There is a great deal of justified concern about continuity through scientific theory change. Our thesis is that, particularly in physics, such continuity can be appropriately captured at the level of conceptual frameworks using conceptual space models. Indeed, we contend that the conceptual spaces of three of our most important physical theories—Classical Mechanics, Special Relativity Theory, and Quantum Mechanics —have already been so modelled as phase-spaces. Working with their phase-space formulations, one can trace the conceptual changes and continuities in transitioning (...) from CM to QM, and from CM to SRT. By offering a revised severity-ordering of changes that conceptual frameworks can undergo, we provide reasons to doubt the commonly held view that CM is conceptually closer to SRT than QM. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the question of whether complexity-like explanations can be applied to the psychology of individuals, and its implications for the scope of complexity explanations of social phenomena. We start by outlining two representational-cum-computational models of the mind—a symbolic model and a networks or connectionist one—and their pros and cons. Based on this we then outline a radical, non-representational and non-computational alternative model that has been gaining ground recently, and which has significant affinities with complexity explanations in (...) social science. Deploying neo-Kantian considerations, we then argue that due to the discursivity, or conceptual dimension of our cognitive system, the radical alternative must be incorrect insofar as humans are concerned. Indeed, human psychology must involve, at least partly, a representational understanding of the sort provided by the symbolic model. Relatedly, we show how the discursiviry of human cognition complicates our psychology and makes it difficult to account for. Finally, we briefly address the question of how the complicated nature of individual psychology, implied by human discursivity, may affect complexity explanations of social behavior. (shrink)

Recently, it has been provocatively claimed that dynamical modeling approaches signal the emergence of a new explanatory framework distinct from that of mechanistic explanation. This paper rejects this proposal and argues that dynamical explanations are fully compatible with, even naturally construed as, instances of mechanistic explanations. Specifically, it is argued that the mathematical framework of dynamics provides a powerful descriptive scheme for revealing temporal features of activities in mechanisms and plays an explanatory role to the extent it is deployed for (...) this purpose. It is also suggested that more attention should be paid to the distinctive methodological contributions of the dynamical framework including its usefulness as a heuristic for mechanism discovery and hypothesis generation in contemporary neuroscience and biology. (shrink)

Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel (1985) defined the notion of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a group level memory system that “involves the operation of the memory systems of the individuals and the processes of communication that occur within the group (p. 191). Those processes are the collaborative procedures (“transactions”) by which groups encode, store, and retrieve information that is distributed among their members. Over the past 25+ years, the conception of a TMS has progressively garnered an increased interest among (...) social and organizational psychologists, communication scholars, and management theorists (Ren & Argote 2011). But there remains considerable disagreement about how exactly Wegner’s appeal to group memory should be understood. My goal in this paper is contribute to this debate, by articulating more clearly the value of conceptualizing groups as TMSs. This value, I argue, consists in providing us with a blueprint for how to explain group memory in terms of collective information-processing mechanisms. Collective information-processing mechanisms are dependent on, and interact with, the brain-bound information-processing of individuals, but cannot be reduced to the latter. In my analysis, I lean on extant accounts of mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of science (Bechtel & Richardson 1993; Machamer, Darden, & Craver 2000; Wimsatt 2007) that have been used to analyze the explanatory practices of psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Bechtel 2008, 2009). Based on my reconstruction of Wegner’s conceptualization of a TMS, I argue that the reality of emergent group cognition is compatible with its mechanistic explanation. More generally, my analysis shows that group cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition, while avoiding the false dilemma between “wholism” and “nothing but-ism” which has hampered traditional construals of the “group mind” thesis (Allport 1968). (shrink)

Which notion of computation (if any) is essential for explaining cognition? Five answers to this question are discussed in the paper. (1) The classicist answer: symbolic (digital) computation is required for explaining cognition; (2) The broad digital computationalist answer: digital computation broadly construed is required for explaining cognition; (3) The connectionist answer: sub-symbolic computation is required for explaining cognition; (4) The computational neuroscientist answer: neural computation (that, strictly, is neither digital nor analogue) is required for explaining cognition; (5) The extreme (...) dynamicist answer: computation is not required for explaining cognition. The first four answers are only accurate to a first approximation. But the “devil” is in the details. The last answer cashes in on the parenthetical “if any” in the question above. The classicist argues that cognition is symbolic computation. But digital computationalism need not be equated with classicism. Indeed, computationalism can, in principle, range from digital (and analogue) computationalism through (the weaker thesis of) generic computationalism to (the even weaker thesis of) digital (or analogue) pancomputationalism. Connectionism, which has traditionally been criticised by classicists for being non-computational, can be plausibly construed as being either analogue or digital computationalism (depending on the type of connectionist networks used). Computational neuroscience invokes the notion of neural computation that may (possibly) be interpreted as a sui generis type of computation. The extreme dynamicist argues that the time has come for a post-computational cognitive science. This paper is an attempt to shed some light on this debate by examining various conceptions and misconceptions of (particularly digital) computation. (shrink)

What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for (...) a group to have emergent cognitive states? (ii) Is this even a metaphysically coherent view? (iii) Relative to which notion of emergence do we have reason to believe that certain groups in fact have emergent cognitive states? We shall argue that evidence from a wide variety of social science domains makes it plausible that there are group cognitive states and processes no less metaphysically emergent than human cognitive (and other special science) states and processes. (shrink)

Two widely accepted assumptions within cognitive science are that (1) the goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for cognitive performances and (2) computational modeling is a major tool for understanding these mechanisms. The particular approaches to computational modeling adopted in cognitive science, moreover, have significantly affected the way in which cognitive mechanisms are understood. Unable to employ some of the more common methods for conducting research on mechanisms, cognitive scientists’ guiding ideas about mechanism have developed in conjunction with their (...) styles of modeling. In particular, mental operations often are conceptualized as comparable to the processes employed in classical symbolic AI or neural network models. These models, in turn, have been interpreted by some as themselves intelligent systems since they employ the same type of operations as does the mind. For this paper, what is significant about these approaches to modeling is that they are constructed specifically to account for behavior and are evaluated by how well they do so—not by independent evidence that they describe actual operations in mental mechanisms. (shrink)

In this paper I describe basic features of traditional (British) emergentism and Popper’s emergentist theory of consciousness and compare them to the contemporary versions of emergentism present in connectionist approach in cognitive sciences. I argue that despite their similarities, the traditional form, as well as Popper’s theory belong to strong causal emergentism and yield radically different ontological consequences compared to the weaker, contemporary version present in cognitive science. Strong causal emergentism denies the causal closure of the physical domain and introduces (...) genuine new mental causal powers and genuine downward causation, while weak emergentism provides new insights in understanding the mechanisms and explanation that is compatible with physicalism. (shrink)

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in what (...) are often taken to be different memory phenomena or in other cognitive phenomena is playing such a heuristic function. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 0119, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0119; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Both in biology and psychology there has been a tendency on the part of many investigators to focus solely on the mature organism and ignore development. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that the explanatory framework often invoked in the life sciences for understanding a given phenomenon, according to which explanation consists in identifying the mechanism that produces that phenomenon, both makes it possible to side-step the development issue and to provide inadequate resources for actually (...) explaining development. When biologists and psychologists do take up the question of development, they find themselves confronted with two polarizing positions of nativism and empiricism. However, the mechanistic framework, insofar as it emphasizes organization and recognizes the potential for self-organization, does in fact provide the resources for an account of development which avoids the nativism-empiricism dichotomy. (shrink)

The need to align multiple experimental procedures and produce converging results so as to demonstrate that the phenomenon under investigation is real and not an artifact is a commonplace both in scientific practice and discussions of scientific methodology (Campbell and Stanley 1963; Wimsatt 1981). Although sometimes this is the purpose of aligning techniques, often there is a different purpose—multiple techniques are sought to supply different perspectives on the phenomena under investigation that need to be integrated to answer the questions scientists (...) are asking. After introducing this function, I will illustrate it by considering three of the major techniques in cognitive neuroscience for linking cognitive function with neural structure. (shrink)

Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations of the parts of the mechanism. The challenge in characterizing such operations is illustrated by an example from the history of physiological chemistry in which some investigators tried to characterize the internal operations in the same terms as the overall physiological system while others appealed to elemental chemistry. In order for biochemistry to become (...) successful, researchers had to identify a new level of operations involving operations over molecular groups. Existing attempts at mechanistic explanation of behavior are in a situation comparable to earlier approaches to physiological chemistry, drawing their inspiration either from overall psychology activities or from low-level neural processes. Successful mechanistic explanations of behavior require the discovery of the appropriate component operations. Such discovery is a daunting challenge but one on which success will be beneficial to both behavioral scientists and cognitive and neuroscientists. (shrink)

Purpose: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s question concerning the relationship between scientific/ rational knowledge and the domain of wisdom and how these forms of knowledge come about is the starting point. This article aims at developing an epistemological as well as methodological framework that is capable of explaining how profound change can be brought about in various contexts, such as in individual cultivation, in organizations, in processes of radical innovation, etc. This framework is based on the triple-loop learning strategy and the U-theory (...) approach, which opens up a perspective on how the domains of scientific/rational knowledge, constructivism, and wisdom could grow together more closely. Design/Structure: This article develops a strategy which is referred to as “tripleloop learning,” which is not only the basis for processes of profound change, but also brings about a new dimension in the field of learning and knowledge dynamics: the existential realm and the domain of wisdom. A concrete approach that puts into practice the tripleloop learning strategy is presented. The final section shows, how these concepts can be interpreted in the context of the constructivist approach and how they might offer some extensions to this paradigm. Findings: The process of learning and change has to be extended to a domain that concerns existential issues as well as questions of wisdom. Profound change can only happen if these domains are taken into consideration. The tripleloop learning strategy offers a model that fulfills this criterion. It is an “epistemo-existential strategy” for profound change on various levels. Conclusions: The (cognitive) processes and attitudes of receptivity, suspension, redirecting, openness, deep knowing, as well as “profound change/innovation from the interior” turn out to be core concepts in this process. They are compatible with constructivist concepts. Von Glasersfeld’s concept of functional fitness is carried to an extreme in the suggested approach of profound change and finds an extension in the existential domain. Key words: Double-loop learning, individual cultivation, (radical) innovation, knowledge creation, knowledge society, personality development, presencing, profound change, triple-loop learning, U-theory, wisdom. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, it is been common to hear the mind likened to a digital computer. This essay is concerned with a particular philosophical view that holds that the mind literally is a digital computer (in a specific sense of “computer” to be developed), and that thought literally is a kind of computation. This view—which will be called the “Computational Theory of Mind” (CTM)—is thus to be distinguished from other and broader attempts to connect the mind with computation, (...) including (a) various enterprises at modeling features of the mind using computational modeling techniques, and (b) employing some feature or features of production-model computers (such as the stored program concept, or the distinction between hardware and software) merely as a guiding metaphor for understanding some feature of the mind. This entry is therefore concerned solely with the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) proposed by Hilary Putnam [1961] and developed most notably for philosophers by Jerry Fodor [1975, 1980, 1987, 1993]. The senses of ‘computer’ and ‘computation’ employed here are technical; the main tasks of this entry will therefore be to elucidate: (a) the technical sense of ‘computation’ that is at issue, (b) the ways in which it is claimed to be applicable to the mind, (c) the philosophical problems this understanding of the mind is claimed to solve, and (d) the major criticisms that have accrued to this view. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in (...) syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

Complex problem solving (CPS) emerged in the last 30 years in Europe as a new part of the psychology of thinking and problem solving. This paper introduces into the field and provides a personal view. Also, related concepts like macrocognition or operative intelligence will be explained in this context. Two examples for the assessment of CPS, Tailorshop and MicroDYN, are presented to illustrate the concept by means of their measurement devices. Also, the relation of complex cognition and emotion in the (...) CPS context is discussed. The question if CPS requires complex cognition is answered with a tentative “yes.”. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content- bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some (...) classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained. (shrink)

The notion of a ‘symbol’ plays an important role in the disciplines of Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science. However, there is comparatively little agreement on how this notion is to be understood, either between disciplines, or even within particular disciplines. This paper does not attempt to defend some putatively ‘correct’ version of the concept of a ‘symbol.’ Rather, some terminological conventions are suggested, some constraints are proposed and a taxonomy of the kinds of issue that give rise to (...) disagreement is articulated. The goal here is to provide something like a ‘geography’ of the various notions of ‘symbol’ that have appeared in the various literatures, so as to highlight the key issues and to permit the focusing of attention upon the important dimensions. In particular, the relationship between ‘tokens’ and ‘symbols’ is addressed. The issue of designation is discussed in some detail. The distinction between simple and complex symbols is clarified and an apparently necessary condition for a system to be potentially symbol, or token bearing, is introduced. (shrink)

Although philosophy has been only a minor contributor to cognitive science to date, this paper describes two projects in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years and that can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive science. First, stances on the mind–body problem (identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) are relevant to cognitive science as it negotiates its relation to neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. Second, analyses of (...) mental representations address both their vehicles and their contents; new approaches to characterizing how representations have content are particularly relevant to understanding the relation of cognitive agents to their environments. Third, the recently formulated accounts of mechanistic explanation in philosophy of science both provide perspective on the explanatory project of cognitive science and may offer normative guidance to cognitive science (e.g., by providing perspective on how multiple disciplinary perspectives can be integrated in understanding a given mechanism). (shrink)

In this paper, I outline two strands of evidence for the conclusion that the dynamical approach to cognitive science both seeks and provides covering law explanations. Two of the most successful dynamical models—Kelso’s model of rhythmic finger movement and Thelen et al.’s model of infant perseverative reaching—can be seen to provide explanations which conform to the famous explanatory scheme first put forward by Hempel and Oppenheim. In addition, many prominent advocates of the dynamical approach also express the provision of this (...) kind of explanation as a goal of dynamical cognitive science. I conclude by briefly outlining two consequences. First, dynamical cognitive science’s explanatory style may strengthen its links to the so-called “situated” approach to cognition, but, secondly, it may also undermine the widespread intuition that dynamics is related to emergentism in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The recent surge of interest in the cognitive science of religion has resulted in a number of studies regarding the memorability of minimally counterintuitive ideas. The present model incorporates ontological templates and their respective inferences, as well as delineates between two major types of violations: schema- and template-level violations. As humor is also defined by its counter-intutiveness at the schema level, this study was designed to find effects this emotion has on retention. Results suggest that humorous statements with parallel violations (...) are recalled significantly better than statements which have only template-level violations, affective statements with only schema-level violations, as well as intuitive statements in both immediate and 1-week follow-up sessions. (shrink)

The attribution of beliefs and other propositional attitudes is best understood as a form of measurement, however counter-intuitive this may seem. Measurement theory does not require that the thing measured should be a magnitude, or that the calibration of the measuring instrument should be numerical. It only requires a homomorphism between the represented domain and the representing domain. On this basis, maps measure parts of the world, usually geographical locations, and 'belief' statements measure other parts of the world, namely people's (...) aptitudes. Having outlined an argument for this view, I deal with an obvious objection to it: that self-attribution of belief cannot be an exercise in measurement, because we are all aware, from introspection, that our beliefs have an intrinsically semantic form. Subsequently, I turn to the philosophical and methodological ramifications of the measurement theoretic view. I argue, first, that it undermines at least one version of constructivism and, second, that it provides an effective alternative to the residually Cartesian philosophy that underpins much qualitative research. Like other anti-Cartesian strategies, belief-attribution-as-measurement implies that the objective world is far more knowable than the subjective one, and that reality is ontologically prior to meaning. I regard this result as both plausible and welcome. (shrink)

Complex adaptive systems and nursingThere have been numerous references to complexity theory and complex systems in the recent healthcare literature, including nursing. However, exaggerated claims have (in my view) been made about how they can be applied to health service delivery, and there is a widespread tendency to misunderstand some of the concepts associated with complexity thinking (usually justified by describing the misconception as a metaphor). These conceptscanbe extended to systems and structures in healthcare organisations but, at this stage in (...) the development of complexity science, only in a modest and very cautious way. In this paper I first outline some of the key ideas in the theory of complex adaptive systems, and then suggest that they have been distorted by a series of influential articles in the medical literature. I go on to present a simple case study of my own and undertake a complexity analysis of it. In the conclusion I suggest that we should beware of some outdated ideas being trotted out in the guise of complexity — an exciting and diverse area of enquiry that those old ideas do not, in fact, resemble. (shrink)

We consider several puzzles of bounded rationality. These include the Allais- and Ellsberg paradox, the disjunction effect, and related puzzles. We argue that the present account of quantum cognition—taking quantum probabilities rather than classical probabilities—can give a more systematic description of these puzzles than the alternate treatments in the traditional frameworks of bounded rationality. Unfortunately, the quantum probabilistic treatment does not always provide a deeper understanding and a true explanation of these puzzles. One reason is that quantum approaches introduce additional (...) parameters which possibly can be fitted to empirical data but which do not necessarily explain them. Hence, the phenomenological research has to be augmented by responding to deeper foundational issues. In this article, we make the general distinction between foundational and phenomenological research programs, explaining the foundational issue of quantum cognition from the perspective of operational realism. This framework is motivated by assuming partial Boolean algebras. They are combined into a uniform system via a mechanism preventing the simultaneous realization of perspectives. Gleason’s theorem then automatically leads to a distinction between probabilities that are defined by pure states and probabilities arising from the statistical mixture of pure states. This formal distinction relates to the conceptual distinction between risk and ignorance. Another outcome identifies quantum aspects in dynamic macro-systems using the framework of symbolic dynamics. Finally, we discuss several ideas that are useful for justifying complementarity in cognitive systems. (shrink)

There is a gap between two different modes of computation: the symbolic mode and the subsymbolic (neuron-like) mode. The aim of this paper is to overcome this gap by viewing symbolism as a high-level description of the properties of (a class of) neural networks. Combining methods of algebraic semantics and non-monotonic logic, the possibility of integrating both modes of viewing cognition is demonstrated. The main results are (a) that certain activities of connectionist networks can be interpreted as non-monotonic inferences, and (...) (b) that there is a strict correspondence between the coding of knowledge in Hopfield networks and the knowledge representation in weight-annotated Poole systems. These results show the usefulness of non-monotonic logic as a descriptive and analytic tool for analyzing emerging properties of connectionist networks. Assuming an exponential development of the weight function, the present account relates to optimality theory – a general framework that aims to integrate insights from symbolism and connectionism. The paper concludes with some speculations about extending the present ideas. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is positioned to make distinctive contributions to cognitive science by providing perspective on its conceptual foundations and by advancing normative recommendations. The philosophy of science I embrace is naturalistic in that it is grounded in the study of actual science. Focusing on explanation, I describe the recent development of a mechanistic philosophy of science from which I draw three normative consequences for cognitive science. First, insofar as cognitive mechanisms are information‐processing mechanisms, cognitive science needs an account of (...) how the representations invoked in cognitive mechanisms carry information about contents, and I suggest that control theory offers the needed perspective on the relation of representations to contents. Second, I argue that cognitive science requires, but is still in search of, a catalog of cognitive operations that researchers can draw upon in explaining cognitive mechanisms. Last, I provide a new perspective on the relation of cognitive science to brain sciences, one which embraces both reductive research on neural components that figure in cognitive mechanisms and a concern with recomposing higher‐level mechanisms from their components and situating them in their environments. (shrink)