Naturalizing Koegler 2022

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2012

Several of Beller, Bender, and Medin's (2012) issues are as relevant within cognitive science as between it and anthropology. Knowledge-rich human mental processes impose hermeneutic tasks, both on subjects and researchers. Psychology's current philosophy of science is ill suited to analyzing these: Its demand for ''stimulus control'' needs to give way to ''negotiation of mutual interpretation.'' Cognitive science has ways to address these issues, as does anthropology. An example from my own work is about how defeasible logics are mathematical models of some aspects of simple hermeneutic processes. They explain processing relative to databases of knowledge and belief-that is, content. A specific example is syllogistic reasoning, which raises issues of experimenters' interpretations of subjects' reasoning. Science, especially since the advent of understandings of computation, does not have to be reductive. How does this approach transfer onto anthropological topics? Recent cognitive science approaches to anthropological topics have taken a reductive stance in terms of modules. We end with some speculations about a different cognitive approach to, for example, religion.

Continental Philosophy Review 54 (2): 183 – 199 , 2021

We explore relationships between phenomenology and developmental psychology through an in-depth analysis of a particular problem in social cognition: the most fundamental access to other minds. In the first part of the paper, we examine how developmental science can benefit phenomenology. We explicate the connection between cognitive psychology and developmental phenomenology as a form of constructive phenomenological psychology. Nativism in contemporary science constitutes a strong impulse to conceive of the possibility of an innate ability to perceive others' mental states, an idea which also has a transcendental implication. In the second part, we consider how phenomenology can contribute to developmental science. Phenomenology can go beyond the necessary evaluation and reinterpretation of experimental results. Some phenomenological notions and theories can be put forward on a par with alternative cognitive-psychological models and compete with them on grounds of empirical adequacy. For example, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's notion of pairing can constitute a viable account of how infants access other minds. We outline a number of ways in which this account can be tested and can thus contribute to generating empirical knowledge.

2011

A critical review of Piaget's and Vygotsky's early developmental theories within the frame of nature versus nurture debate.

Child Development Perspectives, 2009

Cognitive Development, 2013, 28, 96-133, 2013

We argue that the nativist-empiricist debate in developmental psychology is distorted, both theoretically and methodologically, by a shared framework of assumptions concerning the nature of representation. In particular, both sides of the debate assume models of representation that make the emergence of representation impossible. This, in turn, distorts conceptions of cognitive development by forcing developmentally new representation to be constructed out of some already available (innate) foundation of atomistic representations — it forces a foundationalism. Contemporary nativists and empiricists differ with respect to the size and scope of such foundations, but are equally committed to some form of foundationalism. In further consequence, this foundationalism distorts methodologies by rendering any form of developmental emergence of representation impossible, and, thus, renders control conditions in experiments for such kinds of development (and their precursors) seemingly irrelevant. In precluding representational emergence, foundationalisms motivate an assumption that infants perceive the world in the same way as adults (adultomorphism) because the possibility of the developmental emergence of perceptual representation is already conceptually excluded. In this discussion, we focus most strongly on the currently dominant nativist framework, and, in particular, on two seminal sets of studies: Baillargeon’s drawbridge studies and Wynn’s addition and subtraction studies. We begin with an historical overview of the growth of developmental nativist frameworks, showing how they emerged out of a synergy between a competence-performance distinction and the methodology of infant looking studies. Both of these enabling conditions for the historical rise of nativist positions are themselves flawed. We then proceed to a discussion of extant criticisms of the two focal sets of studies. We argue that these criticisms explore various empirical and conceptual alternatives to the standard nativist interpretations of such studies — alternatives that avoid the adultomorphisms of standard interpretations, and, thus, are open to the possibility of anti- foundationalist developmental emergence of representation. We then explore some non- and anti-nativist positions, showing that they too involve a foundationalist commitment, which thus weakens their criticisms of nativist positions, and argue that the common foundationalism follows from a common assumption about the nature of representations: that representation is fundamentally constituted as encodings. Finally, we outline an approach to modeling representation that is not committed to foundationalism because it explicitly models representational emergence. This is an action based approach, akin to Piaget’s model. Ironically, it was the (invalid) rejection of Piaget’s model that fueled much of the growth of nativism in the first place.

Mind, Culture, and Activity

2009

We are familiar with children and childhood; as adults, we constantly encounter them in everyday contexts related to the family, school, leisure time, and other areas of life. We remember our own childhood and what it was like to be a child, but in a strangely ambivalent way. We know so little about the child inside us. It seems likely enough that this child within us is more than just a segment or an episode in our life story. There seem to be peculiar obstacles that block our ability to relate to this child. At the same time, the children outside us often seem to be extraterrestrial beings, "aliens". Relating to the child within us is mysteriously difficult; the children around us are puzzling strangers. If this is true, then the question arises why in our culture relating both to the child within us and to the children around us is so difficult.

Synthese

Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: (1) There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous-response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds (in the West). (2) Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. (3) There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective.