Cognitive Science
When people talk about “common ground”, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions. In the language sciences, however, ‘common ground’ also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and... more
When people talk about “common ground”, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions. In the language sciences, however, ‘common ground’ also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and cognition seek to explain that everyday feeling in terms of how isolated individuals “use” language to communicate. Autonomous cognitive agents are said to use words to communicate inner thoughts and experiences; in such a framework, ‘common ground’ describes a body of information that people allegedly share, hold common, and use to reason about how intentions have been made manifest. We object to this view, above all, because it leaves out mechanisms that demonstrably enable people to manage joint activities by doing things together. We present an alternative view of linguistic understanding on which appeal to inner representations is replaced by tracing language to synergetic coordination between biological agents who draw on wordings to act within cultural ecosystems. Crucially, human coordination depends on, not just bodies, but also salient patterns of articulatory movement (‘wordings’). These rich patterns function as non-local resources that, together with concerted bodily (and vocal) activity, serve to organize, regulate and coordinate both attention and the verbal and non-verbal activity that it gives rise to. Since wordings are normative, they can be used to develop skills for making cultural sense of environments and other peoples’ doings. On our view, the technical notion of common ground is an illusion, because appeal to representations blinds theorists to bodily activity and the role of experience. Turning away from how wordings influence the circumstances, skills, and bodily coordination on which interpersonal understanding depends, it makes premature appeal to reasoning and internally represented knowledge. We conclude that outside its vague everyday sense, the concept of common ground is a notion that the language sciences would be well advised to abandon.
Research Interests: Semiotics, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, and 21 moreCommunication, Languages and Linguistics, Social Sciences, Pragmatics, Distributed Cognition, Social Cognition, Theory of Mind, Ecological Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Dynamical Systems Approach to Cognition, Non-representational theories, Representation, Common Ground, Interactivity, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Mind Reading, Distributed Language, and Anti-representationalism
In this paper, I would like to outline and defend Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of the mind-body problem in its Cartesian formulations, while clarifying the implications of some of Chomsky’s methodological remarks. The structure of the paper... more
In this paper, I would like to outline and defend Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of the mind-body problem in its Cartesian formulations, while clarifying the implications of some of Chomsky’s methodological remarks. The structure of the paper will be as follows: I begin by outlining Descartes’ concept of body and its relation to other aspects of the Cartesian system. I then present Chomsky’s dismissal of the mind-body problem based on a rejection of Cartesian mechanics and their replacement with Newtonian notions. My overall discussion adds very little to Chomsky’s, though I attempt to further clarify some rather more technical points of the Cartesian natural philosophy given the latter’s immense importance for any coherent formulation of the mind-body problem. Lastly, I entertain possible objections and examine alternative formulations of the mind-body problem. I conclude that, in light of Chomsky’s remarks, these objections either a) are misguided, b) should simply be understood as plausible hypotheses, or c) have little relevance to scientific inquiry and the problem of unification.
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The gulf between the humanities and the sciences, named "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow in his now-famous lecture and essay of the same name, grows increasingly wide, even as trends in the digital humanities claim to offer hope. A... more
The gulf between the humanities and the sciences, named "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow in his now-famous lecture and essay of the same name, grows increasingly wide, even as trends in the digital humanities claim to offer hope. A complete diagnosis of the problem may be found in a reading of a work of science produced by an acclaimed practitioner of literature: Goethe, in his book, The Metamorphoses of Plants. Via a reading of this work, the divide between the humanities and the sciences is traced back to a more fundamental divide which is essentially bio-philosophical in nature: the divide between the epistemological phenomena of idealism and materialism, which arise in human cognition via the dysfunctions of embodiment, an account which follows the the transcendental materialist ontology laid out by Adrian Johnston in his work on Slavoj Žižek. Armed with this ontology, recent movements within the humanities, notably the evolutionary and cognitive literary theory called for by Jonathan Gottschall and others, can help us begin to approach the perspectives of the sciences while they will perhaps, in good faith, meet us halfway.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Ontology, Philosophy of Science, and 25 morePhilosophy of Biology, Humanities, Digital Humanities, Molecular Biology, Idealism, Literary Criticism, Sociobiology, Embodiment, Science, Biology, Literary Theory, Slavoj Žižek, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Materialism, Biophilosophy, Evolution, Immanuel Kant, Goethe, Goethean Science, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Transcendental Materialism, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Cognitive Criticism, and Biopoetics
ABSTRACT: Buddhism and Cognitive (Neuro)Science: An Uneasy Liaison? The main aim of this article is to shed light on the intricate relationship between Buddhism and science by focusing on what is becoming an increasingly popular area of... more
ABSTRACT: Buddhism and Cognitive (Neuro)Science: An Uneasy Liaison?
The main aim of this article is to shed light on the intricate relationship between Buddhism and science by focusing on what is becoming an increasingly popular area of contact between the two domains, namely the study of consciousness in the field of cognitive (neuro)science. First, three fundamental ways of approaching the relationship between Buddhism and science are outlined: (a) rejection (Buddhism and science are not, and cannot be, compatible); (b) acceptance (Buddhism and science share important commonalities); (c) construction (Buddhism and science are compatible because they have been made compatible in the course of specific historical processes). It is claimed that which of the three stances one takes depends ultimately on how one construes the two parties involved and the nature of their (potential) interaction. To exemplify this, the scope of the discussion is narrowed to the domain of consciousness research and a general overview of some of the main arguments for and against the collaboration between Buddhism and cognitive (neuro)science (“Three Turnings of the Wheel of (Non)Interaction”) is provided. Finally, in light of the tentative results of our analysis, a short reflection of some of the most pertinent presuppositions and entailments of different stances towards Buddhism-science dialogue is laid out, with special emphasis on the distinction between construing Buddhism as “living” versus “dead” tradition.
The main aim of this article is to shed light on the intricate relationship between Buddhism and science by focusing on what is becoming an increasingly popular area of contact between the two domains, namely the study of consciousness in the field of cognitive (neuro)science. First, three fundamental ways of approaching the relationship between Buddhism and science are outlined: (a) rejection (Buddhism and science are not, and cannot be, compatible); (b) acceptance (Buddhism and science share important commonalities); (c) construction (Buddhism and science are compatible because they have been made compatible in the course of specific historical processes). It is claimed that which of the three stances one takes depends ultimately on how one construes the two parties involved and the nature of their (potential) interaction. To exemplify this, the scope of the discussion is narrowed to the domain of consciousness research and a general overview of some of the main arguments for and against the collaboration between Buddhism and cognitive (neuro)science (“Three Turnings of the Wheel of (Non)Interaction”) is provided. Finally, in light of the tentative results of our analysis, a short reflection of some of the most pertinent presuppositions and entailments of different stances towards Buddhism-science dialogue is laid out, with special emphasis on the distinction between construing Buddhism as “living” versus “dead” tradition.
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For this review, I chose an article entitled, Working memory load and distraction: dissociable effects of visual maintenance and cognitive control authored by Nikos Konstantinou, Eleanor Beal, Jean-Remi King and Nilli Lavie. The article... more
For this review, I chose an article entitled, Working memory load and distraction: dissociable effects of visual maintenance and cognitive control authored by Nikos Konstantinou, Eleanor Beal, Jean-Remi King and Nilli Lavie. The article was published on the Journal of Attention, Perception and Psychophysics (2014) and was available online on 2 August 2014 at Springerlink. I was able to locate the article by typing the keyword: ‘psychophysics’ on the ISI list of journals (Thomson-Reuters), and then searched for the open-access articles published by typing the ISSN number of the journal. After browsing through some of the contents, I chose the article entitled above because it is related to my current field of interest, cognitive science – which is also considered to be a vital discipline associated with psychology especially in terms of assessment and research.
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Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne have written a piece, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, called “Disbelief in Belief,” in which they criticize my recent paper “Religious credence is not factual belief” (2014, Cognition 133). Here I... more
Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne have written a piece, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, called “Disbelief in Belief,” in which they criticize my recent paper “Religious credence is not factual belief” (2014, Cognition 133). Here I respond to their criticisms, the thrust of which is that we shouldn’t distinguish religious credence from factual belief, contrary to what I say. I respond that their picture of religious psychology undermines our ability to distinguish common religious people from fanatics. My response will appear in the same issue as their paper.
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology of Religion, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Social Psychology, and 24 moreAnthropology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy Of Religion, Humanities, Atheism, Social Sciences, Theology, Terrorism, Social Cognition, Self-Knowledge, Islamic Studies, Cognitive Science of Religion, Action Theory, Imagination, Attitudes (Social Psychology), Beliefs, Cognitive Sciences, Pretend Play, Beliefs and attitudes, Anthropology of Religion, and Beliefs & Values
Get is a verb with a wide range of uses that are not obviously related to one another and has begun to attract attention from linguists in a broadly generative or formal semantics tradition (Haegemann 1985, Gronemeyer 1999, 2001, Fleisher... more
Get is a verb with a wide range of uses that are not obviously related to one another and has begun to attract attention from linguists in a broadly generative or formal semantics tradition (Haegemann 1985, Gronemeyer 1999, 2001, Fleisher 2006, McIntyre 2005, Manna 2004). Within Cognitive Linguistics there is as yet no comprehensive attempt to understand the meaning of this surprisingly complex verb (but see Hollmann 2003, Lee 20005, Bonnefille 2006). The present paper is an attempt to make progress toward a unified account, but the reader should be forewarned that it also proposes a novel theoretical framework. This framework relies heavily on spatial concepts formalised in informal geometric terms; crucially, the framework integrates foregournding/backgrounding in discourse, temporal viewpoint, modal distance and directionality (see Chilton 2005, 2007 for previous expositions of the model). The fundamental principles of the approach are cognitive: it is proposed that the construction meanings associated with get are a conceptual category revolving around a prototype whose meaning is embodied in an image schema.
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We examine the fan effect in overlapping data sets and logical inference. Three experiments are presented and modeled using the ACT-R cognitive architecture. The results raise issues over the scope of the memories that determine the fan... more
We examine the fan effect in overlapping data sets and logical inference. Three experiments are presented and modeled using the ACT-R cognitive architecture. The results raise issues over the scope of the memories that determine the fan effect and the use of search strategies to retrieve from memory.
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In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction “a sociology of culture and cognition” (which is a specification of the more general schema “a sociology of [X]”) is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of... more
In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction “a sociology of culture and cognition” (which is a specification of the more general schema “a sociology of [X]”) is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of “Primitive Classification” (which I will refer to as the “Comtean schema”) that governs the way in which sociologists conceive of their place in, and engage with other denizens of, the social science landscape. I will also argue that while this style of disciplinary engagement might have worked in the past when it came to dealing with the standard (nineteenth-century) social science disciplines and even some late twentieth-century upstarts, it will not work as a way to engage the now-sprawling post-disciplinary field that I will refer to as “Cognitive Social Science” (CSS). The takeaway point is that if sociologists want to be part of CSS (and it is in their interest to be part of it because this constitutes the future of the behavioral sciences), then they will have to give up the Comtean-schematic thought style.
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In questo contributo, il discorso iniziale sul termine Chaos, in contrapposizione all’Antropos, diventa il filo conduttore del testo emergendo in più punti. Il Chaos, mediato dal pensiero filosofico greco, diventa espressione di un ordine... more
In questo contributo, il discorso iniziale sul termine Chaos, in contrapposizione all’Antropos, diventa il filo conduttore del testo emergendo in più punti. Il Chaos, mediato dal pensiero filosofico greco, diventa espressione di un ordine latente, un elemento che ci rende più interessante l’esistenza. Un primo punto focale dello scritto considera l’esistenza una interminabile costruzione dal semplice al complesso. Questa dichiarazione impone due questioni domande precise: la prima, riferita a come l’uomo elabori il pensiero scientifico, e la seconda circa cosa renda un cervello una mente umana. Viene quindi messa in evidenza l’importanza della relazione sociale poiché la mente è considerata il prodotto dell’interazione
tra processi neurofisiologici ed esperienze interpersonali. Si giunge così al secondo punto cruciale che considera la conoscenza come spinta che pone l’uomo nella condizione di interpretare la propria realtà. La comunicazione porta con sé il problema del linguaggio, della conoscenza e della sua comunicazione. Per Karl Raimund Popper la vita è il processo di conoscenza per antonomasia, il cui scopo è la realizzazione dell’essere vivente in armonia con l’ambiente. Se la realtà emerge come risultato del rapporto dell’individuo con la propria vita emotiva e attiva, affermare la realtà di una cosa equivale a sottolineare il legame personale cognitivamente ed emotivamente stabilito con essa. La nostra esistenza è attraversata da processi che tendono a trasformare le percezioni in esperienza, in un continuo rinnovamento cognitivo Ogni esperienza cognitiva umana coinvolge l’attore in modo del tutto personale perché ciascun individuo è radicato nella struttura biologica che lo esprime. Tuttavia quando,
nel considerare la precarietà della realtà, l’angoscia ci pervade si può contrapporre ad essa l’osservazione della propria interiorità sulla quale esercitare il dominio intellettuale.
tra processi neurofisiologici ed esperienze interpersonali. Si giunge così al secondo punto cruciale che considera la conoscenza come spinta che pone l’uomo nella condizione di interpretare la propria realtà. La comunicazione porta con sé il problema del linguaggio, della conoscenza e della sua comunicazione. Per Karl Raimund Popper la vita è il processo di conoscenza per antonomasia, il cui scopo è la realizzazione dell’essere vivente in armonia con l’ambiente. Se la realtà emerge come risultato del rapporto dell’individuo con la propria vita emotiva e attiva, affermare la realtà di una cosa equivale a sottolineare il legame personale cognitivamente ed emotivamente stabilito con essa. La nostra esistenza è attraversata da processi che tendono a trasformare le percezioni in esperienza, in un continuo rinnovamento cognitivo Ogni esperienza cognitiva umana coinvolge l’attore in modo del tutto personale perché ciascun individuo è radicato nella struttura biologica che lo esprime. Tuttavia quando,
nel considerare la precarietà della realtà, l’angoscia ci pervade si può contrapporre ad essa l’osservazione della propria interiorità sulla quale esercitare il dominio intellettuale.
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This exploration of how the unique susceptibility of the modern human brain to neurodegenerative illnesses appears to be related to that brain’s acquisition of complex cognitive functions is informed by both neuroscientific data and... more
This exploration of how the unique susceptibility of the modern human brain to neurodegenerative illnesses appears to be related to that brain’s acquisition of complex cognitive functions is informed by both neuroscientific data and present understanding of recent human evolution. The near-absence of such pathologies in other extant primates prompts an analysis of the differences between the human and ape brains, which relate both to relative size and structure. Relevant human brain illnesses implicate specific brain areas in these pathologies, such as the frontal cortex, temporal and parietal lobes, limbic system and basal ganglia in illness like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease and others. The expansion of these same areas has also facilitated the advanced cognitive abilities marking the emergence of Homo sapiens. The authors then explore the questions of when, in this process, the brain diseases first established themselves in the genome, and why natural evolutionary processes failed to select against them. Based on the similarly deleterious introduction of gracility in formerly robust human populations, attributed to breeding mate selection becoming influenced by cultural constructs, the hypothesis is proposed that the dramatic rise of culture over the past 40,000 years or so also rendered the toleration of these brain pathologies possible. Just as the modern human has become a fetalized, neotenous form of ape through unintended self-domestication, a similar process also protected unfavorable mutations of recent encephalization, such as demyelination, against natural selection.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuropsychology, and 27 moreArchaeology, Paleoanthropology, Prehistoric Archaeology, Human Evolution, Primatology, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Alzheimer's Disease, Cognition, Parkinson's Disease, Social Cognition, Archaeological Method & Theory, Cognitive Neuropsychology, Brain and Cognitive Development, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration, Neanderthals (Palaeolithic Archaeology), Behavioral Neuroscience, Archeologia, Evolution and Human Behavior, Prehistory, Neurodegenerative Diseases, Prehistoric Archeology, Evolutionary Primatology, Archeologie, Archéologie, and Archeology
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Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence,... more
Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence, based on non-trivial computations. The model presented here suggests that coincidences occur when subjects perceive complexity drops. Co-occurring events are, together, simpler than if considered separately. This model leads to a possible redefini¬tion of subjective probability.