A Fundamental Circularity: In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Computer Model ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Field ◽  
Sense Of Direction ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mature Science

This chapter describes cognitive science. In its widest sense, the term cognitive science is used to indicate that the study of mind is in itself a worthy scientific pursuit. At this time, cognitive science is not yet established as a mature science. It does not have a clearly agreed upon sense of direction and a large number of researchers constituting a community. Rather, it is really more of a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Interestingly, an important pole is occupied by artificial intelligence—thus, the computer model of the mind is a dominant aspect of the entire field. The other affiliated disciplines are generally taken to consist of linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometimes anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. Each discipline would give a somewhat different answer to the question of what is mind or cognition, an answer that would reflect its own specific concerns.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sebastian Löbner ◽  
Thomas Gamerschlag ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Markus Schrenk ◽  
Henk Zeevat
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Structures ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empirical Means ◽  
Science Disciplines

AbstractIn order to help to explain cognition, cognitive structures are assumed to be present in the mind/brain. While the empirical investigation of such structures is the task of cognitive psychology, the other cognitive science disciplines like linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence have an important role in suggesting hypotheses. Researchers in these disciplines increasingly test such hypotheses by empirical means themselves. In philosophy, the traditional way of referring to such structures is via concepts, i.e. those mental entities by which we conceive reality and with the help of which we reason and plan. Linguists traditionally refer to the cognitive structures as meanings—at least those linguists with a mentalistic concept of meaning do who do not think of meaning as extra-mental entities.

Intentionalität und Bewusstsein in der frühen Neuzeit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Barth
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
Mental Acts ◽  
The Mind

How are we to explain the fact that we can refer to objects by means of mental acts? And what accounts for our being conscious of mental acts? René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz provide fascinating answers to these two central questions of the philosophy of mind. In this study, the concepts of both authors are analyzed in detail, compared with each other and related to current positions. The analyses show that Descartes represents a deflationary conception of consciousness (conscientia). Consciousness is "only" an aspect of intentionality that constitutes the essential feature of the Cartesian mind. The analyses of Leibniz unveil that he represents a far more complex and demanding conception of the mind in comparison to Descartes, which makes for a higher connectivity with contemporary convictions. The salient features of his position are the structural conception of intentionality and the distinction between two forms of consciousness (apperception and conscientia) that correspond to the phenomenal consciousness and the reflexive self-consciousness. In contrast to Descartes, Leibniz also assigns consciousness to non-rational animals in the form of apperception. Conscientia, on the other hand, is reserved for rational substances.

On the Philosophy of Cognitive Science

1998 ◽  
pp. 32-36
Author(s):  
Henrique de Morais Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Philosophy Of Cognitive Science ◽  
Irreducible Elements ◽  
Framework Model ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ontological Problem

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.

Metaphysics of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darragh Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

Philosophy of mind addresses fundamental questions about mental or psychological phenomena. The question held by many to be most fundamental of all is a metaphysical one, often labeled the “mind-body problem,” which concerns the relation between minds and material or physical phenomena. Physicalists (and/or materialists) contend that mental phenomena are physical, or at least that they may be accounted for in terms of physical phenomena (brains, for example). Dualists deny this, maintaining that mental phenomena have fundamentally nonphysical natures, so that to account for minds we must assume the existence of nonphysical substances or properties. Nowadays physicalism is more widely espoused than dualism, but physicalists differ over which physical states/properties should be considered relevant, and over the precise nature of the relation between physical and mental phenomena. This is one of four bibliography entries on the philosophy of mind, and this particular entry concentrates on this metaphysical issue of the relation between mental and physical/material phenomena. Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap between this and topics covered in the other three entries. For example, this entry includes authors who attack physicalism by arguing that it cannot account for the distinctive phenomenal qualities of conscious experiences; but that line of antiphysicalist argument features even more prominently in the entry on consciousness. Moreover, the other entries feature various issues that might perfectly properly be categorized as concerning the metaphysics of mind: for example, the debate between internalists—philosophers who hold that propositional attitudes (mental states such as beliefs and desires, which have representational contents) are intrinsic properties of minds/brains—and externalists, who think of certain attitudes as extrinsic or relational, is surely a question about the metaphysics of mind: but this is discussed in the entry on intentionality instead of here.

scholarly journals The Evolution of Moral Cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tony James Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Inheritance Model ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Evolution Of Mind ◽  
Dual Inheritance

<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>

scholarly journals Contribution of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Simulation of the Complex Human Mind

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 928-932
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Computational Procedures ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Interdisciplinary Theory ◽  
The Brain

The research incorporated encircles the interdisciplinary theory of cognitive science in the branch of artificial intelligence. It has always been the end goal that better understanding of the idea can be guaranteed. Besides, a portion of the real-time uses of cognitive science artificial intelligence have been taken into consideration as the establishment for more enhancements. Before going into the scopes of future, there are many complexities that occur in real-time which have been uncovered. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the brain and its procedures. It inspects the nature, the activities, and the elements of cognition. Cognitive researchers study intelligence and behavior, with an emphasis on how sensory systems speak to, process, and change data. Intellectual capacities of concern to cognitive researchers incorporate recognition, language, memory, alertness, thinking, and feeling; to comprehend these resources, cognitive researchers acquire from fields, for example, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, semantics, and anthropology. The analytic study of cognitive science ranges numerous degrees of association, from learning and choice to logic and planning; from neural hardware to modular mind organization. The crucial idea of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

scholarly journals Entity Realism About Mental Representations

Erkenntnis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Nanay
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Mental Representation ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Real ◽  
Entity Realism ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

Abstract The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations.

Selfless Minds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Distributed Networks ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Symbolic Processing ◽  
Recent Proposal ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Society Of Mind

This chapter looks at Marvin Minsky's and Seymour Papert's recent proposal to study the mind as a society, which takes the patchwork architecture of cognition as a central element. Minsky and Papert present a view in which minds consist of many “agents” whose abilities are quite circumscribed: each agent taken individually operates only in a microworld of small-scale or “toy” problems. This model of the mind as a society of numerous agents is intended to encompass a multiplicity of approaches to the study of cognition, ranging from distributed, self-organizing networks to the classical, cognitivist conception of localized, serial symbolic processing. The society of mind purports to be, then, something of a middle way in present cognitive science. This middle way challenges a homogenous model of the mind, whether in the form of distributed networks at one extreme or symbolic processers at the other extreme.

Searle Rediscovers What Was Not Lost

Dialogue ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-130
Author(s):  
Tim Kenyon
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Common Sense View ◽  
The Mind

John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to show that philosophy of mind since Descartes has been not merely false, but obviously false. The materialist tradition—as Searle encapsulates behaviourism, type and token identity theories, functionalism, Artificial Intelligence, and eliminativism—consists of more or less crazy positions, with a crucial shared trait: they “leave out” the mind, the very thing they were to explain. Searle's second concern is to sketch his own theory of mind, a “common-sense” view that is, he claims, obviously true, and thus is a sharp departure from the madness of the various received views of this century.

scholarly journals Psychopathology and the Enactive Mind

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Colombetti
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Specific Structure ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
The Mind ◽  
In Virtue Of

According to the "enactive" approach in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, mental states are neither identical with, nor reducible to, brain activity. Rather, the mind is enacted or brought forth by the whole situated living organism in virtue of its specific structure and organization. Although increasingly influential in cognitive science, the enactive approach has had little to do with psychopathology so far. This chapter first outlines this approach in some detail, and then illustrates its conceptual and methodological connections to psychopathology. It also provides some indications on how to develop a more explicitly "enactive psychopathology."

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