Can Contemporary Cognitive Science Coherently Accommodate Itself

Nous, 2019

The distinction between perception and cognition has always had a firm footing in both cognitive science and folk psychology. However, there is little agreement as to how the distinction should be drawn. In fact, a number of theorists have recently argued that, given the ubiquity of top-down influences (at all levels of the processing hierarchy), we should jettison the distinction altogether. I reject this approach, and defend a pluralist account of the distinction. At the heart of my account is the claim that each legitimate way of marking a border between perception and cognition deploys a notion I call 'stimulus-control.' Thus, rather than being a grab bag of unrelated kinds, the various categories of the perceptual are unified into a superordi-nate natural kind (mutatis mutandis for the complimentary categories of the cognitive).

1997

This thesis reviews current progress in cognitive science towards satisfying the naturalistic imperative. Caref ul attention is paid to distinguishing metaphysical naturalism £rom methodological naturalism. Following this, methodological naturalism is further clarified as the set of imperatives: analyse, formalise, and mechanise. It is argued that simulation on its own is insufficient for satisfying these imperatives . Instead i t must be supplemented and constrained by existing psychological theory which wi1I indicate the relevant features for cornparision in any simulation that seeks to be an explanation of human cognition. Therefore, we turn to an examination of current work in cognitive psychology. Specif ically, we examine areas where attempts are being made to analyse and formalise cognition in terms of more basic psychological processes. So, the thesis proceeds to examine current work on categorisation and the nature of concepts, memory, problern solving, and inference. Lt sh...

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007

is the latest in a new wave of philosophical theorists that fall within a loose coalition of anti-representationalism (or anti-Cartesianism): Dynamical-, Embodied-, Extended-, Distributed-, and Situated-, theories of cognition (DEEDS an apt acronym). Against this background, cognition for Wheeler is, or should be, a more ecumenical concept. This ecumenical approach would still be amenable to making theoretical distinctions, the central one being the notion of offline and online styles of intelligence, a distinction that makes conceptual space for another closely related notion, that of propositional knowledge (knowing that) and tacit knowledge (knowing how). Wheeler's book comprises 11 chapters and, informally, 3 sections. Beyond the introduction, chapters 2 to 4 offer a close-grained analysis of cognitive science's Cartesian inheritance; chapters 5 to 9 present Wheeler's deployment of Heideggerian ideas in the service of four central DEEDS claims (pp.

2003

One of the questions that frequently come up in discussions of situated, embodied and distributed cognition is w here to draw the boundary between cognisers and their environment. Adams and Aizawa (2001) have recently formulated a critique of what they consider a "radical view of tool use", i.e., the view of tools as part of the cognitive system. We analyse their critique and show that much of what they consider 'radical' turns out to be compatible with what they consider 'common sense'. Hence, we argue that much of the debate boils down to a disagreement over different uses of the term 'cognitive', whereas there is growing agreement about the central role that agent-environment interaction in general, and tool use in particular, play in cognitive processes. We therefore suggest to drop the 'bounds of cognition' debate, and conclude by raising what we consider more important questions in the study of cognitive tool use.

In terms of Cognitive Sciences, it is important to understand that cognitive phenomenons and perceptional differentials. Realistically speaking, a number of humans prefer to trust their five senses to perceive the world. Yet, is it possible to perceive the reality genuinely that simple? Maybe, one or two century before, general thought about perception could see everything at that easy but in this century, with respectable foundings of scientific research, we know that there is a lot of cognitive phenomena which affects our perceiving ability. The same that applies to our consciousness as well. A great deal of research about consciousness describes a lot of terms about conscious and unconscious states which we encounter in our daily life and their influences on perception. The topic is whether Consciousness or Perception or just their relations between them, every each one involves their own questions. For discussing them in every aspect, understanding the academic studies about them may be a great starting point. In this article, We will try to clarify these two big clusters as much as we can, based on some of that studies. This edition can be defined as an article review edition. The writings within has a goal that making more clear a few studies that have been written about those subjects and also has a goal that stays strictly dependent on those studies which we made a review all along the process. Yet, it has no specific purposes like adding a new hypothesis or some studies on them.

CogSci 2018 Proceedings, ISBN: 978-0-9911967-8-4, 2018

Folk psychology takes perception and cognition to be two distinct processes. It seems that when we perceive the world we are engaged in one kind of activity and when we think about it we are engaged in a different one. This conception underlies various discussions within the cognitive sciences, such as on the architecture and modularity of the mind, and the cognitive penetrability of perception. But is the distinction justified? This paper looks for an answer in two opposing paradigms in the sciences of the mind: traditional cognitivism and ecological psychology. Even though cognitivism is the dominant paradigm, we argue that it has thus far failed to give a definite account of the relation between perception and cognition, and to support or to deny their separation. Ecological psychology, on the other hand, rejects the distinction and integrates cognition with perception. We discuss previous work within the ecological view and sketch directions for future research.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research endeavor focusing on human cognitive phenomena such as memory, language use, and reasoning. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is charting new directions at the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter begins by identifying the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science and reviewing the history of the interdisciplinary engagements that characterize it. The second section examines the role that mechanistic explanation plays in cognitive science, while the third focuses on the importance of mental representations in specifically cognitive explanations. The fourth section considers the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and explores how multiple disciplines can contribute to explanations that exceed what any single discipline might accomplish. The conclusion sketches some recent developments in cognitive science and their implications for philosophers.

Philosophical Psychology, 1997

When it comes to applying computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, cognitive scientists appear to face a dilemma. The only strategy that seems to be available is one that explains consciousness in terms of special kinds of computational processes. But such theories, while they dominate the field, have counter-intuitive consequences; in particular, they force one to accept that phenomenal experience is composed of information processing effects. For cognitive scientists, therefore, it seems to come down to a choice between a counter-intuitive theory or no theory at all. We offer a way out of this dilemma. We argue that the computational theory of mind does not force cognitive scientists to explain consciousness in terms of computational processes, as there is an alternative strategy available: one that focuses on the representational vehicles that encode information in the brain. This alternative approach to consciousness allows us to do justice to the standard intuitions about phenomenal experience, yet remain within the confines of cognitive science.