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  1. Model-based abductive cognition: What thought experiments teach us.Lorenzo Magnani & Selene Arfini - forthcoming - Logic Journal of the IGPL.
    In this article, we want to demonstrate how thoughts experiments (TEs) incorporate cognitive structures—abductive inferences as conceptual metaphors—that reliably underpin everyday thinking and are enhanced and rendered more effective in scientific and philosophical contexts. Indeed one might successfully rethink the inferential structure at the heart of thought experiment production as the application of a generative abductive procedure. We shall characterize TES as possessing two characteristics that are essential to the definitions of abductive and metaphorical thinking, but when considered in relation (...)
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  • Models of Possibilities Instead of Logic as the Basis of Human Reasoning.P. N. Johnson-Laird, Ruth M. J. Byrne & Sangeet S. Khemlani - 2024 - Minds and Machines 34 (3):1-22.
    The theory of mental models and its computer implementations have led to crucial experiments showing that no standard logic—the sentential calculus and all logics that include it—can underlie human reasoning. The theory replaces the logical concept of validity (the conclusion is true in all cases in which the premises are true) with necessity (conclusions describe no more than possibilities to which the premises refer). Many inferences are both necessary and valid. But experiments show that individuals make necessary inferences that are (...)
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  • (1 other version)Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  • Logics and collaboration.Liz Sonenberg - 2023 - Logic Journal of the IGPL 31 (6):1024-1046.
    Since the early days of artificial intelligence (AI), many logics have been explored as tools for knowledge representation and reasoning. In the spirit of the Crossley Festscrift and recognizing John Crossley’s diverse interests and his legacy in both mathematical logic and computer science, I discuss examples from my own research that sit in the overlap of logic and AI, with a focus on supporting human–AI interactions.
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  • On the Evolution of Symbols and Prediction Models.Rainer Feistel - 2023 - Biosemiotics 16 (2):311-371.
    The ability of predicting upcoming events or conditions in advance offers substantial selective advantage to living beings. The most successful systematic tool for fairly reliable prognoses is the use of dynamical causal models in combination with memorised experience. Surprisingly, causality is a fundamental but rather controversially disputed concept. For both models and memory, symbol processing is requisite. Symbols are a necessary and sufficient attribute of life from its very beginning; the process of their evolutionary emergence was discovered by Julian Huxley (...)
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  • (1 other version)Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 1 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Intelligence as Accurate Prediction.Trond A. Tjøstheim & Andreas Stephens - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):475-499.
    This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...)
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  • A continuum of intentionality: linking the biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognition.Matthew Sims - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-31.
    Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify (...)
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  • Cognitive Models Are Distinguished by Content, Not Format.Patrick Butlin - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):83-102.
    Cognitive scientists often describe the mind as constructing and using models of aspects of the environment, but it is not obvious what makes something a model as opposed to a mere representation....
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  • Emergence of scientific understanding in real-time ecological research practice.Luana Poliseli - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4):1-25.
    Scientific understanding as a subject of inquiry has become widely discussed in philosophy of science and is often addressed through case studies from history of science. Even though these historical reconstructions engage with details of scientific practice, they usually provide only limited information about the gradual formation of understanding in ongoing processes of model and theory construction. Based on a qualitative ethnographic study of an ecological research project, this article shifts attention from understanding in the context of historical case studies (...)
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  • Iconic Propositions.Jesse J. Fitts - 2020 - Philosophia Scientiae 24:99-123.
    Je défends ici la nécessité, et ébauche une première version, d’une théorie iconique des propositions. Selon celle-ci, les propositions sont comme les objets de représentation, ou similaires à eux. Les propositions, suivant cette approche, sont des propriétés que l’esprit instancie lorsqu’il modélise le monde. Je connecte cette théorie aux récents développements de la littérature académique sur les propositions, ainsi qu’à une branche de recherches en sciences cognitives, qui explique certains types de représentations mentales en termes d’iconicité. I motivate the need (...)
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  • From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition.Andrew W. Corcoran, Giovanni Pezzulo & Jakob Hohwy - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (3):1-45.
    What is the function of cognition? On one influential account, cognition evolved to co-ordinate behaviour with environmental change or complexity. Liberal interpretations of this view ascribe cognition to an extraordinarily broad set of biological systems—even bacteria, which modulate their activity in response to salient external cues, would seem to qualify as cognitive agents. However, equating cognition with adaptive flexibility per se glosses over important distinctions in the way biological organisms deal with environmental complexity. Drawing on contemporary advances in theoretical biology (...)
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  • Learning System Thinking : The role of semiotic and cognitive resources.Maria Larsson - 2009 - Lund University Cognitive Studies 145.
    In the course of our educational life we are introduced to various subject areas, each with its specific way of representing knowledge. The challenge for the learner is to be able to think in ways that are supported by, and match, the representational format. A fundamental question for the science of learning concerns how this is achieved. In this thesis, it will be argued that by observing individuals collaboratively constructing their own graphic representations in a subject area that is new (...)
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  • (1 other version)Pictures, Plants, and Propositions.Alex Morgan - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (2):309-329.
    Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...)
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  • Where are Sunspots? The Practical Method of Galileo as an example of Mental Model.Tadeusz Sierotowicz - 2019 - Philosophical Problems in Science 66:129-141.
    After the publication of Sidereus Nuncius, in the controversy with Ch. Scheiner, Galileo developed several arguments on behalf of the hypothesis that sunspots are contiguous to the surface of the Sun, and presented them in his Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti. One of them, named by Galileo a Practical Method, advocates very clearly the correctness of the hypothesis. In the paper the method in question is briefly described. It is argued that the Practical Method is (...)
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  • Belief in altruistic human nature and prosocial behavior: a serial mediation analysis.Zhuojun Yao & Robert Enright - 2020 - Ethics and Behavior 30 (2):97-111.
    According to the theory of internal working model, belief in altruistic human nature positively influences prosocial behavior. However, the precise influencing mechanism remains unclear. Based on the determinants of human behavior theory and self-efficacy theory, we hypothesized that belief in altruistic human nature indirectly influences prosocial behavior through causally linked multiple mediators of prosocial attitude and prosocial self-efficacy. The results of the current research supported our hypothesis and demonstrated that this serial mediation model could be generalized across individualistic and collectivistic (...)
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  • Ontic Explanation Is either Ontic or Explanatory, but Not Both.Cory Wright & Dingmar van Eck - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5:997–1029.
    What features will something have if it counts as an explanation? And will something count as an explanation if it has those features? In the second half of the 20th century, philosophers of science set for themselves the task of answering such questions, just as a priori conceptual analysis was generally falling out of favor. And as it did, most philosophers of science just moved on to more manageable questions about the varieties of explanation and discipline-specific scientific explanation. Often, such (...)
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  • The Fallacy of the Homuncular Fallacy.Carrie Figdor - 2018 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 31 (31):41-56.
    A leading theoretical framework for naturalistic explanation of mind holds that we explain the mind by positing progressively "stupider" capacities ("homunculi") until the mind is "discharged" by means of capacities that are not intelligent at all. The so-called homuncular fallacy involves violating this procedure by positing the same capacities at subpersonal levels. I argue that the homuncular fallacy is not a fallacy, and that modern-day homunculi are idle posits. I propose an alternative view of what naturalism requires that reflects how (...)
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  • Explaining the reified notion of representation from a linguistic perspective.Farid Zahnoun - 2020 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (1):79-96.
    Despite the growing popularity of nonrepresentationalist approaches to cognition, and especially of those coming from the enactivist corner, positing internal representations is still the order of the day in mainstream cognitive science. Indeed, the idea that we have to invoke internal content-carrying, thing-like entities to account for the workings of mind and cognition proves to be particularly resilient. In this paper, my aim is to explain at least partially where this resilience of the reified notion of representation comes from. What (...)
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  • (1 other version)Pictures, Plants, and Propositions.Alex Morgan - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (2):309-329.
    Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...)
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  • Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning.Sangeet S. Khemlani, Ruth M. J. Byrne & Philip N. Johnson-Laird - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (6):1887-1924.
    This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is defeasible (...)
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  • From Computer Metaphor to Computational Modeling: The Evolution of Computationalism.Marcin Miłkowski - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (3):515-541.
    In this paper, I argue that computationalism is a progressive research tradition. Its metaphysical assumptions are that nervous systems are computational, and that information processing is necessary for cognition to occur. First, the primary reasons why information processing should explain cognition are reviewed. Then I argue that early formulations of these reasons are outdated. However, by relying on the mechanistic account of physical computation, they can be recast in a compelling way. Next, I contrast two computational models of working memory (...)
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  • Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modeling.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (4):1261-1286.
    This paper presents and argues for an account of objectual understanding that aims to do justice to the full range of cases of scientific understanding, including cases in which one does not have an explanation of the understood phenomenon. According to the proposed account, one understands a phenomenon just in case one grasps a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive model of the ways in which it or its features are situated within a network of dependence relations; one’s degree of understanding is (...)
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  • Neural Representations Observed.Eric Thomson & Gualtiero Piccinini - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (1):191-235.
    The historical debate on representation in cognitive science and neuroscience construes representations as theoretical posits and discusses the degree to which we have reason to posit them. We reject the premise of that debate. We argue that experimental neuroscientists routinely observe and manipulate neural representations in their laboratory. Therefore, neural representations are as real as neurons, action potentials, or any other well-established entities in our ontology.
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  • Philosophy of Modeling: Neglected Pages of History.Karlis Podnieks - 2018 - Baltic Journal of Modern Computing 6 (3):279–303.
    The work done in the philosophy of modeling by Vaihinger (1876), Craik (1943), Rosenblueth and Wiener (1945), Apostel (1960), Minsky (1965), Klaus (1966) and Stachowiak (1973) is still almost completely neglected in the mainstream literature. However, this work seems to contain original ideas worth to be discussed. For example, the idea that diverse functions of models can be better structured as follows: in fact, models perform only a single function – they are replacing their target systems, but for different purposes. (...)
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  • From symbols to icons: the return of resemblance in the cognitive neuroscience revolution.Daniel Williams & Lincoln Colling - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):1941-1967.
    We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...)
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  • (4 other versions)Behaviorism at fifty.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):615.
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  • Toward mechanistic models of action-oriented and detached cognition.Giovanni Pezzulo - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    To be successful, the research agenda for a novel control view of cognition should foresee more detailed, computationally specified process models of cognitive operations including higher cognition. These models should cover all domains of cognition, including those cognitive abilities that can be characterized as online interactive loops and detached forms of cognition that depend on internally generated neuronal processing.
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  • Why being dialogical must come before being logical: the need for a hermeneutical–dialogical approach to robotic activities.John Shotter - 2019 - AI and Society 34 (1):29-35.
    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, (...)
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  • Illusions in Reasoning.Sangeet S. Khemlani & P. N. Johnson-Laird - 2017 - Minds and Machines 27 (1):11-35.
    Some philosophers argue that the principles of human reasoning are impeccable, and that mistakes are no more than momentary lapses in “information processing”. This article makes a case to the contrary. It shows that human reasoners commit systematic fallacies. The theory of mental models predicts these errors. It postulates that individuals construct mental models of the possibilities to which the premises of an inference refer. But, their models usually represent what is true in a possibility, not what is false. This (...)
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  • Visual anticipation biases conscious decision making but not bottom-up visual processing.Zenon Mathews, Ryszard Cetnarski & Paul F. M. J. Verschure - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • Intelligibility and the CAPE: Combatting Anti-psychologism about Explanation.Jonathan Waskan - unknown
    Much of the philosophical discussion of explanations has centered around two broad conceptions of what sorts of ‘things’ explanations are – namely, the descriptive and ontic conceptions. Defenders of each argue that scientific psychology has at best little to contribute to the study of explanations. These anti-psychologistic arguments come in two main varieties, the metaphysical and the epistemic. Both varieties trace back to Hempel and recur in the more recent writings of prominent mechanists. The metaphysical arguments attempt to combat psychologism (...)
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  • Construction and Revision of Spatial Mental Models under High Task Demand.Jelica Nejasmic, Leandra Bucher, Paul D. Thorn & Markus Knauff - 2014 - In Paul Bello, Marcello Guarini, Marjorie McShane & Brian Scassellati (eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 1066-72.
    Individuals often revise their beliefs when confronted with contradicting evidence. Belief revision in the spatial domain can be regarded as variation of initially constructed spatial mental models. Construction and revision usually follow distinct cognitive principles. The present study examines whether principles of revisions which follow constructions under high task demands differ from principles applied after less demanding constructions. We manipulated the task demands for model constructions by means of the continuity with which a spatial model was constructed. We administered tasks (...)
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  • Commentary on Polansky.Martin Andic - 1999 - Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 15 (1):87-100.
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  • Book reviews. [REVIEW]Craig DeLancey, Rick Grush, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, R. Keith Sawyer, Benny Shanon, Alberto Greco & John A. Barker - 1997 - Philosophical Psychology 10 (2):231-257.
    Consciousness and experience, William G. Lycan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 0–262–12197–2 (hc)Mind as motion: explorations in the dynamics of cognition, Robert Port & Timothy Van Gelder (Eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford, 1995. ISBN 0–262–16150–8Perception, Kathleen Akins (Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0–19–508461 (hbk); 0–19–508462–4 (pbk)Context and consciousness, B. Nardi (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN: 0–262–14058–6Catching ourselves in the act, Horst Hendriks‐Jansen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 0–262–08246–2The search for mind. A new foundation for (...)
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  • Mental models and probabilistic thinking.Philip N. Johnson-Laird - 1994 - Cognition 50 (1-3):189-209.
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  • God, the devil, and the details: Fleshing out the predictive processing framework.Daniel Rasmussen & Chris Eliasmith - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3):223-224.
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  • Models, rules and expertise.Rosemary J. Stevenson - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):366-366.
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  • Scientific thinking and mental models.Ryan D. Tweney - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):366-367.
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  • There is no need for (even fully fleshed out) mental models to map onto formal logic.Paul Pollard - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):363-364.
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  • Do mental models provide an adequate account of syllogistic reasoning performance?Stephen E. Newstead - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):359-360.
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  • The content of mental models.Paolo Legrenzi & Maria Sonino - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):354-355.
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  • Models for deontic deduction.K. I. Manktelow - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):357-357.
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  • Situation theory and mental models.Alice G. B. ter Meulen - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):358-359.
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  • Deductive reasoning: What are taken to be the premises and how are they interpreted?Samuel Fillenbaum - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):348-349.
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  • Why study deduction?Kathleen M. Galotti & Lloyd K. Komatsu - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):350-350.
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  • Rule systems are not dead: Existential quantifiers are harder.Richard E. Grandy - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):351-352.
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  • Mental models: Rationality, representation and process.D. W. Green - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):352-353.
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  • The logical content of theories of deduction.Wilfrid Hodges - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):353-354.
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  • Mental-model theory and rationality.Pascal Engel - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (2):345-345.
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