Philosophy of Cognitive Science

In the New York Times, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that "Psychology is Not in Crisis." She is responding to the results of a large-scale initiative called the Reproducibility Project, published in Science magazine, which appeared to show that the findings from over 60 percent of a sample of 100 psychology studies did not hold up when independent labs attempted to replicate them. She argues that "the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works." But she's making a pretty big assumption here, which is that the studies we're interested in are "well-designed" and "carefully run." A major reason for the so-called "crisis" in psychology, however, is the fact that a very large number of not-well-designed, and not-carefully-run studies have been making it through peer review for decades.

The main claim of this paper is that Andy Clark’s most influential argument for ‘the extended mind thesis’ (EM henceforth) fails. Clark’s argument for EM assumes that a certain form of common-sense functionalism is true. I argue, contra Clark, that the assumed brand of common-sense functionalism does not imply EM. Clark’s argument also relies on an unspoken, undefended and optional assumption about the nature of mental kinds – an assumption denied by the very common-sense functionalists on whom Clark’s argument draws. I also critique Mark Sprevak’s reductio of Clark’s argument. Sprevak contends that Clark’s argument does not merely entail EM; it entails an extended mind thesis so strong as to be absurd. He goes on to claim that Clark’s argument should properly be viewed as a reductio of the very common-sense functionalism on which it depends. Sprevak’s argument shares the flaw that afflicts Clark’s argument, or so I claim.

A key component of scientific inquiry, especially inquiry devoted to developing mechanistic explanations, is delineating the phenomenon to be explained. The task of delineating phenomena, however, has not been sufficiently analyzed, even by the new mechanistic philosophers of science. We contend that Marr’s characterization of what he called the computational level (CL) provides a valuable resource for understanding what is involved in delineating phenomena. Unfortunately, the distinctive feature of Marr’s computational level, his dual emphasis on both what is computed and why it is computed, has not been appreciated in philosophical discussions of Marr. Accordingly we offer a distinctive account of CL. This then allows us to develop two important points about delineating phenomena. First, the accounts of phenomena that figure in explanatory practice are typically not qualitative but precise, formal or mathematical, representations. Second, delineating phenomena requires consideration of the demands the environment places on the mechanism—identifying, as Marr put it, the basis of the computed function in the world. As valuable as Marr’s account of CL is in characterizing phenomena, we contend that ultimately he did not go far enough. Determining the relevant demands of the environment on the mechanism often requires detailed empirical investigation. Moreover, often phenomena are reconstituted in the course of inquiry on the mechanism itself.

Two intellectual vices seem to always tempt us: arrogance and diffidence. Regarding the former, the world is permeated by dogmatism and table-thumping close-mindedness. From politics, to religion, to simple matters of taste, zealots and ideologues all too often define our disagreements, often making debate and dialogue completely intractable. But to the other extreme, given a world with so much pluralism and heated disagreement, intellectual apathy and a prevailing agnosticism can be simply all too alluring. So the need for intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and a careful, humble commitment to the truth are apparent. In this book, Dr Church and Dr Samuelson explicate a robust and vibrant account of the philosophy and science of this most valuable virtue, and they highlight how it can be best applied and personally developed.

Philosophers have always tried to provide a suitable explanation of what concepts are. Most neo-Fregean philosophers identify concepts with abilities peculiar to cognitive agents. Defenders of the psychological view, in contrast, identify concepts with
token representations located in the head. In this paper, I argue that concepts should be understood neither in terms of mental representations nor in terms of abilities. Concepts, I
argue, are objective entities whose fundamental property is to be normative. Accordingly, I will suggest that the best way to understand what concepts are is to identify them with
abstract rules. To support this, I will follow a Kantian conception of concepts. However, unlike some recent Kantian approaches to concepts, I will provide an alternative explanation of the cognitive relationship between concepts and natural creatures. In doing so, a naturalized approach to the normativity of concepts will be proposed.

Kenneth Hammond introduced a distinction between coherence and correspondence criteria of rationality as a tool in the study of judgment and decision-making. This distinction has been widely used in the field. Yet, as this paper seeks to show, the relevant notions of coherence and correspondence have been progressively considered to be too narrow and have undergone non-trivial conceptual changes since their original introduction. I try to show, first, that the proliferation of conceptualizations of coherence and correspondence has created confusion in the literature and that appealing to such notions has not helped to elucidate discussions over the nature of rational judgment and decision-making. Nevertheless, I also argue for a reframing of the debate. In fact, what seems to underlie several contemporary appeals to the notions of coherence and correspondence is best explained in terms of a contrast between what I call rule-based and goal-based rationality. Whilst these categories do need further refinement, they do seem to be useful for organizing and understanding research on rational judgment and decision-making.

During the early 1970s, science began to change as did the cultural outlook in America and the west. Science had always been extremely objective and rigid. The word intuition was not well accepted as a way of conducting or thinking about science. W.I.B. Beveridge went against the grain and wrote a book titled The Art of Scientific Investigation in 1950 that began to elevate science to an art form based on intuition as much as a strictly philosophical endeavor based on logic. Yet by the early 1960s, a new television program called Star Trek still epitomized science as a completely logical philosophical study in the person of a character named Spock, the ultimate scientist, totally devoid of anything to do with emotion, spirituality, mystical thought and intuition. Yet cultural and scientific thought had begun to loosen and change. The space program of the 1960s opened our imaginations to new possibilities while political situations in China and the Far East, including a war in Vietnam, opened the door in western culture to new ways of thought and brought home new ideas from the Far East, especially to America.
These were accompanied by philosophical changes in science itself. Einstein had died in 1955 and with his death a whole line of research that tried to unify the quantum and relativity all but ended. Yet new advances in quantum theory changed physicists’ perspectives on the concept of unification and philosophical changes in quantum theory itself started to appear. The idea that consciousness collapses the wave function and creates reality began to take hold and the twin concepts of mind and consciousness, with all of their non-logical aspects, began to reappear in science as something important that had to be accounted for. Words like holistic and holism began to surface in science and science began to reshape itself in a form not quite as logically reductionist as it had been before. By 1975, several books comparing science to mystical thought had appeared, but none was a popular as Fritjof Capra’s "The Tao of Physics", except perhaps Lawrence LeShan’s "The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist", both of which exposed scientists and non-scientists alike to new ways of thinking. And science has not been the same since.
This particular essay was written for a 1977 class at San Francisco State University, Beyond the Mechanistic World View, taught by Capra. The assignment was to make comparisons in other academic disciplines similar to that made by Capra between modern physics and eastern mysticism. Having just returned to America from a two and a half year trip around the world, I was interested in languages and how they represented differences in human thought. So I made a comparison between the development of language in a person and how language affected worldview, mysticism and modern physics, which has influenced the development of my own worldview in science ever since. This paper represents a slight revision of the original paper, but only in the wording and not the original content or arguments made within the text.

The aim of the talk is to sort out different views of embodiment proposed by phenomenologists.  The pertinent criterion for sorting these views would be whether and to what extent they provide an internalist-friendly or shallow story of embodiment, i.e., only describing the experience of the body, which may in fact be realized entirely intra-cranially, without countenancing a deep, constitutive involvement of physical and biological features of the body in shaping mental life.  I suggest claims about spatial orientation and kinesthesia (as found, e.g., in Husserl and Sartre) only support a shallow, internalist-compatible view, whereas claims about the prepersonal elements and synergistic dynamics of mental life (as found, e.g., in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas) lean in the direction of a deeper view of embodiment.

To what extent do factors such as upbringing and education shape our philosophical views? And if they do, does this cast doubt on the philosophical results we have obtained? This paper investigates irrelevant influences in philosophy through a qualitative survey on the personal beliefs and attitudes of philosophers of religion. In the light of these findings, I address two questions: an empirical one (whether philosophers of religion are influenced by irrelevant factors in forming their philosophical attitudes), and an epistemological one (whether the influence of irrelevant factors on our philosophical views should worry us). The answer to the empirical question is a confident yes, to the epistemological question, a tentative yes.

The Symposium “Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Cognition” aims at creating a common ground of discussion between scholars whose work is at the intersection between Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. After decades of mutual and pioneering collaboration, in the last years joint efforts between these fields have significantly de- creased. Both Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science have produced several sub-disciplines, each one with its own goals, methods and criteria for evaluation. The aim of this symposium is in pointing out how a stronger collaboration is still needed in order to contribute to the development of artificial systems endowed with human-level intelligence.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the analysis of human groups as distributed cognitive systems, and to examine the related question of whether socially distributed cognition (SDC) amounts to group level cognition. In my discussion, I first break down the complex notion of SDC into a ‘joint’, a ‘distributive’, and a ‘shared’ aspect. Then, I highlight organization-dependence, novelty, and autonomy as central features associated with the ‘emergent’ qualities of SDC. Finally, I survey six theoretical ‘stances’ that have been invoked to identify the presence of cognitive organization at the group level, and thus bridge the suggested inferential gap between SDC and group cognition: (i) the ‘social parity’ stance, (ii) the intentional stance, (iii) the information processing stance, (iv) the computational stance, (v) the ecological stance, and (vi) the dynamical stance.