Although Wittgenstein’s influence on logic and foundations of mathematics is well recognized, nonetheless, his legacy concerning other sciences is much less elucidated, and in this article we aim at shedding new light on physics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science from a Wittgensteinian perspective. We focus upon three issues amongst other things: the Chosmky versus Norvig debate on the nature of language; a Neo-Kantian parallelism between Bohr’s philosophy of physics and Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics; the relationships between cognitive (...) contextuality and physical contextuality as shown by recent Bell-type results. The Chosmky versus Norvig debate may be seen as a battle between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later conceptions of meaning, i.e., picture theory and use theory. From a Wittgensteinian point of view, quantum physics may be seen as a physical version of the Linguistic Turn. The parallelism between Bohr’s philosophy of classical concepts and Hilbert’s philosophy of finitism builds upon transcendental philosophy in the Kantian tradition, both Bohr and Hilbert having been influenced by Neo-Kantian thinkers, such as Hertz, whose sign theory is actually a common root of Wittgenstein’s picture theory and Hilbert’s axiomatics. Wittgenstein is considered a root of contextualism in contemporary philosophy. Contextuality has different manifestations in physics and cognitive science, and contextuality studies across the sciences are rapidly developing in cutting-edge research. We elucidate both analogies and disanalogies between contextuality of reality and contextuality of reason in terms of the nature of probabilities involved. In passing, we also give a reformulation of Penrose’s quantum mind thesis. (shrink)

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and (...) cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

Different researchers from psychology and neuroscience state that navigation involves the manipulation of cognitive maps and graphs. In this paper, I will argue that navigating – specifically, journey planning – can be conceived as a process of practical reasoning. First, I will argue that journey planning constitutes a case of means-end reasoning involving inferences with cartographic representations. Then, I will argue that the output of journey planning functions as an instrumental belief in means-end reasoning. More specifically, journey planning can (...) deliver an instrumental rule that plays a normative role in spatial cognition. This approach motivates a pluralist conception of practical reasoning, stating that inferences might run through different representational formats and processes. (shrink)

Vādanyāya is one of the representative works of Dharmakīrti. It is concerned with debate logic and deals with win-or-lose reasoning rules in the broad sense of logic. In this paper, we will concentrate our discussion on Dharmakīrti’s theory of nigrahasthāna (fault) in his debate logic, a key issue in Vādanyāya. First, we point out that the justification of three logical reasons as proof conditions of debate constitutes the rational point of departure for Dharmakīrti’s debate logic. Second, we analyze the differences (...) between Dharmakīrti’s and the Naiyāyika’s notion of debate and point out that Dharmakīrti’s ‘debate’ involves two parties (the disputant and the opponent) attempting to rationally refute the other’s opinion to persuade the other to change their wrong ideas. Last, based on the discussion of Dharmakīrti’s concept of debate logic, we identify seven types of nigrahasthāna in Vādanyāya with regard to the two parties of a debate (the disputant and the opponent). (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson have defended the intellectualist thesis that knowing-how is a subspecies of knowing-that by appeal to the syntax and semantics of ascriptions of knowing-how. Critics have objected that this way of defending intellectualism places undue weight on linguistic considerations and fails to give sufficient attention to empirical considerations from the scientific study of the mind. In this paper, I examine and reject Stanley's recent attempt to answer the critics.

Philosophy of science is positioned to make distinctive contributions to cognitive science by providing perspective on its conceptual foundations and by advancing normative recommendations. The philosophy of science I embrace is naturalistic in that it is grounded in the study of actual science. Focusing on explanation, I describe the recent development of a mechanistic philosophy of science from which I draw three normative consequences for cognitive science. First, insofar as cognitive mechanisms (...) are information‐processing mechanisms, cognitive science needs an account of how the representations invoked in cognitive mechanisms carry information about contents, and I suggest that control theory offers the needed perspective on the relation of representations to contents. Second, I argue that cognitive science requires, but is still in search of, a catalog of cognitive operations that researchers can draw upon in explaining cognitive mechanisms. Last, I provide a new perspective on the relation of cognitive science to brain sciences, one which embraces both reductive research on neural components that figure in cognitive mechanisms and a concern with recomposing higher‐level mechanisms from their components and situating them in their environments. (shrink)

What is required to be an interdisciplinary theory in cognitive science is for it to span more than one traditional domain. Generally speaking, as I discuss ...

Shaun Gallagher calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of nature and he resists reduction of phenomenology to computational-neural science. However, classic, reductionist science, at least in contemporary computational guise, has the resources to accommodate insights from transcendental phenomenology. Reductionism should be embraced, not feared.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

There is a general conception of levels in philosophy which says that the world is arrayed into a hierarchy of levels and that there are different modes of analysis that correspond to each level of this hierarchy, what can be labelled the ‘Hierarchical Correspondence View of Levels” (or HCL). The trouble is that despite its considerable lineage and general status in philosophy of science and metaphysics the HCL has largely escaped analysis in specific domains of inquiry. The goal of (...) this paper is to take up a recent call to domain-specificity by examining the role of the HCL in cognitive science. I argue that the HCL is, in fact, a conception of levels that has been employed in cognitive science and that cognitive scientists should avoid its use where possible. The argument is that the HCL is problematic when applied to cognitive science specifically because it fails to distinguish two important kinds of shifts used when analysing information processing systems: shifts in grain and shifts in analysis. I conclude by proposing a revised version of the HCL which accommodates the distinction. (shrink)

This paper argues that an account of picturing in terms of the experience it sustains, in particular an experience of resemblance in outline shape, is superior to Dominic Lopes’, view, on which pictures engage our recognitional capacities for the objects they depict. Lopes’ position fails to do the work proper to a philosophical theory of picturing. Lopes argues that the experienced resemblance view pays insufficient attention to empirical work, and that it incurs unwelcome empirical commitments. I refuse the commitments Lopes (...) offers, and suggest that the view is more open to the empirical than he thinks. (shrink)

This article has been retracted. Please see the retraction notice for more detail: 10.1007/s40961-018-0159-5.

The representation of color by pictures raises worthwhile questions for philosophers and psychologists. Moreover, philosophers and psychologists interested in answering these questions will benefit by paying attention to each other's work. Failure to recognize the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation can be attributed to tacit acceptance of the resemblance theory of pictorial color. I argue that this theory is inadequate, so philosophers of art have work to do devising an alternative. At the same time, if the resemblance theory is false, then (...) color depiction has interesting implications for color science. Empirical researchers must rethink the widespread assumption that color recognition requires color constancy. I suggest that a neuropsychological account of color recognition will be instrumental to completing the philosophical task, but by the same token scientists might do well not to proceed without casting an eye to the work of philosophers of art. (shrink)

Duhem’s problem arises especially in scientific contexts where the tools and procedures of measurement and analysis are numerous and complex. Several philosophers of cognitive science have cited its manifestations in fMRI as grounds for skepticism regarding the epistemic value of neuroimaging. To address these Duhemian arguments for skepticism, I offer an alternative approach based on Deborah Mayo’s error-statistical account in which Duhem's problem is more fruitfully approached in terms of error probabilities. This is illustrated in examples such as (...) the use of probabilistic brain atlases, comparison of different preprocessing protocols with respect to their error characteristics, and statistical modeling of fMRI data. These examples demonstrate the ways in which we can better understand and formulate the general methodological problem and direct the way toward alternative approaches to neuroimaging in philosophy of cognitive science, in which we can be more balanced and productive in our scrutiny of the epistemic value of neuroimaging studies. (shrink)

Functionalism is widely regarded as the central doctrine in the philosophy of cognitive science, and is invoked by philosophers of cognitive science to settle disputes over methodology and other puzzles. I describe a recent dispute over extended cognition in which many commentators appeal to functionalism. I then raise an objection to functionalism as it figures in this dispute, targeting the assumption that generality and abstraction are tightly correlated. Finally, I argue that the new mechanist framework offers (...) more realistic resources for understanding cognitive science, and hence is a better source of appeal for resolving disagreement in philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper examines the widespread intuition that the dynamical approach to cognitive science is importantly related to emergentism about the mind. The explanatory practices adopted by dynamical cognitive science rule out some conceptions of emergence; covering law explanations require a deducibility relationship between explanans and explanandum, whereas canonical theories of emergence require the absence of such deducibility. A response to this problem – one which would save the intuition that dynamics and emergence are related – is (...) to reconstrue the concept of emergence as a relationship between laws. I call this “nomological emergence” and comment on the extent to which dynamicists would find it acceptable. Alternatively, dynamical cognitive science might be viewed as fitting better with the kind of “functional reductionism” which has recently been developed by authors such as Jaegwon Kim. Which of these two alternatives is preferable remains an open question pending the further development of dynamical cognitive science, particularly in its “non-classical” forms. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Stich's principle of autonomy argument (From Folk Psychology To Cognitive Science) as an argument that computationalism is an incorrect approach to explanation and prediction in cognitive science. After considering the principle of autonomy argument in light of several computational systems and psychological examples, I conclude that the argument is unsound. I formulate my reasons for rejecting Stich's argument as unsound into the conjunction argument. Finally, I argue that the conjunction argument is (...) sound, and that its soundness adds additional plausibility to computationalism as an explanatory schema in cognitive science. (shrink)

The paper critically reviews Jerry Fodor's book In Critical Condition: Polemic Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. It focuses on Fodor's compositionality arguments and their relevance to the following questions: How should concepts be individuated? What has semantics to do with epistemology? Who is right in the debate over classical and connectionist theories of cognition? How can the semantic properties of a mental state be inherited from the semantic properties of the state's constituents? The paper (...) finally argues that Fodor's opposition to functional role semantics might jeopardize his view that semantic compositionality requires appropriate constituent relations between complex and less complex concepts. (shrink)

Ramsey (1997) argues that connectionist representations 'do not earn their explanatory keep'. The aim of this paper is to examine the argument Ramsey gives to support that conclusion. In doing so, I identify two kinds of explanatory need—need relative to a possible explanation and need relative to a true explanation and argue that internal representations are not needed for either connectionist or nonconnectionist possible explanations but that it is quite likely that they are needed for true explanations. However, to show (...) that the latter is the case requires more than a consideration of the form of explanation involved. (shrink)

Philosophy lost its traditional subject-matter when other disciplines became socio-culturally and epistemologically differentiated. It does not have its unique methods as doing philosophy resembles the features, stages and steps of theorizing and will be present in any significant research, the writing of articles, books, dissertations, etc. Attempts to usurp philosophy and philosophical methods by the new science of Habermas and followers of Critical Theory and other Continental approaches attempt to do philosphy by using terms and ideas from philosophy (eg (...) ontology, epistemology, methodology, transcendentals, pre-suppostions, assumptions etc). These are not uniquely philosophical terms but nowadays they are employed by all disciplines, articles, books etc (all these things have ontologies, epistemologies, do theorizing, etc). (shrink)