink)

There are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations (...) that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an ?affordance? and ?scaffolding? as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously. (shrink)

Mistakes can be made in both personal and official accounts of past events: lies can be told. Stories about the past have many functions besides truth-telling: but we still care deeply that our sense of what happened should be accurate. The possibility of error in memory and in history implies a commonsense realism about the past. Truth in memory is a problem because, coupled with our desires to find out what really happened, we recognize that our individual and collective access (...) to past events may be indirect. This chapter sketches some approaches, from across the disciplines, to such problems about authority over the past. I open up recent lines of research on autobiographical memory which should be more accessible in the humanities and social sciences. Psychological work on constructive remembering should not be seen as sceptically challenging the very possibility of everyday authority over our own past, but as identifying specific forms of fallibility. I argue that the study of historical and social processes is an integral part of the cognitive sciences of memory, not a humanistic curiosity. (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)

Case studies in the psychophysics, modeling and localization of human vision are presented as an example of “hands-on” philosophy of the cognitive sciences. These studies also yield important results for familiar problems in philosophy of mind: the explanatory gap surrounding phenomenological feels is not closed by the kinds of investigations surveyed. However, the science is able to explain some sorts of phenomenological facts, such as why the human color space takes the form of the Munsell color solid, or (...) why there is a phenomenologically-pure yellow but not a phenomenologically-pure orange. (shrink)

According to cognitive science of religion (CSR) people naturally veer toward beliefs that are quite divergent from Anselmian monotheism or Christian theism. Some authors have taken this view as a starting point for a debunking argument against religion, while others have tried to vindicate Christian theism by appeal to the noetic effects of sin or the Fall. In this paper, we ask what theologians can learn from CSR about the nature of the divine, by looking at the CSR literature (...) and what it identifies as commonalities across religions. We use a pluralist, non-confessional approach to outline properties of the divine. We connect our approach to Hick’s religious pluralism, Ramakrishna’s realization of God through multiple spiritual paths, and Gellman’s inexhaustible plenitude. (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)

(1994). Identity and autonomy of psychology in cognitive sciences: Some remarks from language processing and knowledge representation. World Futures: Vol. 42, No. 1-2, pp. 71-78.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a highly complex and rich phenomena, and this has a number of important clinical, theoretical and methodological implications. However, until recently, this fact has not always been incorporated into the experimental designs and theoretical paradigms used by researchers within the cognitive sciences. In this paper, we will briefly outline two recent examples of phenomenologically informed approaches to the study of AVHs taken from a cognitive science perspective. In the first example, based on (...) Larøi and Woodward (Harv Rev Psychiatry 15:109–117, 2007 ), it is argued that reality monitoring studies examining the cognitive underpinnings of hallucinations have not reflected the phenomenological complexity of AVHs in their experimental designs and theoretical framework. The second example, based on Jones (Schizophr Bull, in press, 2010 ), involves a critical examination of the phenomenology of AVHs in the context of two other prominent cognitive models: inner speech and intrusions from memory. It will be shown that, for both examples, the integration of a phenomenological analysis provides important improvements both on a methodological, theoretical and clinical level. This will be followed by insights and critiques from philosophy and clinical psychiatry—both of which offer a phenomenological alternative to the empiricist–rationalist conceptualisation of AVHs inherent to the cognitive sciences approach. Finally, the paper will conclude with ideas as to how the cognitive sciences may integrate these latter perspectives into their methodological and theoretical programmes. (shrink)

Modern linguistics has highlighted the fundamental invariance of human language: A rich invariant structure has emerged from comparative studies nourished by sophisticated formal models; languages also differ along important dimensions, but variation is constrained in severe and systematic ways. I illustrate this research direction in the domains of island constraints, word order restrictions, and the expression of referential dependencies. Both language invariance and language variability within systematic limits are highly relevant for the cognitive sciences.

This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgments that drive them. Instead, cognition is reinterpreted and developed as a scientific concept that is tied to a material domain of research. In this (...) reading, cognition becomes a changeable theoretical concept that can and must be adapted to the findings within this target domain. Taking humans as the best-established existing example of the relevant material target domain, this central case is extended to include all living systems. To clarify what it is about living systems that warrants their role as cognitive target domain, the new concept of cobolism is introduced as a complement to metabolism. Cobolism refers to the systematic ways in which each living system encompasses structures, processes and external events that maintain the fundamental metabolic processes that constitute the core of each living system. Cobolism is perfectly general, applies to bacterial and human cases alike, and provides a general format to describe wildly different cognitive organizations. It provides a clear target for the cognitive sciences to work on, turning them into what we can call the cognitive life sciences. (shrink)

The probabilistic analysis of functional questions is maturing into a rigorous and coherent research paradigm that may unify the cognitive sciences, from the study of single neurons in the brain to the study of high level cognitive processes and distributed cognition. Endless debates about undecidable structural issues (modularity vs. interactivity, serial vs. parallel processing, iconic vs. propositional representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models) may be put aside in favor of a rigorous understanding of the problems solved by organisms (...) in their natural environments. [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths]. (shrink)

This book demonstrates for the first time how the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein can transform 4E Cognitive Science. In particular, it shows how insights from Wittgenstein can empower those within 4E to reject the long held view that our minds must involve representations inside our heads. The book begins by showing how proponents of 4E are divided amongst themselves. Proponents of Extended Mind insist that internal representations are always needed to explain the human mind. However, proponents of Enacted Mind (...) reject this claim. Using insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the book introduces and defends a new theoretical framework called Structural Enacted or Extended Mins (STEEM). (shrink)

An introductory text on cognitive science from an interdisciplinary perspective. Containing chapters on philosophy, psychology, cognition, neuroscience, the network and evolutionary approaches. Covers theories and models of mind looking at all major information processing categories: perception, attention, language, emotions, social, and artificial intelligence.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.

Bayesian cognitive science is a research programme that relies on modelling resources from Bayesian statistics for studying and understanding mind, brain, and behaviour. Conceiving of mental capacities as computing solutions to inductive problems, Bayesian cognitive scientists develop probabilistic models of mental capacities and evaluate their adequacy based on behavioural and neural data generated by humans (or other cognitive agents) performing a pertinent task. The overarching goal is to identify the mathematical principles, algorithmic procedures, and causal mechanisms that (...) enable cognitive agents to take uncertainty into account and weigh it appropriately in producing adaptive behaviour. -/- The appeal of Bayesian cognitive science derives from its transparency, normativity, and unifying power. Resources from Bayesian statistics allow cognitive scientists to characterise transparently, in terms of random variables and probabilistic dependencies between them, the inductive problems that many mental capacities are presumed to solve. Given this characterisation, researchers can define an upper bound on one’s performance on that problem and use it as a benchmark for interpreting experimental results, formulating hypotheses about why and when deviations from optimal performance should be expected, and seeking explanations of mental capacities within one encompassing theoretical framework. -/- Although critics question the testability, explanatory power, and plausibility of Bayesian models of mental capacities, Bayesian cognitive science has proved itself to be an incredibly fruitful research programme. Fuelled by empirical and theoretical results from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and evolution, Bayesian cognitive science has: advanced our understanding of why cognitive systems should keep track of uncertainty and use it to facilitate adaptive behaviour; clarified how the brain might encode information about the uncertainty of its stimuli and perform computations with probability distributions; and crystallised the insight that cognitive agents’ management of uncertainty might be grounded in predictive processes aimed at avoiding surprising exchanges with the environment. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 634-645, July 2022.

Cognitive science has been traditionally organized around the individual as the basic unit of cognition. Despite developments in areas such as communication, human–machine interaction, group behavior, and community organization, the individual-centric approach heavily dominates both cognitive research and its application. A promising direction for cognitive science is the study of augmented intelligence, or the way social and technological systems interact with and extend individual cognition. The cognitive science of augmented intelligence holds promise in helping society tackle (...) major real-world challenges that can only be discovered and solved by teams made of individuals and machines with complementary skills who can productively collaborate with each other. (shrink)

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)

It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the (...) phenomenon to be explained, the kind of unification afforded by the Bayesian framework to cognitive science does not necessarily reveal aspects of a mechanism. Bayesian unification, nonetheless, can place fruitful constraints on causal–mechanical explanation. 1 Introduction2 What a Great Many Phenomena Bayesian Decision Theory Can Model3 The Case of Information Integration4 How Do Bayesian Models Unify?5 Bayesian Unification: What Constraints Are There on Mechanistic Explanation?5.1 Unification constrains mechanism discovery5.2 Unification constrains the identification of relevant mechanistic factors5.3 Unification constrains confirmation of competitive mechanistic models6 ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

The rise of cognitive neuroscience is the most important scientific and intellectual development of the last thirty years. Findings pour forth, and major initiatives for brain research continue. The social sciences have responded to this development slowly--for good reasons. The implications of particular controversial findings, such as the discovery of mirror neurons, have been ambiguous, controversial within neuroscience itself, and difficult to integrate with conventional social science. Yet many of these findings, such as those of experimental neuro-economics, pose (...) very direct challenges to standard social science. At the same time, however, the known facts of social science, for example about linguistic and moral diversity, pose a significant challenge to standard neuroscience approaches, which tend to focus on "universal" aspects of human and animal cognition. A serious encounter between cognitive neuroscience and social science is likely to be challenging, and transformative, for both parties. Although a literature has developed on proposals to integrate neuroscience and social science, these proposals go in divergent directions. None of them has a developed conception of social life. This book surveys these issues, introduces the basic alternative conceptions both of the mental world and the social world, and show how, with sufficient modification, they can be fit together in plausible ways. The book is not a "new theory " of anything, but rather an exploration of the critical issues that relate to the social aspects of cognition which expands the topic from the social neuroscience of immediate interpersonal interaction to the whole range of places where social variation interacts with the cognitive. The focus is on the conceptual problems produced by any attempt to take these issues seriously, and also on the new resources and considerations relevant to doing so. But it is also on the need for a revision of social theoretical concepts in order to utilize these resources. The book points to some conclusions, especially about how the process of what was known as socialization needs to be understood in cognitive science friendly terms. But there is no attempt to resolve the underlying issues within cognitive science, which will doubtless persist. (shrink)

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

Husserl’s phenomenology was particularly influential for a number of French philosophers and their theories. Two of the most prominent French thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned to the instruments offered by phenomenology in their attempts to understand the notions of the body, consciousness, imagination, human being, world and many others. Both philosophers also provided their definitions of perception, but they understood this notion in very different ways. The paper describes selected aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that were adopted by Sartre (...) and Merleau-Ponty and depicts the presumptions of their respective theories of perception, as well as the differences between them. The main thesis presented here is that theories as different as those proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty may, and indeed do, lead to the same conclusion, i.e. that perception represents a different form of cognition. Despite the differences between these theories, they can both be placed in the contemporary context of phenomenological research carried out by cognitive philosophers Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, as well as by the proponent of the enactive theory of perception, Alva Noë. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the possibility of giving a justification of the “semantic information” content and measure, in the framework of the recent coalgebraic approach to quantum systems and quantum computation, extended to QFT systems. In QFT, indeed, any quantum system has to be considered as an “open” system, because it is always interacting with the background fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. Namely, the Hamiltonian in QFT always includes the quantum system and its inseparable thermal bath, formally “entangled” like (...) an algebra with its coalgebra, according to the principle of the “doubling” of the degrees of freedom between them. This is the core of the representation theory of cognitive neuroscience based on QFT. Moreover, in QFT, the probabilities of the quantum states follow a Wigner distribution, based on the notion and measure of quasiprobability, where regions integrated under given expectation values do not represent mutually exclusive states. This means that a computing agent, either natural or artificial, in QFT, against the quantum Turing machine paradigm, is able to change dynamically the representation space of its computations. This depends on the possibility of interpreting QFT system computations within the framework of category theory logic and its principle of duality between opposed categories, such as the algebra and coalgebra categories of QFT. This allows us to justify and not only to suppose, like in the “theory of strong semantic information” of L. Floridi, the definition of modal “local truth” and the notion of semantic information as a measure of it, despite both measures being defined on quasiprobability distributions. (shrink)

Núñez et al (2019) argue (1) that the field of Cognitive Science has failed, in that it has not arrived at a cohesive theory, and (2) that this is contrary to the intentions of the founders. Their survey of publication and citation patterns bears out the lack of a cohesive theory and also provides corroboration for (3) the concern that the field is becoming unbalanced, with psychology overweighted (Gentner, 2010). I will argue against points (1) and (2), but agree (...) with point (3). My central claim is that cognitive science was never meant to have one unified theoretical framework, nor should it have. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author considers a line of thought in Arthur Danto in that regard about the bearing of cognitive science on our construal of changes in art. For Danto, a key to the issue of how to understand change in art forms and artistic identities is found in his fundamental notion that both the meaning and the style of a work of art are historically indexed; that is, they depend on historical conditions. Danto's skepticism about facile changes (...) in world views is born out of his theory that the history of such changes has certain logic, defined over basic or fundamental forms of action and thought; a view that applies as much to science as it does to art. The author's claim has been that recent research shows that, logical deductions aside, advances in cognitive science suggest that the language of art criticism will have to change. (shrink)

Cognitive science continues to make a compelling case for having a coherent, unique, and fundamental subject of inquiry: What is the nature of minds, where do they come from, and how do they work? Central to this inquiry is the notion of agents that have goals, one of which is their own persistence, who use dynamically constructed knowledge to act in the world to achieve those goals. An agentive perspective explains why a special class of systems have a cluster (...) of co‐occurring capacities that enable them to exhibit adaptive behavior in a complex environment: perception, attention, memory, representation, planning, and communication. As an intellectual endeavor, cognitive science may not have achieved a hard core of uncontested assumptions that Lakatos (1978) identifies as emblematic of a successful research program, but there are alternative conceptions according to which cognitive science has been successful. First, challenges of the early, core tenet of “Mind as Computation” have helped put cognitive science on a stronger foundation—one that incorporates relations between minds and their environments. Second, even if a full cross‐disciplinary theoretic consensus is elusive, cognitive science can inspire distant, deep, and transformative connections between pairs of fields. To be intellectually vital, cognitive science need not resemble a traditional discipline with its associated insularity and unchallenged assumptions. Instead, there is strength and resilience in the diverse perspectives and methods that cognitive science assembles together. This interdisciplinary enterprise is fragile and perhaps inherently unstable, as the looming absorption of cognitive science into psychology shows. Still, for many researchers, the excitement and benefits of triangulating on the nature of minds by integrating diverse cases cannot be secured by a stable discipline with an uncontested core of assumptions. (shrink)

This paper considers some issues for traditional and radical views of the semantic content of utterances. It suggests that, as the radical view denies that linguistic meaning solely determines explicit content, it is required to come up with an alternative account of content. We focus on cognitively oriented radical theories and argue that none of the current alternatives for delimiting content is adequate. An alternative radical account of content is sketched. We also consider Stanley’s (2000) binding argument in support of (...) the traditional view and suggest that it fails as it is based on an overly strong conception of binding in natural language. (shrink)

The function and legitimacy of values in decision making is a critically important issue in the contemporary analysis of science. It is particularly relevant for some of the more application-oriented areas of science, specifically decision-oriented science in the field of regulation of technological risks. Our main objective in this paper is to assess the diversity of roles that non-cognitive values related to decision making can adopt in the kinds of scientific activity that underlie risk regulation. We start out, first, (...) by analyzing the issue of values with the help of a framework taken from the wider philosophical debate on science and values. Second, we study the principal conceptualizations used by scholars who have applied them to numerous case studies. Third, we appraise the links between those conceptualizations and learning processes in decision-oriented science. In this, we recur to the concept of methodological learning, i.e., learning about the best methodologies for generating knowledge that is useful for science-based regulatory decisions. The main result of our analysis is that non-cognitive values can contribute to methodological improvements in science in three principal ways: as basis for critical analysis, for contextualizing methodologies, and for establishing the burden of proof. (shrink)

© 2006 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s overemphasis (...) on cognition to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists (including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Fanon), I channel this tension in 4E cognitive science into a dancing partnership with human science psychology, suggesting three “choreographic provocations” for therapeutic practice and psychological research, namely (1) treating clients/subjects as dancers, (2) reimagining research and therapy as improvised duets between practitioners and clients/subjects, and (3) pursuing an ideal of freer movement and an emergent flourishing singularity for clients/subjects. Finally, I reformulate these three choreographic provocations in terms of my new theoretical method of “dancing-with,” as well as the four psychological prerequisites for flourishing posited by my figuration philosophy of dance. (shrink)

Many philosophers insist that the revisionary metaphysician—i.e., the metaphysician who offers a metaphysical theory which conflicts with folk intuitions—bears a special burden to explain why certain folk intuitions are mistaken. I show how evidence from cognitive science can help revisionist discharge this explanatory burden. Focusing on composition and persistence, I argue that empirical evidence indicates that the folk operate with a promiscuous teleomentalist view of composition and persistence. The folk view, I argue, deserves to be debunked. In this way, (...) I take myself to have illustrated one key role cognitive science can play in metaphysics; namely by helping the revisionary metaphysician discharge the explanatory burden of providing a plausible explanation of how the folk have gone wrong. (shrink)

This paper supports the view that the ongoing shift from orthodox to embodied-embedded cognitive science has been significantly influenced by the experimental results generated by AI research. Recently, there has also been a noticeable shift toward enactivism, a paradigm which radicalizes the embodied-embedded approach by placing autonomous agency and lived subjectivity at the heart of cognitive science. Some first steps toward a clarification of the relationship of AI to this further shift are outlined. It is concluded that the (...) success of enactivism in establishing itself as a mainstream cognitive science research program will depend less on progress made in AI research and more on the development of a phenomenological pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper considers some issues for traditional and radical views of the semantic content of utterances. It suggests that, as the radical view denies that linguistic meaning solely determines explicit content, it is required to come up with an alternative account of content. We focus on cognitively oriented radical theories and argue that none of the current alternatives for delimiting content is adequate. An alternative radical account of content is sketched. We also consider Stanley's (2000) binding argument in support of (...) the traditional view and suggest that it fails as it is based on an overly strong conception of binding in natural language. (shrink)

Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Despite the great variation in theories a number of common features can be distilled and most theories can be situated in the cognitivist and modular paradigm. In this paper, I investigate how cognitive science of religion (CSR) can be made better by insights from John Dewey. I chose Dewey because he offered important insights in cognition long before (...) there was cognitive science and because his ideas are influential in the recent enactivist movement. The relevance of Dewey’s thought for CSR will be discussed under three headers: embodiedness, embeddedness and anti-modularity. I focus on these points because embodiedness and embeddedness are important features of Dewey’s view on cognition and because his ideas are useful for criticizing modularity. I will first give a brief overview of the most influential theories in CSR. Then I will discuss how existing theories in CSR can be improved on the first two points and criticized on the third. (shrink)