Recent evidence suggests that performance on reasoning tasks may reflect the operation of a number of distinct cognitive mechanisms and processes. This paper explores the implications of this view of the mind for the descriptive and normative assessment of reasoning. I suggest that descriptive questions such as “Are we equipped to reason using rule X?” and normative questions such as “Are we rational?” are obsolete—they do not possess a fine enough grain of architectural resolution to accurately characterize the mind. I (...) explore how this general lesson can apply to specific experimental interpretations, and suggest that 'rationality' must be evaluated along a number of importantly distinct dimensions. (shrink)

I critically assess two widely cited evolutionary biological arguments for two versions of the ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT): namely, an argument appealing to Dawkins’s ‘Extended Phenotype Thesis’ (EPT) and an argument appealing to ‘Developmental Systems Theory’ (DST). Specifically, I argue that, firstly, appealing to the EPT is not useful for supporting the EMT (in either version), as it is structured and motivated too differently from the latter to be able to corroborate or elucidate it. Secondly, I extend and defend Rupert’s (...) argument that DST also fails to support or elucidate the EMT (in either version) by showing that the considerations in favour of the former theory have no bearing on the truth of the latter. I conclude by noting that the relevance of this discussion goes beyond the debate surrounding the EMT, as it brings out some of the difficulties of introducing evolutionary biological considerations into debates in psychology and philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Embodied approaches to cognition conceive of mental life as emerging from the ongoing relationship between neural and extra-neural resources. The latter include, first and foremost, our entire body, but also the activity patterns enacted within a contingent milieu, cultural norms, social factors, and the features of the environment that can be used to enhance our cognitive capacities (e.g., tools, devices, etc.). Recent work in music education and sport psychology has applied general principles of embodiment to a number of social contexts (...) relevant to their respective fields. In particular, both disciplines have contributed fascinating perspectives to our understanding of how skills are acquired and developed in groups; how musicians, athletes, teachers, and coaches experience their interactions; and how empathy and social action participate in shaping effective performance. In this paper, we aim to provide additional grounding for this research by comparing and further developing original themes emerging from this cross-disciplinary literature and empirical works on how performative skills are acquired and optimized. In doing so, our discussion will focus on: (1) the feeling of being together, as meaningfully enacted in collective musical and sport events; (2) the capacity to skillfully adapt to the contextual demands arising from the social environment; and (3) the development of distributed forms of bodily memory. These categories will be discussed from the perspective of embodied cognitive science and with regard to their relevance for music education and sport psychology. It is argued that because they play a key role in the acquisition and development of relevant skills, they can offer important tools to help teachers and coaches develop novel strategies to enhance learning and foster new conceptual and practical research in the domains of music and sport. (shrink)

To which extent is it justified to adopt Kant as a godfather of cognitive science? To prepare the stage for an answer of this question, we need to set aside Kant’s general transcendental approach to the mind which is radically anti-empiricist and instead turn our attention to his specific topics and claims regarding the mind which are often not focus of Kant’s epistemological investigations. If someone is willing to take this stance, it turns out that there are many bridges connecting (...) Kant with contemporary cognitive science. We investigate possible bridges suggested in the literature between some of Kant’s central claims about consciousness, mental content, and functions of mind, and some specific treatments of these topics in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. While doing so, we offer additional arguments for some proposed bridges, reconstruct others and completely destroy still other bridges by demonstrating that some suggested links between Kant and cognitive science remain only apparent. (shrink)

The classic dichotomy between bodily and cognitive processes has survived in scientific thought and can still be seen undiminished in the classic paradigm of the cognitive sciences. Lately, however, the notion of amodal cognitive systems has been challenged by new insights. More and more findings from neurobiological and perceptual studies support the assumption that cognitive processes solely rely on the brain's modal activities – even the most complex ones. Discarding amodal systems, however, would have profound effects not only on the (...) cognitive sciences, but also on the broader study of human behaviour. During the last two decades, cognitivist theories have made their entrance into humanistic studies, including the study of religion. Thus, in discarding one of the basic premises of the cognitive paradigm, as I argue in this article, could lead to a radical rethinking of the science of religion. I will argue that the body and its sensory-motor modalities are not only the mind's representational base, but also encompass the intentionality behind human behaviour in general and religious behaviour in particular. I will call this intentionality homeostatic intentionality, as it has to do with the self-regulation and optimization of the organism. Ignoring physiological activities, including homeostatic ones, in the mind's complex cognitive processes is unfortunately a characteristic of classic cognitivist theories, and this negligence, it seems to me, rules out a satisfying and realistic account of religious behaviour. (shrink)

This paper considers the hedonic aspect of emotions: the fact that part of an emotion is feeling good (pleasure) or feeling bad (displeasure), in various ways, to various degrees. It argues that some aspects of what might reasonably be called the modularity of emotions reduces to the modularity of the hedonic aspects of emotions. In this regard, the way in which pleasure and displeasure reflect what is expected at the visceral level (what one is jaded to, what one is hardened (...) to, what one takes for granted...) receives particular discussion. (shrink)

Previous neural network models of concept learning were mainly implemented with supervised learning schemes. However, studies of human conceptual memory have shown that concepts may be learned without a teacher who provides the category name to associate with exemplars. A modular neural network architecture that realizes concept acquisition through two functionally distinct operations, categorizing and naming, is proposed as an alternative. An unsupervised algorithm realizes the categorizing module by constructing representations of categories compatible with prototype theory. The naming module associates (...) category names to the output of the categorizing module in a supervised mode. In such a modular architecture, the interface between the modules can be conceived of as an “information relay” that encodes, constrains, and propagates important information. Five experiments were conducted to analyze the relationships among internal conceptual codes and simple conceptual and lexical development. The first two experiments show a prototype effect and illustrate some basic characteristics of the system. The third experiment presents a bottom‐up model of the narrowing down of children's early lexical categories that honors mutual exclusivity. The fourth experiment introduces top‐down constraints on conceptual coding. The fifth experiment exhibits how hierarchical relationships between concepts are learned by the architecture, and also demonstrates how a spectrum of conceptual expertise may gradually emerge as a consequence of experiencing more with certain categories than with others. (shrink)

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

One of the central questions in both metaethics and empirical moral psychology is whether moral judgments are the products of reason or emotions. This way of putting the question relies on an overly simplified view of reason and emotion as two fully independent cognitive faculties whose causal contributions to moral judgment can be cleanly separated. However, there is a significant body of evidence in the cognitive sciences that seriously undercuts this conception of reason and emotion, and supports the view that (...) moral judgments are caused by a complex interplay of psychological mechanisms that are both cognitive and affective, but in a way that is not simply a function of the independent causal contributions of reason and emotion. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this view for metaethics. (shrink)

An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it is hard to imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind scientists so often engage in. The present (...) article offers an entry point to addressing this challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the nature of mind, thought, and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the article claims that the functionalist conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims. (shrink)

Gareth Evans has observed that one merely needs to ‘look outward’ to discover one’s own beliefs. This observation of what has become known as belief ‘transparency’ has formed a basis for a cluster of views on the nature of introspection. These views may be well suited to account for our introspective access to beliefs, but whether similar transparency-based accounts of our introspective access to mental states other than belief can be given is not obvious. The question of whether a transparency-based (...) account can be generalized beyond beliefs is part of the larger issue whether introspection of different mental states can receive broadly the same account—whether introspection is unified. My aim is to examine one particularly thorough attempt at generalizing a transparency-based account of introspection due to Alex Byrne. I argue that the resulting view does not offer a unified account of introspection, even across a handful of mental states. In doing so, I highlight two difficulties most views on introspection that try to offer a unified account would have to face, even if they are not based in belief transparency. The subsequent move away from introspective unification has ramifications for several other philosophical debates, such as the architecture of the mind and our rationality. (shrink)

Samuels and Stich explore the debate over the extent to which ordinary human reasoning and decision making is rational. One prominent cluster of views, often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition in psychology, maintains that human reasoning is, in important respects, normatively problematic or irrational. Samuels and Stich start by sketching some key experimental findings from this tradition and describe a range of pessimistic claims about the rationality of ordinary people that these and related findings are sometimes taken to (...) support. Such pessimistic interpretations of the experimental findings have not gone unchallenged however: Samuels and Stich outline some of the research on reasoning that has been done by evolutionary psychologists and sketch a cluster of more optimistic theses about ordinary reasoning that such psychologists defend. Although Samuels and Stich think that the most dire pronouncements made by writers in the heuristics and biases tradition are unwarranted, they also maintain that the situation is rather more pessimistic than sometimes suggested by evolutionary psychologists. They conclude by defending this “middle way” and sketch a family of “dual processing” theories of reasoning which, they argue, offer some support for the moderate interpretation they advocate. (shrink)

In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves ‘central processing’ —is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or ‘modules’. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main arguments that evolutionary psychologists have offered for this general architectural thesis fail to provide us with any reason to prefer it to a competing picture of the (...) mind which I call the Library Model of Cognition. Second, I argue that this alternative model is compatible with the central theoretical and methodological commitments of evolutionary psychology. Thus I argue that, at present, the endorsement of the Massive Modularity Hypothesis by evolutionary psychologists is both unwarranted and unmotivated. (shrink)

Kengo Miyazono’s Delusions and Beliefs: A Philosophical Inquiry is an attempt to provide a unified account of the nature, pathology, and etiology of delusions. The strength of his book resides in the clarity of arguments and its consistent adoption of a biological explanation of delusions, based on teleo-functionalism about mental states. However, there are some weaknesses in each of his arguments regarding the nature, pathology, and etiology of delusions. Regarding the nature of delusions, teleo-functionalism makes it difficult to confirm that (...) delusions are beliefs. Regarding the pathology of delusions, I suggest that the existence of harmful malfunction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a belief to be considered pathological, and that additional evidence is needed to justify the separation of the belief and the holder’s personhood. Regarding the etiology, it is not reasonable to incorporate the prediction error theory into a kind of two-factor theory. Therefore, the details of his arguments require further modification. (shrink)

The hypothesis that human reasoning and decision-making can be roughly modeled by Expected Utility Theory has been at the core of decision science. Accumulating evidence has led researchers to modify the hypothesis. One of the latest additions to the field is Dual Process theory, which attempts to explain variance between participants and tasks when it comes to deviations from Expected Utility Theory. It is argued that Dual Process theories at this point cannot replace previous theories, since they, among other things, (...) lack a firm conceptual framework, and have no means of producing independent evidence for their case. (shrink)

This article compares the potential of classical and connectionist computational concepts for explanations of innate infant knowledge and of its development. It focuses on issues relating to: the perceptual process; the control and form(s) of perceptual-behavioural coordination; the role of environmental structure in the organization of action; and the construction of novel forms of activity. There is significant compatibility between connectionist and classical views of computation, though classical concepts are, at present, better able to provide a comprehensive computational view of (...) the infant. However, Varela's “enaction” perspective poses a significant challenge for both approaches. (shrink)

The ascription of intentional states to the self involves knowledge, or at least claims to knowledge. Armed with the working definition of knowledge as 'the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts' [Hyman, J. Philos. Quart. 49:432—451], I sketch a simple competence model of acting and believing from knowledge and when knowledge is defeated by un-experienced changes of state. The model takes the form of three concentric (...) circles. The 'periphery' is analogous to Fodor's [(1983), The modularity of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] input systems. The 'core' contains copies of peripheral representations, and between these representations there is executive competition. At the 'nucleus', operations are performed on the core representations of, at least, negation and recursion. I argue that this provides a fruitful way in which to conceptualise why theory-of-mind tasks challenge pre-school children, how some degree of first-person authority is mental state attribution is possible, and how executive inhibition is achieved. (shrink)

I distinguish between being cognisant and being able to perform intelligent operations. The former, but not the latter, minimally involves the capacity to make adequate judgements about one's relation to objects in the environment. The referential nature of cognisance entails that the mental states of cognisant systems must be inter-related holistically, such that an individual thought becomes possible because of its relation to a system of potential thoughts. I use Gareth Evans' 'Generality Constraint' as a means of describing how the (...) reference and holism of mental states in cognisant systems are mutually dependent. Next, I describe attempts to deny the relevance of holism and reference by positing a mentalese. These attempts fail because the meanings of symbols are under determined, with there being no principled means of distinguishing between the mental tokening of a symbol and its disambiguation. I argue that the connectionist meta-theory does not encounter this problem because it is able to encompass the holism of the mental. Recent attempts to show that symbol processing theories of thought must be preferred to connectionist theories do not work. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Generality Constraint favours connectionist not symbol-processing theories. (shrink)