Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

The paper outlines a model-theoretic framework for investigating and comparing a variety of mereotopological theories. In the first part we consider different ways of characterizing a mereotopology with respect to (i) the intended interpretation of the connection primitive, and (ii) the composition of the admissible domains of quantification (e.g., whether or not they include boundary elements). The second part extends this study by considering two further dimensions along which different patterns of topological connection can be classified - the strength of (...) the connection and its multiplicity. (shrink)

In a development that has still been hardly noticed by philosophers, a conception of ontology has been advanced in recent years in a series of extra-philosophical disciplines as researchers in linguistics, psychology, geography and anthropology have sought to elicit the ontological commitments (‘ontologies’, in the plural) of different cultures or disciplines. Exploiting the terminology of Quine, researchers in psychology and anthropology have sought to establish what individual human subjects, or entire human cultures, are committed to, ontologically, in their everyday cognition, (...) in much the same way in which philosophers of science have attempted to elicit the ontological commitments of the natural sciences. Thus they have engaged in inquiries designed to establish how folk ontologies (or folk biologies, folk theories of physics, folk psychologies, and so on) develop through infancy and childhood, or to establish the degree to which given elements of folk ontologies reflect universal features of the human cognitive system. In a parallel development, researchers in biomedicine developed what they called 'ontologies' as controlled vocabularies to ensure interoperability of the way in which, for example, genomic data is described in different biological disciplines. We describe in what follows some of the relations between these efforts and the more traditional concerns of philosophers. (shrink)

Finite-state methods are applied to the Russell-Wiener-Kamp notion of time (based on events) and developed into an account of interval relations and semi-intervals. Strings are formed and collected in regular languages and regular relations that are argued to embody temporal relations in their various underspecified guises. The regular relations include retractions that reduce computations by projecting strings down to an appropriate level of granularity, and notions of containment for partiality within and across such levels.

This article discusses an approach to characterizing movement patterns (paths/trajectories) of individual agents that allows for relating aspects of cognitive conceptualization of movement patterns with formal spatial characterizations. To this end, we adopt a perspective of characterizing movement patterns on the basis of perceptual and conceptual invariants that we term movement choremes (MCs). MCs are formally grounded by behaviorally validating qualitative spatio-temporal calculi. Relating perceptual and cognitive aspects of space and formal theories of spatial information has shown promise to foster (...) understanding of the semantics of movement patterns. Specifically, we discuss our approach in relation to existing qualitative formalisms such as the region connection calculus and the Egenhofer’s intersection formalisms. We show that the MC approach is compatible with these approaches but offers additional opportunities to improve the cognitive adequacy of these formalisms. We summarize this paper using a movement taxonomy that also provides guidance for future research. (shrink)