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  1. Information Versus Knowledge in Confirmation Theory.Darrell Patrick Rowbottom - 2012 - Logique Et Analyse 226:137-149.
    I argue that so-called 'background knowledge' in confirmation theory has little, if anything, to do with 'knowledge' in the sense of mainstream epistemology. I argue that it is better construed as 'background information', which need not be believed in, justified, or true.
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  • The Explanatory Force of Dynamical and Mathematical Models in Neuroscience: A Mechanistic Perspective.David Michael Kaplan & Carl F. Craver - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):601-627.
    We argue that dynamical and mathematical models in systems and cognitive neuro- science explain (rather than redescribe) a phenomenon only if there is a plausible mapping between elements in the model and elements in the mechanism for the phe- nomenon. We demonstrate how this model-to-mechanism-mapping constraint, when satisfied, endows a model with explanatory force with respect to the phenomenon to be explained. Several paradigmatic models including the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model of bimanual coordination and the difference-of-Gaussians model of visual receptive fields are (...)
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  • Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches.Gualtiero Piccinini & Carl Craver - 2011 - Synthese 183 (3):283-311.
    We sketch a framework for building a unified science of cognition. This unification is achieved by showing how functional analyses of cognitive capacities can be integrated with the multilevel mechanistic explanations of neural systems. The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms , in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated (...)
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  • Evidence and Knowledge.Clayton Littlejohn - 2011 - Erkenntnis 74 (2):241-262.
    According to Williamson, your evidence consists of all and only what you know (E = K). According to his critics, it doesn’t. While E = K calls for revision, the revisions it calls for are minor. E = K gets this much right. Only true propositions can constitute evidence and anything you know non-inferentially is part of your evidence. In this paper, I defend these two theses about evidence and its possession from Williamson’s critics who think we should break more (...)
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  • Underdetermination and evidence.Alexander Bird - 2007 - In Bradley John Monton (ed.), Images of empiricism: essays on science and stances, with a reply from Bas C. van Fraassen. New York: Oxford University Press.
    I present an argument that encapsulates the view that theory is underdetermined by evidence. I show that if we accept Williamson's equation of evidence and knowledge, then this argument is question-begging. I examine ways of defenders of underdetermination may avoid this criticism. I also relate this argument and my critique to van Fraassen's constructive empiricism.
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  • On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
    By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...)
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  • Inference to the best explanation made coherent.Igor Douven - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (Supplement):S424-S435.
    Van Fraassen (1989) argues that Inference to the Best Explanation is incoherent in the sense that adopting it as a rule for belief change will make one susceptible to a dynamic Dutch book. The present paper argues against this. A strategy is described that allows us to infer to the best explanation free of charge.
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  • Practical reasoning and acceptance in a context.Michael E. Bratman - 1992 - Mind 101 (401):1-16.
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  • Curing cognitive hiccups: A defense of the extended mind.Andy Clark - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (4):163-192.
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  • Radical embodiment: Neural dynamics and consciousness.Evan Thompson & Francisco J. Varela - 2001 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (10):418-425.
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  • After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science.Tony Chemero & Michael Silberstein - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (1):1-27.
    We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal--environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some (...)
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  • Doing cognitive neuroscience: A third way.Frances Egan & Robert J. Matthews - 2006 - Synthese 153 (3):377-391.
    The “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches have been thought to exhaust the possibilities for doing cognitive neuroscience. We argue that neither approach is likely to succeed in providing a theory that enables us to understand how cognition is achieved in biological creatures like ourselves. We consider a promising third way of doing cognitive neuroscience, what might be called the “neural dynamic systems” approach, that construes cognitive neuroscience as an autonomous explanatory endeavor, aiming to characterize in its own terms the states and (...)
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  • The amazing predictive power of folk psychology.Ran Lahav - 1992 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1):99-105.
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  • Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
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  • Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
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  • Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.Paul M. Churchland - 1981 - Journal of Philosophy 78 (2):67-90.
    Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...)
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  • On the distinction between Peirce’s abduction and Lipton’s Inference to the best explanation.Daniel G. Campos - 2011 - Synthese 180 (3):419-442.
    I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peireean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peireean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In (...)
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  • Whose social values? Evaluating Canada’s ‘death of evidence’ controversy.Maya J. Goldenberg - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3):404-424.
    With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The (...)
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  • Evidence: wanted, alive or dead.Stathis Psillos - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3):357-381.
    This paper is meant to link the philosophical debate concerning the underdetermination of theories by evidence with a rather significant socio-political issue that has been taking place in Canada over the past few years: the so-called ‘death of evidence’ controversy. It places this debate within a broader philosophical framework by discussing the connection between evidence and theory; by bringing out the role of epistemic values in the so-called scientific method; and by examining the role of social values in science. While (...)
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  • Must cognition be representational?William Ramsey - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11):4197-4214.
    In various contexts and for various reasons, writers often define cognitive processes and architectures as those involving representational states and structures. Similarly, cognitive theories are also often delineated as those that invoke representations. In this paper, I present several reasons for rejecting this way of demarcating the cognitive. Some of the reasons against defining cognition in representational terms are that doing so needlessly restricts our theorizing, it undermines the empirical status of the representational theory of mind, and it encourages wildly (...)
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  • False-belief understanding in infants.Renée Baillargeon, Rose M. Scott & Zijing He - 2010 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (3):110-118.
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  • False-belief understanding in infants.Zijing He Renée Baillargeon, Rose M. Scott - 2010 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (3):110.
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  • On what there is.W. V. O. Quine - 1948 - Review of Metaphysics 2 (5):21-38.
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  • Confirmation, heuristics, and explanatory reasoning.Timothy McGrew - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):553-567.
    Recent work on inference to the best explanation has come to an impasse regarding the proper way to coordinate the theoretical virtues in explanatory inference with probabilistic confirmation theory, and in particular with aspects of Bayes's Theorem. I argue that the theoretical virtues are best conceived heuristically and that such a conception gives us the resources to explicate the virtues in terms of ceteris paribus theorems. Contrary to some Bayesians, this is not equivalent to identifying the virtues with likelihoods or (...)
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  • The explanatory role of content.Fred Dretske - 1988 - In Robert H. Grimm & Daniel Davy Merrill (eds.), Contents of Thought. Tucson.
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  • In defense of intentional psychology.Patricia Kitcher - 1984 - Journal of Philosophy 81 (February):89-106.
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  • Concepts as a working hypothesis.Samuel D. Taylor - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology (4):569-594.
    Some philosophers argue that all concepts cannot have the same representational structure, because no single kind of representation has been successful in accounting for the phenomena related to the formation and application of concepts. Here, I argue against this “appeal to cognitive science” by demonstrating that different theories of the kind concept cohere with different interpretations of the argument. To circumvent the threat of relativism, I argue that theories of concept should be understood as working hypotheses, which are provisionally accepted (...)
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  • The Explanatory Role of Concepts.Samuel D. Taylor & Gottfried Vosgerau - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1045-1070.
    Machery and Weiskopf argue that the kind concept is a natural kind if and only if it plays an explanatory role in cognitive scientific explanations. In this paper, we argue against this explanationist approach to determining the natural kind-hood of concept. We first demonstrate that hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist theories of concepts afford the kind concept different explanatory roles. Then, we argue that we cannot decide between hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist theories of concepts, because each endorses a different, but equally (...)
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  • Two kinds of explanatory integration in cognitive science.Samuel D. Taylor - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4573-4601.
    Some philosophers argue that we should eschew cross-explanatory integrations of mechanistic, dynamicist, and psychological explanations in cognitive science, because, unlike integrations of mechanistic explanations, they do not deliver genuine, cognitive scientific explanations. Here I challenge this claim by comparing the theoretical virtues of both kinds of explanatory integrations. I first identify two theoretical virtues of integrations of mechanistic explanations—unification and greater qualitative parsimony—and argue that no cross-explanatory integration could have such virtues. However, I go on to argue that this is (...)
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  • Systematizing the theoretical virtues.Michael N. Keas - 2017 - Synthese 1 (6):1-33.
    There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least three virtues that sequentially follow a repeating pattern of progressive disclosure and expansion. Systematizing the theoretical virtues in this manner clarifies each virtue and suggests how they might have a coordinated and cumulative (...)
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  • Précis of Inference to the Best Explanation, 2 nd Edition.Peter Lipton - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):421-423.
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  • Curing Cognitive Hiccups.Andy Clark - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (4):163-192.
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  • Deliberation, judgement and the nature of evidence.Jon Williamson - 2015 - Economics and Philosophy 31 (1):27-65.
    :A normative Bayesian theory of deliberation and judgement requires a procedure for merging the evidence of a collection of agents. In order to provide such a procedure, one needs to ask what the evidence is that grounds Bayesian probabilities. After finding fault with several views on the nature of evidence, it is argued that evidence is whatever is rationally taken for granted. This view is shown to have consequences for an account of merging evidence, and it is argued that standard (...)
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  • Mechanism.Carl Craver & William Bechtel - 2005 - In Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeifer (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge. pp. 469--478.
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  • Three- and four-year-old children's ability to use desire- and belief- based reasoning.Kimberly Wright Cassidy - 1998 - Cognition 66 (1):B1-B11.
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  • Cortical coordination dynamics and cognition.Steven L. Bressler & J. A. Scott Kelso - 2001 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (1):26-36.
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  • A developmental shift in processes underlying successful belief‐desire reasoning.Ori Friedman & Alan M. Leslie - 2004 - Cognitive Science 28 (6):963-977.
    Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247–254]. We tested (...)
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