An alternate route toward a science of mind

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-703
Author(s):  
David A. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Alternate Route ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Science Of Mind ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Mental Events

Shepard has challenged psychologists to identify nonarbitrary principles of mind upon which to build a more explanatory and general cognitive science. I suggest that such nonarbitrary principles may fruitfully be sought not only in the laws of physics and mathematics, but also in the logical entailments of different categories of representation. In the example offered here, conceptualizing mental events as indexical with respect to the events they represent enables one to account parsimoniously for a wide range of empirical psychological phenomena. [Shepard]

scholarly journals Bad World: The Negativity Bias in International Politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic D.P. Johnson ◽  
Dominic Tierney
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Negative Information ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Positive Information ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Research

A major puzzle in international relations is why states privilege negative over positive information. States tend to inflate threats, exhibit loss aversion, and learn more from failures than from successes. Rationalist accounts fail to explain this phenomenon, because systematically overweighting bad over good may in fact undermine state interests. New research in psychology, however, offers an explanation. The “negativity bias” has emerged as a fundamental principle of the human mind, in which people's response to positive and negative information is asymmetric. Negative factors have greater effects than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phenomena, including cognition, motivation, emotion, information processing, decision-making, learning, and memory. Put simply, bad is stronger than good. Scholars have long pointed to the role of positive biases, such as overconfidence, in causing war, but negative biases are actually more pervasive and may represent a core explanation for patterns of conflict. Positive and negative dispositions apply in different contexts. People privilege negative information about the external environment and other actors, but positive information about themselves. The coexistence of biases can increase the potential for conflict. Decisionmakers simultaneously exaggerate the severity of threats and exhibit overconfidence about their capacity to deal with them. Overall, the negativity bias is a potent force in human judgment and decisionmaking, with important implications for international relations theory and practice.

Précis ofUnified theories of cognition

1992 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Newell
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Convincing Evidence ◽  
Syllogistic Reasoning ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Unified Theories

AbstractThe book presents the case that cognitive science should turn its attention to developing theories of human cognition that cover the full range of human perceptual, cognitive, and action phenomena. Cognitive science has now produced a massive number of high-quality regularities with many microtheories that reveal important mechanisms. The need for integration is pressing and will continue to increase. Equally important, cognitive science now has the theoretical concepts and tools to support serious attempts at unified theories. The argument is made entirely by presenting an exemplar unified theory of cognition both to show what a real unified theory would be like and to provide convincing evidence that such theories are feasible. The exemplar is SOAR, a cognitive architecture, which is realized as a software system. After a detailed discussion of the architecture and its properties, with its relation to the constraints on cognition in the real world and to existing ideas in cognitive science, SOAR is used as theory for a wide range of cognitive phenomena: immediate responses (stimulus-response compatibility and the Sternberg phenomena); discrete motor skills (transcription typing); memory and learning (episodic memory and the acquisition of skill through practice); problem solving (cryptarithmetic puzzles and syllogistic reasoning); language (sentence verification and taking instructions); and development (transitions in the balance beam task). The treatments vary in depth and adequacy, but they clearly reveal a single, highly specific, operational theory that works over the entire range of human cognition, SOAR is presented as an exemplar unified theory, not as the sole candidate. Cognitive science is not ready yet for a single theory – there must be multiple attempts. But cognitive science must begin to work toward such unified theories.

Neuroscience and the explanation of psychological phenomena

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 847-849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Revonsuo
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Actual Problem ◽  
Philosophy Of Neuroscience ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Biological Explanations ◽  
Different Levels

Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not well captured by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations across different levels of description can be extended to account for psychological phenomena. According to cognitive neuroscience, some neural levels of description at least are essential for the explanation of psychological phenomena, whereas, in traditional cognitive science, psychological explanations are completely independent of the neural levels of description. The challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to discover the levels of description appropriate for the neural explanation of psychological phenomena.

Relationship between the Wide Range Achievement Test 3 and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test

1998 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 963-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa D. Smith ◽  
Billy L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Learning Disabled ◽  
Achievement Test ◽  
Wide Range Achievement Test ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Individual Achievement ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Mean Differences ◽  
Education Resource ◽  
Wide Range Achievement

The present study examined the relationship between the Wide Range Achievement Test 3 and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test for a sample of children with learning disabilities in two rural school districts. Data were collected for 87 school children who had been classified as learning disabled and placed in special education resource services. Pearson product-moment correlations between scores on the two measures were significant and moderate to high; however, mean scores were not significantly different on Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic subtests of the Wide Range Achievement Test 3 compared to those for the Basic Reading, Spelling, and Mathematics Reasoning subtests of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test. Although there were significant mean differences between scores on Reading and Reading Comprehension and on Arithmetic and Numerical Operations, magnitudes were small. It appears that the two tests provide similar results when screening for reading spelling, and arithmetic.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Truth

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Semantic Paradox ◽  
Theories Of Truth ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
And Mathematics

This Handbook contains twenty-nine entries, covering a wide range of topics related to the theory of truth, and its applications in philosophy. It surveys how the concept of truth was understood in ancient and modern philosophy and major debates about truth during the emergence of analytic philosophy. It describes the received standard theories of truth in the current literature, including the coherence, correspondence, identity, and pragmatist theories. It examines the place of truth in metaphysics, focusing on truth-makers, propositions, determinacy, objectivity, deflationism, fictionalism, relativism, and pluralism. It explores broader applications of truth in philosophy, including ethics, science, and mathematics. Finally, it reviews formal work on truth and its application to semantic paradox.

The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim van Gelder
Keyword(s):  
Dynamical Systems ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Computational Approach ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Cognitive Agents ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dynamical Hypothesis

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.

scholarly journals The network structure affects the fixation probability when it couples to the birth-death dynamics in finite population

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. e1009537
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Dehghani ◽  
Amir Hossein Darooneh ◽  
Mohammad Kohandel
Keyword(s):  
Network Structure ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Finite Population ◽  
Small World ◽  
Fixation Time ◽  
Fixation Probability ◽  
Neutral Drift ◽  
Scale Free ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Mathematics

The study of evolutionary dynamics on graphs is an interesting topic for researchers in various fields of science and mathematics. In systems with finite population, different model dynamics are distinguished by their effects on two important quantities: fixation probability and fixation time. The isothermal theorem declares that the fixation probability is the same for a wide range of graphs and it only depends on the population size. This has also been proved for more complex graphs that are called complex networks. In this work, we propose a model that couples the population dynamics to the network structure and show that in this case, the isothermal theorem is being violated. In our model the death rate of a mutant depends on its number of neighbors, and neutral drift holds only in the average. We investigate the fixation probability behavior in terms of the complexity parameter, such as the scale-free exponent for the scale-free network and the rewiring probability for the small-world network.

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