scholarly journals On the Bodily Basis of Human Cognition: A Philosophical Perspective on Embodiment

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitabha Das Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Human Embodiment ◽  
Field Of Inquiry ◽  
New Framework

This paper seeks to show that human cognition cannot be characterised purely in mentalistic term. It has a bodily basis and cognition is thus the product of the interplay between mind, body, and brain. This is how the idea of embodiment and its importance is realised and gets its foothold in both philosophy and cognitive science. This brings a radical change introducing a new framework for philosophy and cognitive science. In this new change philosophy and cognitive science have a special role to play which this paper seeks to explore. Philosophy in its capacity as a conceptual inquiry provides justification for human embodiment on a conceptual ground whereas cognitive science provides the same on an empirical and experimental ground. This brings the two disciplines closer resulting into a new field of inquiry which can be best described as the interface between philosophy and cognitive science. An important consequence that follows from this alignment is that the traditional epistemological distinction between the a priori and the empirical can no longer be rigidly maintained.

Kant's Theory of Musical Sound: An Early Exercise in Cognitive Science

Dialogue ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Robert E. Butts
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Early Exercise ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
Sensus Communis

Kant is well known as the philosopher who spent his life hunting for a prioris, philosophically identifiable characteristics of the make-up of human beings. These characteristics are species-universal, and are necessary presuppositions of the possibility of the success of various kinds of cognitive and cultural strategies. Kant bagged some big game. Space, time and the categories are a priori conditions of the possibility of human cognition. God, freedom and immortality are a priori conditions of the possibility of morality. The sensus communis is the a priori condition of the possibility of the universalization of judgments of taste. The hard-won trophies are presuppositions of possibilities. Once they were thought to be properties of a universe well ordered by a substantive god. No longer. Now we must look upon them as entrenched contributions of what it is to be human, as preconditions of human potentialities.

Language as a mental travel guide

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Eiling Yee
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Travel Guide

Abstract Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.

scholarly journals The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110078
Author(s):  
Romit Chowdhury ◽  
Colin McFarlane
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Urban Density ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Human Embodiment

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.

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.

A new framework for defining a priori grids in 2D runoff modelsat basin scale

2020 ◽  
pp. 1997-2005
Author(s):  
Domenico Ferraro ◽  
Pierfranco Costabile ◽  
Carmelina Costanzo ◽  
Gabriella Petaccia ◽  
Francesco Macchione
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Basin Scale ◽  
New Framework

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.

scholarly journals On the Subject of Objects: Four Views on Object Perception and Tool Use

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarja Susi ◽  
Tom Ziemke
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Theoretical Biology ◽  
Object Perception ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
Functional Tone

This paper addresses the relation between an agent and its environment, and more specifically, how subjects perceive object/artefacts/tools and their (possible) use. Four different conceptions of the relation between subject and object are compared here: functional tone (von Uexküll), equipment (Heidegger), affordance (Gibson), and entry point (Kirsh). even as these concepts have developed within different disciplines (theoretical biology, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science) and in very different historical contexts, they are used more or less interchangeably in much of the literature, and typically conflated under the label of ‘affordance’. However, at closer inspection, they turn out to have not only similarities, but also substantial differences, which are identified and discussed here. Given that the relation between subjects and their objects is crucial to understanding human cognition and interaction with tools and technology, as well as robots’ interaction with their environment, we argue that these differences deserve some more attention than they have received so far.

A Dynamical, Self-Organized View of the Context for Linguistic Performance

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-86
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Linguistic Performance ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Temporal Process ◽  
The World ◽  
Organizational View

Most everyone agrees that context is critical to the pragmatic interpretation of speakers’ utterances. But the enduring debate within cognitive science concerns when context has its influence in shaping people’s interpretations of what speakers imply by what they say. Some scholars maintain that context is only referred to after some initial linguistic analysis of an utterance has been performed, with other scholars arguing that context is present at all stages of immediate linguistic processing. Empirical research on this debate is, in my view, hopelessly deadlocked. My goal in this article is to advance a framework for thinking about the context for linguistic performance that conceives of human cognition and language use in terms of dynamical, self-organized processes. A self-organizational view of the context for linguistic performance demands that we acknowledge the multiple, interacting constraints which create, or soft-assemble, any specific moment of pragmatic experience. Pragmatic action and understanding is not producing or recovering a “meaning” but a continuously unfolding temporal process of the person adapting and orienting to the world. I discuss the implications of this view for the study of pragmatic meaning in discourse.

Knowledge, belief, and moral psychology

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mikhail
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Representations ◽  
Knowledge Attributions ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Strong Case ◽  
Synthetic A Priori ◽  
The Law

Abstract Phillips et al. make a strong case that knowledge representations should play a larger role in cognitive science. Their arguments are reinforced by comparable efforts to place moral knowledge, rather than moral beliefs, at the heart of a naturalistic moral psychology. Conscience, Kant's synthetic a priori, and knowledge attributions in the law all point in a similar direction.

What Do We Mean “Human Experience”?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Human Embodiment

This chapter examines human experience. It is necessary to have a disciplined perspective on human experience that can enlarge the domain of cognitive science to include direct experience. Such a perspective already exists in the form of mindfulness/awareness meditation. Mindfulness/awareness practice, phenomenological philosophy, and science are human activities; each is an expression of human embodiment. The chapter then looks at the Buddhist method of examining experience called mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness/awareness meditation can provide a natural bridge between cognitive science and human experience. Particularly impressive is the convergence among some of the main themes of Buddhist doctrine, phenomenology, and cognitive science—themes concerning the self and the relation between subject and object.

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