According to the dominant computational approach in cognitive science, cognitive agents are digital computers; according to the alternative approach, they are dynamical systems. This target article attempts to articulate and support the dynamical hypothesis. The dynamical hypothesis has two major components: the nature hypothesis (cognitive agents are dynamical systems) and the knowledge hypothesis (cognitive agents can be understood dynamically). A wide range of objections to this hypothesis can be rebutted. The conclusion is that cognitive systems may well be dynamical systems, (...) and only sustained empirical research in cognitive science will determine the extent to which that is true. (shrink)

Was genau ist eigentlich eine Ich-Störung? Ich werde auf den folgenden Seiten dafür argumentieren, daß man die Natur dieses Typs von psychiatrischen Störungsbildern besser verstehen kann, indem man einen Blick über die medizinischen Fachgrenzen hinweg in die analytische Philosophie des Geistes [1] und in die Kognitionswissenschaft [2] wirft. Beiden Disziplinen ist gemeinsam, daß mentale Zustände dort häufig einer funktionalen Analyse unterzogen und als Informationsverarbeitungsereignisse beschrieben werden. Das bedeutet, daß mentale Zustände dabei zunächst mit Blick auf die kausale Rolle untersucht werden, (...) die sie im System spielen. Das System selbst wird als natürlich entstandenes Informationsverarbeitungssystem mit einer langen biosozialen Geschichte analysiert, welches Repräsentationen der Welt und von sich selbst in ihr erzeugt. Psychiatrische Störungsbilder sind unter dieser Perspektive Störungen des Informationsflusses, insbesondere Störungen in der Art und Weise, in der es die Welt und sich selbst.. (shrink)

The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. --œPhysically embodied, environmentally embedded--� approaches thus loom large on the contemporary cognitive scientific scene. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely embodied, embedded science of the mind is still unclear. I begin by sketching a few examples of the approach, and (...) then raise a variety of critical questions concerning its nature and scope. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: 'simple' cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing, and more radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. (shrink)

A Karger 'Publishing Highlights 1890-2015' title These three volumes are the revised and enlarged edition of a classic work hailed as bringing a new perspective to knowledge of the mind-brain relationship. In the tradition of highest scholarship, the author uses both neurological and epistemological approaches to provide a unique interpretation of the relationship of brain and consciousness.

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between the (...) two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)