Review: Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi: The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

Mind ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 118 (469) ◽  
pp. 174-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Toribio
Dialogue ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kernohan

In a recent series of papers, Donald Davidson has put forward a challenging and original philosophy of mind which he has called anomalous monism. Anomalous monism has certain similarities to another recent and deservedly popular position: functionalist cognitive psychology. Both functionalism, in its materialist versions, and anomalous monism require token-token psychophysical identities rather than type-type ones. (Token identities are identities between individual events; type identities represent a stronger claim of identities between interesting sorts of events.) Both deny that psychology can be translated into, or scientifically reduced to, neurophysiology. Both are mentalistic theories, allowing psychology to make use of intentional descriptions in its theorizing. Anomalous monism uses a belief/desire/action psychology; cognitive science makes use of information-bearing states. But these similarities must not be allowed to conceal an essential difference between the two positions. Cognitive psychology claims to be a science, making interesting, lawlike generalizations for the purpose of explaining mental activity. Anomalous monism denies that psychology is a science by denying that psychological laws can be formulated. Davidson has other ideas for psychology connected with his work on meaning and truth. Hence, the title of one of his essays on anomalous monism is “Psychology as Philosophy”.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-28
Author(s):  
Pendaran S. Roberts ◽  
Joshua Knobe ◽  
Pendaran Roberts ◽  
Joshua Knobe

This conversation piece contains an interview with Joshua Knobe. It provides a useful introduction to what experimental philosophy is and the interdisciplinary collaborations it encourages. Pendaran Roberts and Joshua Knobe collaboratively developed this conversation piece via email. Joshua Knobe is a renowned experimental philosopher, who works on a range of philosophical issues, including philosophy of mind, action and ethics. He is a professor in the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is most known for what is now called the ‘Knobe effect’.


Author(s):  
Miranda Anderson

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


Author(s):  
Henrique de Morais Ribeiro

Psychophysical dualism — the distinction between mind and body — is the counterposition between essentially irreducible elements: the mind and body. Such a dualism implies the main ontological problem of the philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of mind: the mind-body problem (MBP). The dualism and the referred-to problem has been insistently discussed in the philosophical tradition and several solutions have been proposed. Such solutions are properly philosophical or require a scientific approach. First, I will expound the philosophical solution to the MBP proposed by Descartes, to be followed by an exposition of Ryle's criticisms to the solution. Second, from Ryle's criticism, I will deduce a scientific solution to the MBP related to the neural framework model of mind in cognitive science by means of what I call 'the principle of the embodiment of the mind.' Finally, I shall point out the philosophical difficulties that are to be found in using such a principle.


Philosophy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter P. Slezak

AbstractIn response to widespread doubts among professional philosophers (Russell, Horwich, Dietrich, McGinn, Chalmers), Stoljar argues for a ‘reasonable optimism’ about progress in philosophy. He defends the large and surprising claim that ‘there is progress on all or reasonably many of the big questions’. However, Stoljar's caveats and admitted avoidance of historical evidence permits overlooking persistent controversies in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are essentially unchanged since the 17thCentury. Stoljar suggests that his claims are commonplace in philosophy departments and, indeed, the evidence I adduce constitutes an indictment of the widely shared view among professional analytic philosophers.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tony James Scott

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-92
Author(s):  
Vladimir Konecni

This Opinion Article highlights three sets of important implications of the very recent work by C. Firestone and B. Scholl on the encapsulation of visual perception: (a) methodological implications, especially with regard to experimental areas of cognitive science, such as cognitive social psychology; (h) implications of interest to philosophers of mind, some of whose more extravagant recent claims have been based on the assumption of "top-down" cognitive effects on perception; and (c) implications that challenge some recent work in philosophical and psychological aesthetics regarding art expertise, as well as defend the logic of A. Danto's theorizing from attacks that are based on the assumption of "top-down- cognitive effects.


Philosophies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach human-level intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature.


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