Cognitive science began as a multidisciplinary endeavor to understand how the mind works. Since the beginning, cognitive scientists have been asking questions about the right methodologies and levels of explanation to pursue this goal, and make cognitive science a coherent science of the mind. Key questions include: Is there a privileged level of explanation in cognitive science? How do different levels of explanation fit together, or relate to one another? How should explanations at one level inform or constrain explanations at (...) some other level? Can the different approaches to the mind, brain, and culture be unified? The aim of this issue of topiCS is to provide a platform for discussing different answers to such questions and to facilitate a better understanding between the different strands of thinking about the right levels of explanation in cognitive science. (shrink)

Descriptive abstraction means omission of information from descriptions of phenomena. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between vertical and horizontal descriptive abstraction. Vertical abstracts away levels of mechanism or organization, while horizontal abstracts away details within one level of organization. The distinction is implicit in parts of the literature, but it has received insufficient attention and gone mainly unnoticed. I suggest that the distinction can be used to clarify how computational descriptions are formed in some variants of the mechanistic (...) account of physical computation. Furthermore, I suggest that, if this suggestion is adopted, it can be used to resolve what I call abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems raised against mechanistic account of physical computation. According to the abstraction problem, the mechanistic account of physical computation is conceptually confused in claiming that physical systems process computational, abstract properties. An existing solution distinguishes between descriptive and metaphysical abstraction, suggesting that the abstraction problem unnecessarily postulates metaphysically abstract entities. The solution has been criticized for leading to what I call hierarchy and generality problems: it results in two separate hierarchies, one physical and one computational, making it problematic both to account for the generality of computational descriptions and to specify how the two hierarchies are related to each other. Adopting the vertical-horizontal distinction and the view that computational descriptions are achieved by horizontal abstraction allows one to account for the generality of computational descriptions, and to form a single hierarchy in which there are no separate hierarchies in need of integration. (shrink)

In this commentary, I advocate for strict relations between Marr's levels of analysis. Under a strict relationship, each level is exactly implemented by the subordinate level. This yields two benefits. First, it brings consistency for multilevel explanations. Second, similar to how a sculptor chisels away superfluous marble, a modeler can chisel a computational-level model by applying constraints. By sculpting the model, one restricts the set of possible algorithmic- and implementational-level theories.

Behavioral welfare economics assigns different roles to preferences than either non-behavioral forms of welfare economics or theories outside of the domain of welfare economics. In particular...