scholarly journals Legal Concepts as Mental Representations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Jakubiec
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Cognitive Tools ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Aspect ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
Mental Constructs

AbstractAlthough much ink has been spilled on different aspects of legal concepts, the approach based on the developments of cognitive science is a still neglected area of study. The “mental” and cognitive aspect of these concepts, i.e., their features as mental constructs and cognitive tools, especially in the light of the developments of the cognitive sciences, is discussed quite rarely. The argument made by this paper is that legal concepts are best understood as mental representations. The piece explains what mental representations are and why this view matters. The explanation of legal concepts, understood as mental representations is one of (at least) three levels of explanation within legal philosophy, but—as will be argued—it is the most fundamental level. This paper analyzes the consequences of such understanding of concepts used in the field of legal philosophy. Special emphasis is put on the current debate on the analogical or amodal nature of concepts.

scholarly journals Representations, Affordances, and Interactive Systems

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Robert Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Data Structures ◽  
Digital Computer ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Interactive Systems ◽  
Algorithmic Composition ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The history of algorithmic composition using a digital computer has undergone many representations—data structures that encode some aspects of the outside world, or processes and entities within the program itself. Parallel histories in cognitive science and artificial intelligence have (of necessity) confronted their own notions of representations, including the ecological perception view of J.J. Gibson, who claims that mental representations are redundant to the affordances apparent in the world, its objects, and their relations. This review tracks these parallel histories and how the orientations and designs of multimodal interactive systems give rise to their own affordances: the representations and models used expose parameters and controls to a creator that determine how a system can be used and, thus, what it can mean.

Historical Cognition and Cognitive Sciences: New in Russian Historiography

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Lidia Sofronova
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Analytical Review ◽  
Science Disciplines

The article presents an analytical review of the recent literature on cognitive history, especially the Russian collective monograph “Cognitive Sciences and Historical Cognition”, published in 2020. It traces the patterns typical for interdisciplinary research not only within the humanitarian disciplines, but also at the “borders” between the humanities and the “natural sciences”. The article highlights the paradoxical and productive nature of the “mutual interventions” of cognitive science and the humanities, which contribute to overcoming “atomism” both within the humanities and at the “frontier” between them and the natural science disciplines.

The 7E Model of the Human Mind: Articulating a Plastic Self for the Cognitive Science of Religion

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-476
Author(s):  
Flavio A. Geisshuesler
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Religious Mind ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
Concrete Model

AbstractThis article proposes a 7E model of the human mind, which was developed within the cognitive paradigm in religious studies and its primary expression, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This study draws on the philosophically most sophisticated currents in the cognitive sciences, which have come to define the human mind through a 4E model as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Introducing Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” the study not only confirms the insight of the 4E model of the self as a decentered system, but it also recommends two further traits of the self that have been overlooked in the cognitive sciences, namely the negativity of plasticity and the tension between giving and receiving form. Finally, the article matures these philosophical insights to develop a concrete model of the religious mind, equipping it with three further Es, namely emotional, evolved, and exoconscious.

scholarly journals Neo-mechanistic explanatory integration for cognitive science: the problem of reduction remains

Sofia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Azevedo Leite
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Cognitive Models ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Cognitive Theories ◽  
Multi Level

One of the central aims of the neo-mechanistic framework for the neural and cognitive sciences is to construct a pluralistic integration of scientific explanations, allowing for a weak explanatory autonomy of higher-level sciences, such as cognitive science. This integration involves understanding human cognition as information processing occurring in multi-level human neuro-cognitive mechanisms, explained by multi-level neuro-cognitive models. Strong explanatory neuro-cognitive reduction, however, poses a significant challenge to this pluralist ambition and the weak autonomy of cognitive science derived therefrom. Based on research in current molecular and cellular neuroscience, the framework holds that the best strategy for integrating human neuro-cognitive theories is through direct reductive explanations based on molecular and cellular neural processes. It is my aim to investigate whether the neo-mechanistic framework can meet the challenge. I argue that leading neo-mechanists offer some significant replies; however, they are not able yet to completely remove strong explanatory reductionism from their own framework.

Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Cognitive Science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Bermúdez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Spatial Reasoning ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, this paper illustrates how highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa.

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Studies

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Miranda Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Research Context ◽  
Renaissance Studies

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in medieval and Renaissance studies on topics related to distributed cognition and to consider how the various chapters in this volume represent, reflect and advance work in this area. The volume brings together 14 chapters by international specialists working in the period between the ninth and the seventeenth century in the fields of law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine. The chapters revitalise our reading of medieval and Renaissance works by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the distributed nature of cognition. Together the chapters make evident the ways in which particular notions and practices of distributed cognition emerged from the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed during this period. This chapter attempts to put these contributions in their wider research context by examining how such topics have been approached by mainstream scholarship, earlier work in the cognitive sciences and by existing applications of distributed cognition theory. It draws out both more general features of distributed cognition and what was distinctive about medieval and Renaissance insights into (and superstitions about) the cognitive roles of the body and environment. Throughout this chapter, I reference the chapters in this volume that provide further information on topics covered or take forward the issues in question. In the concluding section, I turn to a fuller overview of the chapters themselves

Legal concepts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ake Frandberg
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Psychological Factors ◽  
Intellectual Structure ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
Criminal Intent ◽  
The One ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
Contextual Setting ◽  
General Scope

Concept-formation is an important component of law-formation. Well-developed legal orders are profoundly conceptual in nature. Throughout Western legal history, legislators have aimed at basing their law-making on concepts of a general scope (such as ‘property’, ‘possession’, ‘usufruct’, ‘criminal intent’ and many others) – and even more so legal scholars in their reconstruction and development of law. Legal thinking makes use of concepts with many different functions and varying logical status. A distinction can be made between concepts that are an integral part of law themselves (here called L-concepts) and concepts that belong to the professional vocabulary of lawyers and jurists in their handling of the law (J-concepts). Among the L-concepts there are on the one hand concepts whose meaning is totally determined by the rules of one single legal system and on the other hand concepts that pertain to two or more legal systems. The latter concepts have a comparative function. J-concepts provide lawyers with a language enabling them to give an intellectual structure to the legal material, to characterize and discuss the professional-juridical handling of law and the methods used for performing that task, to specify the functions of law and to formulate the underlying values of (the handling of) the legal system. There was a tendency in earlier legal philosophy to hypostasize legal concepts, for example, the concept of ‘right’ in classical natural-law doctrine: that is, to postulate real entities to which our concepts/terms refer. The legal philosophy of the twentieth century has to a large extent been a reaction against this tendency. This reaction has taken three different directions: (1) to reduce the abstract legal concepts to factual phenomena such as certain human behaviour or socio-psychological factors (mainly within US and Scandinavian realism); (2) to assign to legal concepts a normative ontological status, placing them in a world of norms, distinct from the world of facts; and (3) to analyse legal concepts in a contextual setting, that is, to find out how they function in actual legal discourse.

Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 93-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Gallagher ◽  
Francisco J. Varela
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
Science Of Mind ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Lines

In recent years there has been some hard-won but still limited agreement that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences. This realization comes in the wake of dismissive gestures made by philosophers of mind who mistakenly associate phenomenological method with untrained psychological introspection (e.g., Dennett 1991). For very different reasons, resistance is also found on the phenomenological side of this issue. There are many thinkers well versed in the Husserlian tradition who are not willing to consider the validity of a naturalistic science of mind. For them cognitive science is too computational or too reductionistic to be seriously considered as capable of explaining experience or consciousness. In some cases, when phenomenologists have seriously engaged the project of the cognitive sciences, rather than pursing a positive rapprochement with this project, they have been satisfied in drawing critical lines that identify its limitations. On the one hand, such negative attitudes are understandable from the perspective of the Husserlian rejection of naturalism, or from strong emphasis on the transcendental current in phenomenology.

scholarly journals Radiologia e ciência cognitiva: os avanços tecnológicos e a neurociência

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Francisco Alencar de Sousa ◽  
Vivaldo Medeiros Santos ◽  
Amanda Juliane da Silva Branco ◽  
Carmen Regina de Souza Franco ◽  
Luciana Takahashi Carvalho Ribeiro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Fundamental Factor ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Mapping Technology ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
New Research ◽  
Xix Century

O presente artigo é uma tentativa de reflexão sobre a relevância da radiologia no processo de transformação nos estudos das ciências cognitivas, a partir da segunda metade do século XIX. Desta forma, procurou-se explorar os procedimentos produzidos pela tecnologia de mapeamento do cérebro, como sendo fator fundamental no entendimento de como são as funções cerebrais e como o cérebro aprende. Para esta reflexão, o objetivo é trazer os processos de desenvolvimento técnico e teórico de equipamentos da radiologia que foram capazes de contribuir para os estudos das ciências cognitivas. Partiu-se da hipótese de que só a partir do desenvolvimento da área de radiologia que foi possível o avanço nos estudos das funções do cérebro. Espera-se que tais reflexões abram caminhos para novas pesquisas que pretendem explicar aptidões mentais como a linguagem, a memória e análises mais profundas, para descrever como os processos neuropsicológicos produzem o estado cognitivo.Descritores: Radiologia, Ciência Cognitiva, Tecnologia, Cérebro. Radiology and Cognitive Science: technological Advances and neuroscienceAbstract: The present article is an attempt to reflect on the relevance of radiology in the process of transformation in the studies of cognitive sciences, from the second half of the XIX century. In this way, we tried to explore the procedures produced by brain mapping technology, as a fundamental factor in understanding how brain functions are and how the brain learns. For this reflection, the objective is to bring the processes of technical and theoretical development of radiology equipment that were able to contribute to the studies of the cognitive sciences. It was hypothesized that only from the development of the radiology area that it was possible to advance in the studies of brain functions. It is hoped that such reflections will open the way to new research that seeks to explain mental abilities such as language, memory and deeper analysis to describe how neuropsychological processes produce cognitive status.Descriptors: Radiology, Cognitive Science, Technology, Brain. Radiología y ciencia cognitiva: avances tecnológicos y neurocienciaResumen: El presente artículo es un intento de reflexión sobre la relevancia de la radiología en el proceso de transformación en los estudios de las ciencias cognitivas, a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. De esta forma, se buscó explorar los procedimientos producidos por la tecnología de mapeo del cerebro, como siendo factor fundamental en el entendimiento de cómo son las funciones cerebrales y cómo el cerebro aprende. Para esta reflexión, el objetivo es traer los procesos de desarrollo técnico y teórico de equipos de radiología que fueron capaces de contribuir a los estudios de las ciencias cognitivas. Se partió de la hipótesis de que sólo a partir del desarrollo del área de radiología que fue posible el avance en los estudios de las funciones del cerebro. Se espera que tales reflexiones abran caminos para nuevas investigaciones que pretenden explicar aptitudes mentales como el lenguaje, la memoria y análisis más profundos, para describir cómo los procesos neuropsicológicos producen el estado cognitivo.Descriptores: Radiología, Ciencia Cognitiva, Tecnología, Cerebro.

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