Rationality and Cognitive Science

It has been claimed that cognitive therapists endorse sets of uplifting beliefs BECAUSE the client feels better believing them: not because they lead towards greater verisimilitude, a purported cognitivists’ hallmark of rational choice. Since standard cognitive therapists sometimes ask us to choose sets of beliefs that interpret evidence on the basis of greater individual happiness (all other things being equal), this suggests that the basis of choice goes beyond rationality. I contend that the case against the rationality of cognitive therapy (...) is not made if one allows a broadening of what to count as rational cognitive therapy. The rationality of therapy consists in how well it achieves its goal. My claim is that at least one goal is, or ought to be, greater information value of the client’ dialogues. Among other things, information values encode affect. Understanding reason in this way effectively transforms our understanding of rationality in a way that may be incommensurable with the standard view. If these radically divergent approaches to cognitive therapy are incommensurable, there is no way to discover that we are still talking about the same thing. So, a challenge for this competing view is to say on what basis the term cognitive therapy may be projectable. I identify some constraints on this project and sketch a possible solution. (shrink)

Kahneman's 'Asian disease' has nothing to do with Asians or their diseases; it is disrespectful of the basic principles of psychology. The attendant research--fooling people--is not science. Here I show how to build a science of the mind.

[A slightly revised version of this paper has been accepted by the BJPS] More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary scenarios accounting for the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values of discriminated states, available actions, or action-state pairings. The argument is an application the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, (...) although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected utilities can, under specified general conditions, be a powerful design solution to the problem of allocating the capacities of an agent in an efficient way. Preferences are for efficient action selection, and are a ‘fuel for success’ in the sense urged by Godfrey-Smith for true beliefs. They will tend to be favoured by selection when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when organisms have rich behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs. The rationale suggested here is conditional, especially on contingencies in what design options are available to selection and on trade-offs associated with the costs of generating and processing representations of value. The unqualified efficiency rationale for preferences suggests that organisms should represent expected utilities in a comprehensive and consistent way, but none of them do. In the final stages of the paper I consider some of the ways in which design trade-offs compromise the implementation of preferences in organisms that have them. (shrink)

Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions—including our own—will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, i.e. when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity, and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence (Blackwell 1953; Good (...) 1967)—ambiguity is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively-accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence; I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects; and I use simulations to show how it can help explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect. (shrink)

In some situations, we attribute intentional mental states to a person despite their inability to articulate the contents in question: these are implicit mental states. Attributions of implicit mental states raise certain philosophical challenges related to rationality, concept possession, and privileged access. In the philosophical literature, there are two distinct strategies for addressing these challenges, depending on whether the content attributions are personal-level or subpersonal-level. This paper explores the difference between personal-level and subpersonal-level approaches to implicit mental state attribution and (...) investigates the relationship between the two approaches. It concludes by highlighting the methodological and metaphilosophical commitments which can result in different perspectives on the relative priority of personal-level and subpersonal-level theories. (shrink)

The orthodox view in epistemology is that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive. I offer a novel argument for a version of this view, one that appeals to capacities to rationally respond to evidence. I do so by developing the Sellarsian idea that the concept of belief functions to mark the space of reasons in a non-intellectualist and naturalistic direction. The resulting view does justice to the role of belief in social interactions, joint deliberation, and rational persuasion, while including evidence-resistant beliefs and (...) animal beliefs as genuine beliefs. It has a range of further benefits: it helps us account for epistemic normativity, paves the way for better psychological models of belief revision, distinguishes beliefs from imaginings and mere acceptances, and helps us avoid noxious simplistic takes on human irrationality. (shrink)

Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context-sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language. In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My third aim is to (...) clarify the role of rational ideals in bounded rationality. (shrink)

Recent work in judgment and decisionmaking has stressed that institutions, like individuals, often rely on decisionmaking heuristics. But most of the institutional decisionmaking heuristics studied to date are highly firm- and industry-specific. This contrasts to the individual case, in which many heuristics are general-purpose rules suitable for a wide range of decision problems. Are there also general-purpose heuristics for institutional decisionmaking? In this paper, I argue that a number of methods recently developed for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty have a good (...) claim to be understood as general-purpose decisionmaking heuristics suitable for a broad range of institutional decision problems. (shrink)

I argue that bounded agents face a systematic accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition. Agents must choose whether to structure their cognition in ways likely to promote coherence or accuracy. I illustrate the accuracy-coherence tradeoff by showing how it arises out of at least two component tradeoffs: a coherence-complexity tradeoff between coherence and cognitive complexity, and a coherence-variety tradeoff between coherence and strategic variety. These tradeoffs give rise to an accuracy-coherence tradeoff because privileging coherence over complexity or strategic variety often leads to (...) a corresponding reduction in accuracy. I conclude with a discussion of two normative consequences for the study of bounded rationality: the importance of procedural rationality and the role of coherence in theories of bounded rationality. (shrink)

The English language now dominates scientific communications. Yet, many scientists have English as their second language. Their English proficiency may therefore often be more limited than that of a ‘native speaker’, and their scientific contributions (e.g. manuscripts) in English may frequently contain linguistic features that disrupt the fluency of a reader’s, or listener’s information processing even when the contributions are understandable. Scientific gatekeepers (e.g. journal reviewers) sometimes cite these features to justify negative decisions on manuscripts. Such justifications may rest on (...) the prima facie plausible assumption that linguistic characteristics that hinder fast and easy understandability of scientific contributions are epistemically undesirable in science. I shall raise some doubts about this assumption by drawing on empirical research on processing fluency and its biasing effects. I also argue that directing scientists with English as a foreign language toward approaching ‘native-level’ English can have the negative consequence of reducing their potential to make scientific belief formation more reliable. These points suggest that one seemingly compelling justification for linguistically discriminating against scientific contributions in ‘non-native’ English is questionable and that the common insistence by scientific gatekeepers on ‘native-like’ English may be epistemically harmful to science. (shrink)

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...) of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks. (shrink)

Surprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive-neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains (...) when and why an unexpected fact is surprising. We distinguish between descriptive and normative notions of what is surprising; clarify the sense in which surprising facts are unexpected; and, finally, develop and defend the significance account of surprise, according to which a fact is surprising to an agent if and to the extent that it is both unexpected and significant to the agent. Since a surprising fact can be significant to an agent in various ways—personal, moral, epistemic, and aesthetic—surprise is not merely or primarily epistemic. Fitting surprise reflects more than a person’s view of what is; it reflects a person’s view of what is significant. (shrink)

This collection of articles is a tribute to Nenad Smokrović, our friend and colleague from the Philosophy Department. He has been working on human rationality for over 25 years. Consequently, articles in this collection are either directly or indirectly related to this subject matter. In this volume, 19 authors from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Italy, Israel, USA, and GB write about human rationality. What human rationality consists in? What is the relationship between its normative aspect (logic) and its descriptive aspect (psychology)? (...) Do people in fact reason according to the laws of logic? What is the nature and the function of reasoning, argumentation, and inference? ... We are publishing this volume in the hope that it will provide further contribution to the research in the field. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that at least some moods are affective episodes whose main difference from emotions is that their intentional objects, qua intentional objects, are not consciously available. I defend this claim by exposing an experiment where affective responses – moods, I maintain – are elicited by subliminal pictures (§2). I then show how everyday kinds of moods can also be plausibly interpreted as emotion-like affects whose intentional object is not conscious (§3). In the final section (§4), I (...) borrow the six criteria for rationality that de Sousa proposed in The rationality of emotion and show how they can be used to argue that, if we conceive of moods as such, then they too can be rational. (shrink)

The notion of intelligence is relevant to several fields of research, including cognitive and comparative psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, among others. However, there is little agreement within and across these fields on how to characterise and explain intelligence. I put forward a behavioural, operational characterisation of intelligence that can play an integrative role in the sciences of intelligence, as well as preserve the distinctive explanatory value of the notion, setting it apart from the related concepts of cognition and (...) rationality. Finally, I examine a popular hypothesis about the underpinnings of intelligence: the capacity to manipulate internal representations of the environment. I argue that the hypothesis needs refinement, and that so refined, it applies only to some forms of intelligence. (shrink)

We argue that social deliberation may increase an agent’s confidence and credence under certain circumstances. An agent considers a proposition H and assigns a probability to it. However, she is not fully confident that she herself is reliable in this assignment. She then endorses H during deliberation with another person, expecting him to raise serious objections. To her surprise, however, the other person does not raise any objections to H. How should her attitudes toward H change? It seems plausible that (...) she should increase the credence she assigns to H and, at the same time, increase the reliability she assigns to herself concerning H. A Bayesian model helps us to investigate under what conditions, if any, this is rational. (shrink)

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are mental states posited by psychologists to explain behaviors including implicit racial and gender bias. In this paper I investigate the belief view of the implicit attitudes, on which implicit attitudes are a kind of implicit belief. In particular, I focus on why implicit attitudes, if they are beliefs, are often resistant to updating in light of new evidence. I argue that extant versions of the belief view do not give a satisfactory account of this phenomenon. This is (...) because proponents of the belief view have focused on overly narrow explanations of recalcitrance in terms of belief storage. Expanding the focus of the belief view to the kinds of irrational and arational transitions between beliefs and other mental states provides compelling (if preliminary) explanations of recalcitrance. (shrink)

Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology engages a wide range of issues of enduring interest to epistemologists, applied ethicists, and anyone concerned with how knowledge and justice intersect. Topics include stereotypes and generics, evidence and epistemic justification, epistemic injustice, ethical-epistemic dilemmas, moral encroachment, and the relations between blame and accountability. Begby applies his views about these topics to an equally wide range of pressing social questions, such as conspiracy theories, misinformation, algorithmic bias, discrimination, and criminal justice. Through it (...) all, the book’s central thesis is that prejudices can be epistemically rational, a corrective against what Begby takes to be the received view that prejudices are always and everywhere bad. However, Begby’s arguments do not engage consistently with relevant empirical literatures, misrepresent the positions of his interlocutors, and rehearse ideas already well-established across a range of intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to develop a unified solution to two paradoxes of bounded rationality. The first is the regress problem that incorporating cognitive bounds into models of rational decisionmaking generates a regress of higher-order decision problems. The second is the problem of rational irrationality: it sometimes seems rational for bounded agents to act irrationally on the basis of rational deliberation. I review two strategies which have been brought to bear on these problems: the way of weakening which (...) responds by weakening rational norms, and the way of indirection which responds by letting the rationality of behavior be determined by the rationality of the deliberative processes which produced it. Then I propose and defend a third way to confront the paradoxes: the way of level separation. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a Bayesian revolution in cognitive science. This should be of interest to metaphysicians of science, whose naturalist project involves working out the metaphysical implications of our leading scientific accounts, and in advancing our understanding of those accounts by drawing on the metaphysical frameworks developed by philosophers. Toward these ends, in this paper I develop a metaphysics of the Bayesian mind. My central claim is that the Bayesian approach supports a novel empirical argument for normativism, the thesis (...) that belief has a normative essence, with the norms in question being those of rationality. The argument I develop draws in part on the causal powers subset account of realization defended by Wilson and Shoemaker, with the link being that Bayesians often appeal to Marr’s framework of levels of analysis, which carries with it multiple realizability claims that can be understood in terms of the subset model. I then use the view developed, with its appeal to normativism and subset realization, to explain how Bayesians can accommodate empirical findings of irrationality that are sometimes thought to pose a problem for their view. (shrink)

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...) of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living. (shrink)

We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms (...) that select when a production is required and how it should be carried out. To operate on production mechanisms, control mechanisms need to procure information through measurement processes and evaluate possible actions. They are making decisions. In all organisms, these decisions are made by multiple different control mechanisms that are organized not hierarchically but heterarchically. In many cases, they employ internal models of features of the environment with which the organism must deal. Cognition, in the form of decision-making, is thus fundamental to living systems which must control their production mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper aims to defend deliberation-compatibilism against several objections, including a recent counterexample by Yishai Cohen that involves a deliberator who believes that whichever action she performs will be the result of deterministic manipulation. It begins by offering a Moorean-style proof of deliberation-compatibilism. It then turns to the leading argument for deliberation-incompatibilism, which is based on the presumed incompatibility of causal determinism and the ‘openness’ required for rational deliberation. The paper explains why this argument fails and develops a coherent account (...) of how one can rationally deliberate and believe in causal determinism without inconsistency. The second half of the paper then takes up Cohen's proposed counterexample and his Four-Case Deliberation Argument against deliberation-compatibilism, which is meant to mirror Derk Pereboom's famous Four-Case Manipulation Argument. In response, the author defends a hard-line reply to FCDA but also argues that the notion of ‘sourcehood’ relevant to rational deliberation differs from that involved in free will. (shrink)

This paper identifies a tension between the commitment to forming rationally justified emotions and the happy life. To illustrate this tension I begin with a critical evaluation of the positive psychology technique known as ‘gratitude training’. I argue that gratitude training is at odds with the kind of critical monitoring that several philosophers have claimed is regulative of emotional rationality. More generally, critical monitoring undermines exuberance, an attitude that plays a central role in contemporary models of the happy life. Thus, (...) prominent notions of what it takes to maintain emotion rationality and what it takes to maintain happiness are in tension. To resolve this tension, I argue that some people have good reason to depreciate critical monitoring—even while maintaining the requirement of emotion rationality that we be sensitive to facts about how our concerns are faring. (shrink)

This paper is about the alethic aspect of epistemic rationality. The most common approaches to this aspect are either normative (what a reasoner ought to/may believe?) or evaluative (how rational is a reasoner?), where the evaluative approaches are usually comparative (one reasoner is assessed compared to another). These approaches often present problems with blindspots. For example, ought a reasoner to believe a currently true blindspot? Is she permitted to? Consequently, these approaches often fail in describing a situation of alethic maximality, (...) where a reasoner fulfills all the alethic norms and could be used as a standard of rationality (as they are, in fact, used in some of these approaches). I propose a function α, which accepts a set of beliefs as inputand returns a numeric alethic value. Then I use this function to define a notion of alethic maximality that is satisfiable by finite reasoners (reasoners with cognitive limitations) and does not present problems with blindspots. Function α may also be used in alethic norms and evaluation methods (comparative and non-comparative) that may be applied to finite reasoners and do not present problems with blindspots. A result of this investigation isthat the project of providing purely alethic norms is defective. The use of function α also sheds light on important epistemological issues, such as the lottery and the preface paradoxes, and the principles of clutter avoidance and reflection. (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...) are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

Epistemologists spend a great deal of time thinking about how we should respond to our evidence. They spend far less time thinking about the ways that evidence can be acquired in the first place. This is an oversight. Some ways of acquiring evidence are better than others. Many normative epistemologies struggle to accommodate this fact. In this article I develop one that can and does. I identify a phenomenon – epistemic feedback loops – in which evidence acquisition has gone awry, (...) with the result that even beliefs based on the evidence are irrational. Examples include evidence acquired under the influence of confirmation bias and evidence acquired under the influence of cognitively penetrated experiences caused by implicit bias. I then develop a theoretical framework which enables us to understand why beliefs that are the outputs of epistemic feedback loops are irrational. Finally, I argue that many popular approaches to epistemic normativity may need to be abandoned on the grounds that they cannot comfortably explain feedback loops. The scope of this last claim is broad: it includes almost all contemporary theories of justified/rational belief and of the epistemology of cognitive penetration. (shrink)

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists claim to have discovered a large number of cognitive biases, which have a tendency to mislead reasoners. Might cognitive scientists themselves be subject to the very biases they purport to discover? And how should this alter the way they evaluate their research as evidence for the existence of these biases? In this paper, we posit a new paradox (the ‘Self-Reflexive Bias Paradox’), which bears a striking resemblance to some classical logical paradoxes. Suppose that research R appears to be (...) good evidence for the existence of bias B, but if B exists, then R would have been subject to B. Thus, it seems sensible for the researcher to reject R as good evidence for the existence of B. However, rejecting R for this reason admits the existence of B. We examine four putative cognitive biases and criticisms of them, each of which seem to be subject to self-reflexivity. In two cases, we argue, paradox is avoidable. In the remaining two, we cannot find a way to avoid the paradox, which poses a practical obstacle to scientific inquiry and results in an intriguing theoretical quandary. (shrink)

The lottery paradox involves a set of judgments that are individually easy, when we think intuitively, but ultimately hard to reconcile with each other, when we think reflectively. Empirical work on the natural representation of probability shows that a range of interestingly different intuitive and reflective processes are deployed when we think about possible outcomes in different contexts. Understanding the shifts in our natural ways of thinking can reduce the sense that the lottery paradox reveals something problematic about our concept (...) of knowledge. However, examining these shifts also raises interesting questions about how we ought to be thinking about possible outcomes in the first place. (shrink)

Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skilled action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively (...) productive kind of reasoning. (shrink)

In the philosophy of science, it is a common proposal that values are illegitimate in science and should be counteracted whenever they drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions. Drawing on recent cognitive scientific research on human reasoning and confirmation bias, I argue that this view should be rejected. Advocates of it have overlooked that values that drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions can contribute to the reliability of scientific inquiry at the group level even when they (...) negatively affect an individual’s cognition. This casts doubt on the proposal that such values should always be illegitimate in science. It also suggests that advocates of that proposal assume a narrow, individualistic account of science that threatens to undermine their own project of ensuring reliable belief formation in science. (shrink)

One challenge faced by aesthetics is the development of an account able to trace out the continuities and discontinuities between general experience and aesthetic experiences. Regarding this issue, in this paper, I present an enactive model of some raw cognitive dynamics that might drive the progressive emergence of aesthetic experiences from the stream of general experience. The framework is based on specific aspects of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and embodied aesthetic theories, while also taking into account research in ecological psychology, (...) cognitive sciences, and dynamic systems theory. The model focuses on dynamically relevant nodes at the pre-reflective and the reflective side of experience that would work as nested rhythmic constraints at different cognitive timescales with the potential to shunt experiences toward the aesthetic in everyday situations. My proposal constitutes a way to explore aesthetic experiences from an enactive perspective that regards them as transformative events in which cognitive processes entrain and are entrained by changes taking place in the environment, the brain, and the body. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that indicative conditionals like "If people wear masks, the spread of Covid-19 will be diminished" require a probabilistic dependency between their antecedents and consequents to be acceptable (Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2016). But it is easy to make the slip from this claim to the thesis that indicative conditionals are acceptable only if this probabilistic dependency results from a causal relation between antecedent and consequent. According to Pearl (2009), understanding a causal relation involves multiple, hierarchically organized conceptual dimensions: (...) prediction, intervention, and counterfactual dependence. In a series of experiments, we test the hypothesis that these conceptual dimensions are differentially encoded in indicative and counterfactual conditionals. If this hypothesis holds, then there are limits as to how much of a causal relation is captured by indicative conditionals alone. Our results show that the acceptance of indicative and counterfactual conditionals can become dissociated. Furthermore, it is found that the acceptance of both is needed for accepting a causal relation between two co-occurring events. The implications that these findings have for the hypothesis above, and for recent debates at the intersection of the psychology of reasoning and causal judgment, are critically discussed. Our findings are consistent with viewing indicative conditionals as answering predictive queries requiring evidential relevance (even in the absence of direct causal relations). Counterfactual conditionals in contrast target causal relevance, specifically. Finally, we discuss the implications our results have for the yet unsolved question of how reasoners succeed in constructing causal models from verbal descriptions. (shrink)

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato’s Meno—concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of subjects or agents, as such, appear. We (...) take exception to this orthodoxy, or at least to its unquestioned status. We argue that subpersonal states play a significant—arguably, primary—role in much epistemically relevant cognition and thus constitute a domain in which we might reasonably expect to locate the “missing source” of epistemic value, beyond the value attached to mere true belief. (shrink)

I comment on two analyses of the Simonshaven case: one by Prakken (2019), based on arguments, and the other by van Koppen and Mackor (2019), based on scenarios (or stories, narratives). I argue that both analyses lack a clear account of proof beyond a reasonable doubt because they lack a clear account of the notion of plausibility. To illustrate this point, I focus on the defense argument during the appeal trial and show that both analyses face difficulties in modeling key (...) features of this argument. (shrink)

The paper is dedicated to particular cases of interaction and mutual impact of philosophy and cognitive science. Thus, philosophical preconditions in the middle of the 20th century shaped the newly born cognitive science as mainly based on conceptual and propositional representations and syntactical inference. Further developments towards neural networks and statistical representations did not change the prejudice much: many still believe that network models must be complemented with some extra tools that would account for proper human cognitive traits. I address (...) some real implemented connectionist models that show how ‘new associationism ’ of the neural network approach may not only surpass Humean limitations, but, as well, realistically explain abstraction, inference and prediction. Then I stay on Predictive Processing theories in a little more detail to demonstrate that sophisticated statistical tools applied to a biologically realist ontology may not only provide solutions to scientific problems or integrate different cognitive paradigms but propose some philosophical insights either. To conclude, I touch on a certain parallelism of Predictive Processing and philosophical inferentialism as presented by Robert Brandom. (shrink)

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

पादरी Hofstadter द्वारा कट्टरपंथी प्रकृतिवाद के चर्च से नवीनतम उपदेश. अपने बहुत अधिक प्रसिद्ध (या अपने अथक दार्शनिक त्रुटियों के लिए कुख्यात) काम Godel, Escher, बाख की तरह, यह एक सतही प्रशंसनीयता है, लेकिन अगर एक समझता है कि यह बड़े पैमाने पर वैज्ञानिकता है जो दार्शनिक लोगों के साथ वास्तविक वैज्ञानिक मुद्दों घोला जा सकता है (यानी, केवल असली मुद्दों क्या भाषा का खेल हम खेलना चाहिए रहे हैं) तो लगभग सभी अपनी रुचि गायब हो जाता है. मैं विकासवादी (...) मनोविज्ञान और Wittgenstein के काम में आधारित विश्लेषण के लिए एक रूपरेखा प्रदान (के बाद से मेरे और अधिक हाल ही में लेखन में अद्यतन). आधुनिक दो systems दृश्यसे मानव व्यवहार के लिए एक व्यापक अप करने के लिए तारीख रूपरेखा इच्छुक लोगों को मेरी पुस्तक 'दर्शन, मनोविज्ञान, मिनडी और लुडविगमें भाषा की तार्किक संरचना से परामर्श कर सकते हैं Wittgenstein और जॉन Searle '2 एड (2019). मेरे लेखन के अधिक में रुचि रखने वालों को देख सकते हैं 'बात कर रहेबंदर- दर्शन, मनोविज्ञान, विज्ञान, धर्म और राजनीति पर एक बर्बाद ग्रह --लेख और समीक्षा 2006-2019 3 एड (2019) और आत्मघाती यूटोपियान भ्रम 21st मेंसदी 4वें एड (2019) . (shrink)

Я начинаю с некоторых известных комментариев философа (психолог) Людвига Витгенштейна, потому что Пинкер акций с большинством людей (из-за настройки по умолчанию нашей развитой врожденной психологии) определенные предрассудки о функционировании ума, и потому, что Витгенштейн предлагает уникальные и глубокие идеи в работе языка, мысли и реальности (которые он рассматривал как более или менее совсеоблены) не найдено в другом месте. Rere является лишь ссылкой на Витгенштейна в этом томе, который является наиболее прискорбным, учитывая, что он был самым блестящим и оригинальным аналитиком языка. (...) В последней главе, используя знаменитую метафору пещеры Платона, он красиво обобщает книгу с обзором того, как ум (язык, мысль, умы, умы, умы, умы) - продукт слепого эгоизма, умеренный лишь слегка автоматизированным альтруизмом для близких родственников, несущих копии наших генов (Инклюзивный Фитнес)- работает автоматически, но пытается закончить на оптимистичной ноте, давая нам надежду, что мы можем, тем не менее, сделать это. Пинкер, безусловно, известно, но мало говорит о том, что гораздо больше о нашей психологии остается вне, чем включены. Среди окон в человеческую природу, которые остались в стороне или уделяется минимальное внимание математики и геометрии, музыка и звуки, изображения, события и причинно-следственная связь, онтологии (классы вещей или то, что мы знаем), большинство эпистемологии (как мы знаем), диспозиции (вера, мышления, судить, намереваясь и т.д.) и остальные преднамеренной психологии действия, нейротрансмиттеров и энфеогенов, духовных состояний (например, satori и просветления, стимуляции мозга и записи, повреждения мозга и поведенческих дефицитов и расстройств, игры и спорт, теория принятия решений (в том же теории игры и поведенческой экономики), поведение животных (очень мало языка, но миллиард лет общей генетики). Много книг было написано о каждой из этих областей преднамеренной психологии. Данные в этой книге являются описаниями, а не объяснения, которые показывают, почему наш мозг делает это таким образом или как это делается. Как мы знаем, чтобы использовать предложения по-разному (т.е., знать все их значения)? Это эволюционная психология, которая работает на более базовом уровне – уровне, где Витгенштейн наиболее активен. И есть скудное внимание к контексту, context в котором слова используются - арена, которую Витгенштейн впервые. Тем неменее, это классическая работа и с этими предостережениями по-прежнему стоит прочитать. Те, кто желает всеобъемлющего до современных рамок для человеческого поведения из современных двух systEms зрения могут проконсультироваться с моей книгой"Логическая структура философии, психологии, Минd иязык в Людвиг Витгенштейн и Джон Сирл" второй ред (2019). Те, кто заинтересован в более моих сочинений могут увидеть "Говоря обезьян - Философия, психология, наука, религия и политика на обреченной планете - Статьи и обзоры 2006-2019 3-й ed (2019) и suicidal утопических заблуждений в 21-мst веке 4-й ed (2019) th и другие. (shrink)

이것은 행동에 유전자/환경 상호 작용의 훌륭한 검토 이며, 조금 일자 임에도 불구 하 고, 쉽고 가치 있는 읽기. 그(것)들은 행동에 유전학의 압도적인 충격을 보여주는 쌍둥이 연구 결과로 시작합니다. 그들은 공유 가정 환경이 행동에 거의 영향을 미치지 않으며 입양 된 자녀가 무작위로 선택된 사람들처럼 의붓 형제 자매와 다르게 자라는 사실을 확장하고 요약하는 주디스 해리스 (Judith Harris)의 점점 더 잘 알려진 연구에 주목합니다. 그들 (그리고 행동 유전학을 토론하는 거의 모든 사람들이) 주의하지 못하는 한 가지 기본 포인트는 우리의 성격의 모든 기초를 포함하여 인간의 (...) 행동 보편적 인 수백 (수천)이 정상의 변화가없는 유전자에 의해 100 % 결정된다는 것입니다. 모든 사람은 나무를 돌이 아닌 나무로 보고, 음식을 찾고 먹고, 화가 나고 질투합니다. 그래서, 그들은 주로 여기에 대해 이야기하는 것은 얼마나 많은 환경 (문화)가 자신의 외모보다는 다양한 특성이 표시되는 정도에 영향을 미칠 수 있습니다. 마지막으로, 그들은 우리와 모든 유기체가 자연의 우생학의 산물이며 의학, 농업 및 문명 전체와 자연 선택을 물리 치려는 시도가 이 일을계속하는 모든 사회에 재앙이라는 것을 주목하지 못하고, 일반적인 정치적으로 올바른 방식으로 우생학에 대해논의합니다. 모든 개념의 50%, 또는 약 1억 년 동안, 어머니가 인식하지 못하고 거의 모든 조기 자발적 낙태로 끝납니다. 결함이 있는 유전자의 이 자연적인 컬링은 진화를 유도하고, 상대적으로 유전적으로 건전하게 유지하고, 사회를 가능하게 합니다. 이형성은 문명을 파괴하기에 충분하지만 인구 과잉은먼저그것을 o것입니다. 현대 의 두 시스템 보기에서인간의 행동에 대한 포괄적 인 최신 프레임 워크를 원하는 사람들은 내 책을 참조 할 수 있습니다'철학의 논리적 구조, 심리학, 민d와 루드비히 비트겐슈타인과 존 Searle의 언어' 그리고 언어 2nd ed (2019). 내 글의 더 많은 관심있는 사람들은 '이야기 원숭이를 볼 수 있습니다 -철학, 심리학, 과학, 운명 행성에 종교와 정치 - 기사 및 리뷰 2006-2017' 3rd ed (2019) 및 기타. (shrink)

Context sensitivity is one of the distinctive marks of human intelligence. Understanding the flexible way in which humans think and act in a potentially infinite number of circumstances, even though they’re only finite and limited beings, is a central challenge for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, particularly in the case of those using representational theories. In this work, the frame problem, that is, the challenge of explaining how human cognition efficiently acknowledges what is relevant from what is not (...) in each context, has been adopted as a guide. By using it, we’ve been able to describe a fundamental tension between context sensitivity and the mental representations used in cognition theories. The first chapter discusses the nature of the frame problem,as well as the reasons for its persistence. In the second and third chapters, the problem is used as a measure tool in order to inquiry a few representational approaches and check how well suited they are to deal with context dependencies. The problems found are then correlated with the frame problem. Throughout the discussion, we try to show that 1) none of the evaluated approaches is capable of dealing with context sensitivity in a proper manner, but 2) that’s not a reason to think that the frame problem constitutes an argument against representational approaches in general, and 3) that it constitutes a fundamental conceptual tool in contemporary research -/- A sensibilidade ao contexto é uma das marcas distintivas da inteligência humana. Compreender o modo flexível como o ser humano pensa e age em função de um número potencialmente infinito de circunstâncias, ainda que munido de recursos finitos e limitados, é um desafio central para a filosofia da mente e para a ciência cognitiva, em particular aos que fazem uso de teorias representacionalistas. Nesse trabalho, adotou-se como fio condutor o modo como isso se manifesta no "frame problem": a dificuldade em explicar como a cognição humana reconhece, de maneira eficiente, o que é ou não relevante em cada contexto. A partir dele, buscou-se caracterizar uma tensão fundamental entre a sensibilidade ao contexto e o uso de representações mentais em teorias da cognição. O primeiro capítulo discute a natureza do frame problem, bem como as razões de sua resiliência. No segundo e terceiro capítulos, faz-se uso do problema como métrica para investigar o quão adequado é o tratamento das dependências contextuais no âmbito de várias abordagens representacionais. No decorrer da discussão, realiza-se um esforço argumentativo para mostrar que 1) nenhuma das estratégias abordadas é capaz tratar adequadamente da sensibilidade ao contexto, mas que 2) apesar disso, o frame problem não constitui argumento fatal para teorias representacionalistas em geral, e que 3) ele constitui uma ferramenta conceitual fundamental para pesquisas contemporâneas. (shrink)

The professor of psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen claims that males are on average stronger at systematizing than empathizing and females are on average stronger at empathizing than systematizing. Systematizing is defined as the drive to construct or understand systems. In this paper, I observe that Baron-Cohen overlooks certain examples of systems, examples which lead to doubts about his claim.

An abstract in English is included in the download. Wolfgang Pauli war einer der Grossen unter den Physikern des 20. Jahrhunderts, nicht ganz so berühmt wie Heisenberg und Einstein, aber annähernd ebenso bedeutend. Er war es, der bei der Entwicklung der Quantenphysik das sogenannte Ausschließungsprinzip entdeckte und damit den Weg zu unserem physikalischen Grundverständnis der ganzen Chemie eröffnete. Seine Gedanken galten aber auch hintergründigen wissenschaftsphilosophischen Fragen, und die gängigen Auffassungen über die Rolle von Vernunft und Materialismus in der Naturwissenschaft waren (...) ihm zu eng. Er betonte vielmehr, dass wissenschaftliches Verständnis immer wesentlich auch psychisch ist, dass das erlebte Glücksgefühl, welches mit einer Entdeckung verbunden ist, entscheidendes Motiv ist, dass dabei Ordnungen der Natur mit Urbildern unserer Psyche verknüpft werden, und dass eine sinnvolle Weltsicht zwar auch, aber nicht nur durch abendländisches Vernunftdenken zustande kommen kann; er strebte nach einer Verbindung mit einem gefühlten Einheitsdenken in der Tradition der östlichen asiatischen Kulturen. Abschliessend betont der Artikel, wie vielseitig überhaupt die Gedanken der Begründer der modernen Physik im 20. Jahrhundert in Bezug auf Grundfragen des religiösen Denkens waren. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)

In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy (...) is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent. (shrink)