Are minds really dynamical or are they really symbolic? Because minds are bundles of computations, and because computation is always a matter of interpretation of one system by another, minds are necessarily symbolic. Because minds, along with everything else in the universe, are physical, and insofar as the laws of physics are dynamical, minds are necessarily dynamical systems. Thus, the short answer to the opening question is “yes.” It makes sense to ask further whether some of the computations that constitute (...) a human mind are constrained by functional, algorithmic, or implementational factors to be essentially of the discrete symbolic variety (even if they supervene on an apparently continuous dynamical substrate). I suggest that here too the answer is “yes” and discuss the need for such discrete, symbolic cognitive computations in communication-related tasks. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to use the epistemological framework of a specific version of Cognitive Constructivism to address Piaget’s central problem of knowledge construction, namely, the re-equilibration of cognitive structures. The distinctive objective character of this constructivist framework is supported by formal inference methods of Bayesian statistics, and is based on Heinz von Foerster’s fundamental metaphor of objects as tokens for eigen-solutions. This epistemological perspective is illustrated using some episodes in the history of chemistry concerning the definition (...) or identification of chemical elements. Some of von Foerster’s epistemological imperatives provide general guidelines of development and argumentation. (shrink)

The theory of concepts advanced in the dissertation aims at accounting for a) how a concept makes successful practice possible, and b) how a scientific concept can be subject to rational change in the course of history. Traditional accounts in the philosophy of science have usually studied concepts in terms only of their reference; their concern is to establish a stability of reference in order to address the incommensurability problem. My discussion, in contrast, suggests that each scientific concept consists of (...) three components of content: 1) reference, 2) inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with the concept's use. I argue that in the course of history a concept can change in any of these three components, and that change in one component—including change of reference—can be accounted for as being rational relative to other components, in particular a concept's epistemic goal.This semantic framework is applied to two cases from the history of biology: the homology concept as used in 19th and 20th century biology, and the gene concept as used in different parts of the 20th century. The homology case study argues that the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory, despite introducing a new definition of homology, did not bring about a new homology concept (distinct from the pre-Darwinian concept) in the 19th century. Nowadays, however, distinct homology concepts are used in systematics/evolutionary biology, in evolutionary developmental biology, and in molecular biology. The emergence of these different homology concepts is explained as occurring in a rational fashion. The gene case study argues that conceptual progress occurred with the transition from the classical to the molecular gene concept, despite a change in reference. In the last two decades, change occurred internal to the molecular gene concept, so that nowadays this concept's usage and reference varies from context to context. I argue that this situation emerged rationally and that the current variation in usage and reference is conducive to biological practice.The dissertation uses ideas and methodological tools from the philosophy of mind and language, the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the psychology of concepts. (shrink)

Inferential Role Semantics is often criticized for being incompatible with the platitude that words of different speakers can mean the same thing. While many assume that this platitude can be accommodated by understanding sameness of meaning in terms of similarity of meaning, no worked out proposal has ever been produced for Inferential Role Semantics. I rectify this important omission by giving a detailed structural account of meaning similarity in terms of graph theory. I go on to argue that this account (...) has a number of attractive features, prominent among them that it makes sameness of meaning probabilistically determine co-reference. (shrink)

This paper deals with the problem of understanding semiosis and meaning in cognitive systems. To this aim we argue for a unified two-factor account according to which both external and internal information are non-independent aspects of meaning, thus contributing as a whole in determining its nature. To overcome the difficulties stemming from this approach we put forward a theoretical scheme based on the definition of a suitable representation space endowed with a set of transformations, and we show how it can (...) be implemented, in the case of a single agent, by a neural network architecture. Numerical experiments conducted on different instances of the latter show that similar representations are developed as a consequence of the fact that these instances are facing a similar semantic task. This allows to model social and environmental influences through a system of interacting agents, each described by a specific implementation of this model architecture. (shrink)

While extremes tend to capture attention, the ordinary is often most of the story. So it may be with the structure-mapping process. The structure-mapping process can account for such pinnacles of thinking as analogy and metaphor, which can lead to overlooking the mundane, incremental use of structure mapping. Consequently, the current discussion shifts focus to the value of close comparisons between literally similar items for the development of knowledge. The intent is to foster greater integration between process and content as (...) well as between individuals and collectives. The payoff is identifying some undue simplifications and some promising new directions. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is twofold. I first outline a philosophical theory of concepts based on conceptual role semantics. This approach is explicitly intended as a framework for the study and explanation of conceptual change in science. Then I point to the close similarities between this philosophical framework and the theory theory of concepts, suggesting that a convergence between psychological and philosophical approaches to concepts is possible. An underlying theme is to stress that using a non-atomist account of concepts (...) is crucial for the successful study of conceptual development and change. (shrink)

In an evolutionary perspective Louwerse elaborates the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis (Louwerse, 2011), arguing that language has evolved such that it maps onto the perceptual system, allowing to bootstrap meaning also when grounding is limited. The author concludes that in principle the processing of abstract and concrete words is the same and that in both cases language users tend to rely anyway on indexical relationships that words entertain with other words.

The ability to make informative comparisons is central to human cognition. Comparison involves aligning two representations and placing their elements into correspondence. Detecting correspondences is a necessary component of analogical inference, recognition, categorization, schema formation, and similarity judgment. Connectionist Analogy Builder (CAB) determines correspondences through a simple iterative computation that matches elements in one representation with elements playing compatible roles in the other representation while simultaneously enforcing structural constraints. CAB shows promise as a process model of comparison as its performance (...) can be related to human performance (e.g., solution trajectory, error patterns, time‐on‐task). Furthermore, CAB's bounded working memory allows it to account for the inherent capacity limitations of human processing. CAB's strengths are its parsimony, transparency of operations, and ability to generate performance predictions. In this paper, CAB is evaluated against benchmark phenomena from the analogy literature. (shrink)

Cognitive science continues to make a compelling case for having a coherent, unique, and fundamental subject of inquiry: What is the nature of minds, where do they come from, and how do they work? Central to this inquiry is the notion of agents that have goals, one of which is their own persistence, who use dynamically constructed knowledge to act in the world to achieve those goals. An agentive perspective explains why a special class of systems have a cluster of (...) co‐occurring capacities that enable them to exhibit adaptive behavior in a complex environment: perception, attention, memory, representation, planning, and communication. As an intellectual endeavor, cognitive science may not have achieved a hard core of uncontested assumptions that Lakatos (1978) identifies as emblematic of a successful research program, but there are alternative conceptions according to which cognitive science has been successful. First, challenges of the early, core tenet of “Mind as Computation” have helped put cognitive science on a stronger foundation—one that incorporates relations between minds and their environments. Second, even if a full cross‐disciplinary theoretic consensus is elusive, cognitive science can inspire distant, deep, and transformative connections between pairs of fields. To be intellectually vital, cognitive science need not resemble a traditional discipline with its associated insularity and unchallenged assumptions. Instead, there is strength and resilience in the diverse perspectives and methods that cognitive science assembles together. This interdisciplinary enterprise is fragile and perhaps inherently unstable, as the looming absorption of cognitive science into psychology shows. Still, for many researchers, the excitement and benefits of triangulating on the nature of minds by integrating diverse cases cannot be secured by a stable discipline with an uncontested core of assumptions. (shrink)