Using mental bias to construct a model of cognition

Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science and the Nature of Cognition, 2023

Over the last decades, Interdisciplinarity (ID) has become one of the leading research practices. Traditionally, cognitive science is considered one of the most prominent examples of ID research by including disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, anthropology and linguistics. Recently, however the ID character of cognitive science has become under pressure. According to a study by Leydesdorff and Goldstone (2013), research in this domain gets more and more absorbed by cognitive psychology and the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is steadily fading away. In this paper, we will examine this claim and argue that its conclusion is premature. We will show that there are reasons to think that the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is more robust and that the configuration of ID relations may be more dynamic than portrayed by ID skeptics. The reason, or so we will argue, is that ID research is a consequence of the theoretical framework(s) in place, i.e. it is in the nature of ID that fluctuations occur depending on what is held to be the nature of cognition. Our findings are twofold. On the one hand, we will show that the reintegration of cognitive science into cognitive psychology-and with it an approximation towards biology and neuroscience-is, as a matter of fact, the fruit of past ID research. On the other hand, we will demonstrate that novel conceptual frameworks open the possibility for restoring ID relations and foster new ID research.

2008

As the electronic version of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Wilson and Keil, 1999) has now lost its disembodied (and unquotable) form and become incarnate as the official reference work of a vital and expansionary cognitive science, a less reassuring picture of the field is evoked by Two Sciences of Mind, the result of the workshop on Reaching for Mind: Foundations of Cognitive Science, hosted by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour and the Sheffield Computer Science Department, in 1995.

Minds and Machines, 1999

The roots of cognitive science go as far back as those of philosophy. One way of defining cognitive science is to say that it is just naturalised philosophy. Much of contemporary thinking about the mind derives from René Descartes' distinction between the body and the soul. They were constituted of two different substances and it was only humans that had a soul and were capable of thinking. According to him, other animals were mere automata.

Theory & Psychology, 2009

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.

Journal of Physiology-Paris, 2007

Studies of cognitive function include a wide spectrum of disciplines, with very diverse theoretical and practical frameworks. For example, in Behavioral Neuroscience cognitive mechanisms are mostly inferred from loss of function (lesion) experiments while in Cognitive Neuroscience these mechanisms are commonly deduced from brain activation patterns. Although neuroscientists acknowledge the limitations of deriving conclusions using a limited scope of approaches, there are no systematically studied, objective and explicit criteria for what is required to test a given hypothesis of cognitive function. This problem plagues every discipline in science: scientific research lacks objective, systematic studies that validate the principles underlying even its most elemental practices. For example, scientists decide what experiments are best suited to test key ideas in their field, which hypotheses have sufficient supporting evidence and which require further investigation, which studies are important and which are not, based on intuitions derived from experience, implicit principles learned from mentors and colleagues, traditions in their fields, etc. Philosophers have made numerous attempts to articulate and frame the principles that guide research and innovation, but these speculative ideas have remained untested and have had a minimal impact on the work of scientists.

French Studies In The Philosophy Of Science, 2009

Synthese, 2020

Attempts to apply the mathematical tools of dynamical systems theory to cognition in a systematic way has been well under way since the early 90s and has been recognised as a "third contender" to computationalist and connectionist approaches (Eliasmith in Philos Psychol 9(4): 1996). Nevertheless, it was also realised that such an application will not lead to a solid paradigm as straightforwardly as was initially hoped van Leeuwen in Minds Mach 15:271-333, 2005). In this paper I explicate a method for assessing such proposals by drawing upon Lakatos's (in: Lakatos, Musgrave (eds) Criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge University Press, London, pp 1970) methodology of scientific research programs (hereafter: "MSRP"). MSRP focuses on the heuristics of a particular field and gauges the model/theory building stratagems by reference to theoretical and empirical progress, on the one hand, and the continuity and the autonomy of the way the field's heuristic generates its series of models/theories, on the other. The requirement of continuity and autonomy afford distinct senses of ad hoc-ness, which serve as an effective tool to detect various subtleties which may otherwise be missed: the present approach identifies shortcomings missed by Chemero's (Radical embodied cognitive science, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009) radical embodied cognitive science and falsifies Chemero's claim that the methodological powers of his model-based account is on a par with computationalism. In general, I claim that MSRP is relevant to current methodological issues in cognitive science and can supplement debates regarding "local" assessments of methodologies, such as that between mechanical versus covering-law explanations. MSRP must at least be viewed as a necessary constraint for any methodological considerations in cognitive science.

Cognitive science or cognitive sciences? This question can be rephrased in other terms: One science of the mind or several sciences about the mind? This question synthesizes the tension, presented all over the book, between the different disciplines that collaborate together to study the mind – with the ultimate goal of formulating a theory that ties all the results together and unifies the different research programs. This common basis is the idea that mental operations are information-processing operations. The whole book is an attempt to show how all the interdisciplinary endeavors that study the mind turn around this idea. The book presents the main historical milestones of cognitive science and their particular methods, always with the aim to elucidate the connections and links between the different procedures and the whole project of understanding the mind from an information-processing point of view.

Cognitive science, 2001

Indian journal of physiology and pharmacology, 2000

Although cognitive science, the 'science of mind' is generally regarded as of relatively recent vintage, its origins can actually be traced back to ideas from the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to offer a view of the essential nature of what has come to be called the cognitive paradigm--the framework around which cognitive science has come to be constructed--and about its origins and development. Of particular note is the interdisciplinarity of the field, with its strong links to psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, computer science and philosophy. As will be explained below, this interdisciplinary character is rooted in the historical development of the science itself, and can only be understood in such a context. Thus, the present article is strongly historical in spirit and content.

Inevitably, much of the discussion in this section concerning the founding figures and their core ideas overlaps with the preceding section detailing the history of the discipline. Core ideas had either a philosophical influence (their ideas and beliefs impacted on thinking about cognitive psychology) or a methodological influence (their ways of working and research studies influenced the development and thinking about cognitive psychology).