Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and the use of (...) explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. (shrink)

Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitive science, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitive science with respect to generality and normativity. General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of cognitive science. Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize expected utility, and how norms should be established. These (...) kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of progress in cognitive science. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of findings in cognitive science. (shrink)

How neuropsychology is necessary but insufficient for understanding spirituality is explored. Multileveled spiritual requisites are systematically examined in terms of their neuropsychological constituents and limitations. The central “problem of integrity” is articulated via the “modularity” of our neuropsychology, and evidence is presented for disunities of self and consciousness. It is argued that the integrity of self or spirit is a contingent achievement rather than a necessary given. Integrating possibilities include belief, emotion, and relationships. Understanding integrity, and the transformations of self-surrender (...) and sacrifice, may require explicitly stepping beyond neuropsychology and including the self in a larger system. (shrink)

Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that cognitive (...) science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of objectivism vs constructivism in two areas,biology and cognitive science, which areintermediate between the natural sciences suchas physics (where objectivism is dominant) andthe human and social sciences (whereconstructivism is widespread). The issues inbiology and in cognitive science are intimatelyrelated; in each of these twin areas, the objectivism vs constructivism issue isinterestingly and rather evenly balanced; as aresult, this issue engenders two contrastingparadigms, each of which has substantialspecific scientific content. The neo-Darwinianparadigm in biology is closely resonant (...) withthe classical cognitivist paradigm in cognitivescience, and both of them are intrinsicallyobjectivist. The organismic paradigm inbiology, based on the concept of autopoiesis,is consonant with the paradigm of enaction incognitive science; the latter paradigms are bothprofoundly constructivist.In cognitive science, the objectivism vsconstructivism issue is internal to thescientific field itself and reflexivity isinescapable. At this level, strong ontologicalobjectivism is self-contradictory and thereforeuntenable. Radical constructivism isself-coherent; but it also rehabilitatesa weak form of objectivism as a pragmaticallyviable alternative. In conclusion, there is aneven-handed reciprocity between objectivistand constructivist perspectives. Finally, thearticle examines the consequences of thisconclusion for fields other than cognitivescience: biology; physics and the naturalsciences; and the human and social sciences. (shrink)

Currently, our official rationality is still of a Cartesian kind; we are still embedded in a mechanistic order that takes it that separate, countable entities (spatial forms), related logically to each other, are the only ‘things’ that matter to us—an order clearly suited to advances in robotics. Unfortunately, it is an order that renders invisible ‘relational things’, non-objective things that exist in time, in the transitions from one state of affairs to another, things that ‘point’ toward possibilities in the future, (...) which mean something to us. I have called such things, hermeneutical–dialogical ‘things’ as they gradually emerge in our back-and-forth, step-by-step relations to the others and otherneses in our surroundings; they consist in the ‘promissory’ things sustaining our trust in each other and in our authorities, in our social organizations and social institutions, and in our culture. Clearly, we need to understand better, not only what robots can, and cannot do, but also the long-term ethical and political implications of inserting robotic activities into our everyday ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings if we are to avoid the dystopian futures envisaged by some. Descartes’ aim of “making ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature,” forgets our larger task of our making ourselves into human beings—of doing together in dialog what we cannot do apart. (shrink)

El plan de estudios no preceptivo de historia de Educación Secundaria de Nueva Zelanda les permite a los maestros que tienen una gran experiencia intelectual en el conocimiento disciplinar la oportunidad de desarrollar programas innovadores que aborden los intereses de sus alumnos. El currículo o el marco de evaluación no requieren conocimiento de eventos históricos particulares, de personalidades o de temas concretos. Sin embargo, para el profesorado que no tiene una comprensión sólida de cómo funciona la disciplina de la historia, (...) la ausencia de límites plantea un desafío. La base para elegir contenidos o temas puede carecer de coherencia, ser en gran medida arbitraria y basarse en la experiencia limitada de individualidades en lugar de en los conocimientos especializados de los investigadores. Este artículo examina las implicaciones de un currículum de historia de alta autonomía con un enfoque basado en el conocimiento. En él se sostiene que, si los jóvenes deben tener acceso a formas intelectualmente poderosas de comprender el pasado, el conocimiento histórico debe diferenciarse entre los marcos disciplinares del pensamiento y el conocimiento que no requiere una dimensión crítica. (shrink)

Academic emotions can play a major role in students’ learning in their English classes. The literature about emotional scaffolding strategies is not widely developed; most of the studies merely focus on negative emotions in EFL contexts. However, in today’s world of varied psychological elements, it is more critical than ever before to scaffold students’ positive emotions to provide more opportunities for their classroom engagement. This study is to explore teachers’ strategies of enhancing students’ positive emotions in English classes in Iran. (...) To investigate the correspondence between students’ and teachers’ views on the effective emotional scaffolding strategies of English teachers, an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design was conducted. First, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 high school students of Salami School in Kazeroun to collect in-depth qualitative data. Then, the interview-based Likert scale questionnaires were distributed and completed by 60 high school English teachers in Kazeroun for the quantitative data. According to the teachers’ self-reports, expressing optimism and hope about the students’ future lives and prospective jobs was the most frequently used strategy. There was a significant difference among the teachers’ views on the emotional scaffolding strategies. Moreover, some of the strategies taken into consideration as effective strategies by the students are the least frequently used ones according to the teachers’ reports. The results and findings have several theoretical and practical implications for English teachers in EFL contexts; they might bolster their understanding of appropriate emotional scaffolding strategies preparing them to play a contributing role as great facilitators in English classes. (shrink)

This paper critiques the view, widely held by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, that psychological explanation is a matter of ascribing propositional attitudes (such as beliefs and desires) towards language-like propositions in the mind, and that cognitive mental states consist in intentional attitudes towards propositions of a linguistic quasi-linguistic nature. On this view, thought is structured very much like a language. Denial that propositional attitude psychology is an adequate account of mind is therefore, on this view, is tantamount to (...) eliminative materialism, the denial that human beings are thinking beings. -/- I dispute this on the basis of recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Mental models theory, on which thought is better understood as nonpropositional intentional psychology, accords better with the evidence and offers an alternative view to propositional attitude psychology -- one that means that the denial that that is propositional is not eliminative. However, I argue that propositional attitude psychology is a useful idealization, as classical mechanics is of relativity theory, strictly but not radically false, and useful for prediction and indeed, as long as its idealized character is born in mind, for explanation of behavior. (shrink)

The human adventure in education is one of imperfect expression, punctuated by moments of insight. Education cultivates these epiphanies and nurtures their possible continuation. But even without major or minor insights, education cultivates the appreciation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. An experimentalist's sensibility lies amid the humanist's grasp of the myriad ways of trying to understand our existence. To bridge discourse is to appreciate the languages of other cultures, which reveal the nuances of life and experience.

Well-known critics of AI such as Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Polanyi tend to confuse cybernetics with AI. Such a confusion is quite misleading and should not be overlooked. In the first place, cybernetics is not vulnerable to criticism of AI as cognitivistic and behaviouristic. In the second place, AI researchers are recommended to consider the cybernetics approach as a way of overcoming the limitations of cognitivism and behaviourism.

Our primary goal in this article is to discuss the cross-talk between biological and cultural factors that become manifested in the individual brain development, neural wiring, neurochemical homeostasis, and behavior. We will show that behavioral propensities are the product of both cultural and biological factors and an understanding of these interactive processes can provide deep insights into why people behave the way they do. This interdisciplinary perspective is offered in an effort to generate dialog and empirical work among scholars interested (...) in merging aspects of anthropology and neuroscience, and anticipates that biological and cultural anthropology converge. We discuss new theoretical developments, hypothesis-testing strategies, and cross-disciplinary methods of observation and data collection. We believe that the exigency of integrating anthropology and the neurosciences is indisputable and anthropology's role in an emerging interdisciplinary science of human behavior will be critical because its focus is, and has always been, on human biological and cultural systems. (shrink)

This paper sketches an alternative answer to James Jones's recent attempt to explore the implications of cognitive social learning theories of personality for issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and religious studies. Since the 1960s, two cognitive revolutions have taken place in scientific psychology: the first made cognition central to theories of perception, memory, problem solving, and so on; the second made cognition central to theories of learning and behavior, among others. Cognitive social learning theories find their place in the (...) latter revolution. Because of an ongoing naturalistic revolution in philosophy, these cognitive revolutions in psychology are having a profound effect on both descriptive and normative issues in epistemology and philosophy of science. From the naturalistic perspective, philosophy cannot adequately pursue its goals without the contributions of the empirical sciences, including psychology. The author concludes that the cognitive revolutions in psychology and the naturalistic revolution in philosophy have similar descriptive and normative import for the study of religion. (shrink)

The following article is a response to K. Mainzer's ‘Knowledge-Based Systems; Remarks on the Philosophy of Technology and Artificial Intelligence’. We show, that Mainzer does not reach any of his aimsto analyse the possibilities and limits of AI-technology.to reduce anxiousness and hostility against AI, which is motivated by phantastic speculations.to evaluate the factual impact of AI on our lives and on society.His article contributes on the contrary to phantastic speculations, which are not technologically justified in any way. There are two (...) main reasons for his misleading view: (a) the state of the art of knowledge-based systems is incorrectly described; (b) the roots, paradigms and alternatives to AI are not in the least sufficiently analysed. We examine issues (a) and (b) in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 we discuss, how the conclusions, which Mainzer draws, have to be modified. In analysing the lines of argumentation of Mainzer we try to clarify the methodological errors and the philosophical attitude of Mainzer, which is in many respects not adequate to the subject of the article. (shrink)

Today, the frequency and the rate of success resulting from advances in medicine have made organ transplantations an everyday occurrence. Still, organ transplantations and donations modify the subjective experience of human beings as regards the image they have of themselves, of body, of life and of death. If the concern of the quality of life and the survival of the patients is a completely human phenomenon, the fact remains that the possibility of organ transplantation and its justification depend a great (...) deal on the culture in which we live. The exploration of the philosophical tradition allows for a reconsideration of organ transplantation. If we listen to people who have experienced the decline of one of their organs and their own rebirth through the organ of someone else, we arrive at the conclusion that they went through an extreme experience in which nothing appeared as before. All those experiences intensify philosophical questionings on the meaning of life with respect to self fulfilment. The concept of nature as the experience of others can be an authentic source from which to nourish our thoughts about organ transplantation. However, and this is our hypothesis, we need something more if we are to decide something about our own life. We need a hermeneutical stance in relation to ourselves and to our world. Philosophical counselling, as a long established tradition originating with Pythagoras and later reframed by the German philosopher Achenbach could be useful in inspiring a reflection on the good life, chiefly as it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue. (shrink)

Behaviorism and mentalism are commonly considered to be mutually exclusive and conjunctively exhaustive options for the psychological explanation of behavior. Behaviorism and mentalism do differ in their characterization of inner causes of behavior. However, I argue that they are not mutually exclusive on the grounds that they share important foundational assumptions, two of which are the notion of an innerouter split and the notion of control. I go on to argue that mentalism and behaviorism are not conjunctively exhaustive either, on (...) the grounds that dropping these common foundational assumptions results in a distinctively different framework for the explanation of behavior. This third alternative, which is briefly described, is a version of non-individualism. (shrink)

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional relations between them, we should reject these assumptions.

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional relations between them, we should reject these assumptions. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The term ‘information’ is used extensively in biology, cognitive science and the philosophy of consciousness in relation to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘causation’. While ‘information’ is a term that serves a useful purpose in specific disciplines, there is much to the concept that is problematic. Part 1 is a critique of the stance that information is an independently existing entity. On this view, and in biological contexts, systems transmit, acquire, assimilate, decode and manipulate it, and in so doing, generate (...) meaning. I provide a detailed proposal in Part 2 that supports the claim that it is the dynamic form of a system that qualifies the informational nature of meaningful interactive engagement, that is, that information is dependent on dynamic form rather than that it exists independently. In Part 3, I reflect on the importance of the distinction between the independent and dependent stances by looking specifically at the implications for how we might better interpret causation and emergence. (shrink)

In this review essay, numerous historical errors in The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology by Bernard J. Baars are discussed. Approximately one-half of the book is devoted to interviews of people who have been important in the cognitive revolution, but several of the interviews are less informative than they might have been. Many of the interviews involved a minimum of interaction between Baars and the interviewees. Additionally, interesting topics, the nature of representation for example, are introduced but not considered in sufficient (...) detail to make a contribution to either cognitive science or the history of psychology. (shrink)

We intend to put into question two fundamental principles adopted by critical rationalism. One of them, explicitly proposed by Popper, argues that what is valid in logic is also in psychology. And the other, tacitly espoused, implies that epistemological verdicts have metascientific authority and validity. Regarding the second, we hold the view that to the conclusions arrived at by epistemology should not automatically be conferred metascientific authority and validity. To acquire metascientific import such conclusions also need to be derived from (...) the observation of the actual ways of producing scientific knowledge. The Hume-dependent manner with which Popper rejects induction exemplifies with emblematic strength the tendency to extend the conclusions of epistemology to philosophy of science. On one hand Popper endorses Hume’s argument about the lack of epistemic justification for induction, on the other, disagrees with the humean view that induction is routinely employed and should, therefore, be seen as a human or animal fact. Popper departs from Hume to argue that induction is not even a way of thinking; therefore, it can be employed neither by the layman nor by the scientist. Also in defense of the thesis that induction does not exist, Popper gives primacy to epistemology. More than an epistemological thesis, the theory that decrees that induction is not even a psychological fact requires empirical confirmation. For Popper being right, it is necessary to verify the theory that our minds always operate according to the model from the top down. And psychology not even provides the corroboration of Popper’s thesis. (shrink)