Episodic and semantic memory are often taken to be fundamentally different mental systems, and contemporary philosophers often pursue research questions about episodic memory, in particular, in isolation from semantic memory. This paper challenges that assumption, and puts pressure on philosophical approaches to memory that break off episodic memory as its own standalone topic. I present and systematize psychological and neuroscientific theories of semanticization, the thesis that memory content tends to drift from episodic to semantic in structure over time and exposure (...) to an environment. Semanticization, I argue, is a long-term interconnection between episodic and semantic systems that requires approaching both the content and function of these two memory systems as a whole. Thus we have a reason to reject projects by Michael Martin, which aims to carve out a uniquely episodic memory content, and Kourken Michaelian, which pairs episodic memory to its own unique function. Instead, seeing declarative memory as a single system with two facets or even a continuum of features allows for deeper insight into both content and function. (shrink)

Sometimes, we face choices between actions most likely to lead to valuable outcomes, and actions which put us in a better position to learn. These choices exemplify what is called the exploration/exploitation trade-off. In computer science and psychology, this trade-off has fruitfully been applied to modulating the way agents or systems make choices over time. This article extends the trade-off to belief. We can be torn between two ways of believing, one of which is expected to be more accurate in (...) light of current evidence, whereas the other is expected to lead to more learning opportunity and accuracy in the long run. Further, it is sometimes rationally permissible to choose the latter. The article breaks down the features of action which give rise to the trade-off, and then argues that each feature applies equally well to belief. This conclusion is an instance of a systematic, foreseeable way in which what is rational to believe now depends on what one expects to be doing in the future. That is, epistemic rationality fundamentally concerns time. (shrink)

What does it mean to hold a belief? Some of our ways of speaking in English suggest that to hold a belief is to have something in your mind: beliefs are things we acquire, defend, recover, and so on (Abelson, 1986). That is, believing is a matter of being in a state of having a thing. In this paper, I will argue for an alternative: believing is something we do. This is not a new suggestion. For instance, Matthew Boyle (2011) (...) defends a theory of belief as an activity, which he traces back to Aristotle. This paper, however, makes two new contributions: first, I argue for an analogy between belief and planning that fleshes out what it would mean to understand belief as an activity, and second, I aim to show how the resulting view can help sense of a variety of theories in cognitive psychology that suggest cognitive information storage is dynamic and reconstructive. (shrink)

Mental simulation — such as imagining tilting a glass to figure out the angle at which water would spill — can be a way of coming to know the answer to an internally or externally posed query. Is this form of learning a species of inference or a form of observation? We argue that it is neither: learning through simulation is a genuinely distinct form of learning. On our account, simulation can provide knowledge of the answer to a query even (...) when the basis for that answer is opaque to the learner. Moreover, through repeated simulation, the learner can reduce this opacity, supporting self-training and the acquisition of more accurate models of the world. Simulation is thus an essential part of the story of how creatures like us become effective learners and knowers. (shrink)

This paper aims to reconfigure the place of memory in epistemology. I start by rethinking the problem that memory systems solve; rather than merely functioning to store information, I argue that the core function of any memory system is to support accurate and relevant retrieval. This way of specifying the function of memory has consequences for which structures and mechanisms make up a memory system. In brief, memory systems are modeling systems. This means that they generate, update and manage a (...) series of overlapping, simplified, relational representations that map out features of the world. Succeeding at building and maintaining models requires the kind of active knowledge generation traditionally associated only with deliberative reasoning. (shrink)

People often answer why-questions with what we call experiential explanations: narratives or stories with temporal structure and concrete details. In contrast, on most theories of the epistemic function of explanation, explanations should be abstractive: structured by general relationships and lacking extraneous details. We suggest that abstractive and experiential explanations differ not only in level of abstraction, but also in structure, and that each form of explanation contributes to the epistemic goals of individual learners and of science. In particular, experiential explanations (...) support mental simulation and survive transitions across background theories; as a result, they support learning and help us translate between competing frameworks. Experiential explanations play an irreducible role in human cognition – and perhaps in science. (shrink)

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

Some presuppositions seem to be weaker than others in the sense that they can be more easily neutralized in some contexts. For example some factive verbs, most notably epistemic factives like know, be aware, and discover, are known to shed their factivity fairly easily in contexts such as are found in (1). (1) a. …if anyone discovers that the method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected (...) to stop use of the route… c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars…. (The examples in (1) are all naturally occurring ones, discovered by David Beaver with the aid of Google; cf. Beaver 2002, exx. 32, 43, and 51, respectively.) On the other hand some other factives, e.g. regret, matter, and be surprised, do not exhibit the same type of behavior: (2) a. If any of the students regrets behaving badly, they’ll let us know. b. It doesn’t matter that the chimpanzees escaped. c. Was Bill surprised that spinach was included? Unlike the examples in (1), those in (2) could not be used appropriately in contexts where the speaker was not assuming that the complement clause was true. Our main concern will be trying to find the cause of this difference. However, before we get to that, we will look more closely at the concept “presupposition” itself, as well as its close neighbor in the linguistic literature, “conventional implicature” (section 2), and also at various ways of getting rid of presuppositions (section 3). In section 4 we will investigate two possible explanations for differences in presupposition triggering – the “lexical alternative” approach of Abusch (2002, 2005), and a suggestion of Ladusaw’s involving detachability of presuppositions. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

What is morally permissible, and what is morally obligatory? These questions form the core of a vast amount of philosophical reasoning. In this landmark work, Kant proposes the concept of a maxim, which functions as a guide to appropriate action under a given set of circumstances. By universalizing the maxim, morally permissible and obligatory behavior becomes clear. The German philosopher's test, known as the Categorical Imperative, is a logical proof of the Golden Rule and the centerpiece of this work. It (...) constitutes Kant's best-known contribution to ethical discussion, and a familiarity with its constituents is essential to students of philosophy, religion, and history. (shrink)

When entering an environment, animals – including humans – tend to consult their memories to determine what they know about the place. This information is useful to determine: is this place safe? And what happens next? In this chapter, we argue on both empirical and conceptual grounds that memory is largely organized by space. Spatial relations determine what is recalled and which experiences are combined in generalizations. Time does not play an analogous role. We show that space and time in (...) memory are thus deeply asymmetrical. We conclude with a consequence of our view: spatial organization entails a basic form of abstraction in a way temporal organization does not, and so the spatial organization of memory reveals that memory involves generalization from the very beginning. (shrink)

This far-ranging collection of essays represents a conference of the same name held at Emory University in conjunction with a meeting of the “Rethinking Plato’s Parmenides” seminar sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature.In embracing authors as diverse as Plato himself, Epictetus, Ralph Cudworth, Yeats, and Levinas, to name a few of the Platonists identified herein, the volume clearly and deliberately stretches the meaning of this rubric to its outer limits. This review will reprise some of the articles from each (...) of the book’s sections—Ancient, Late Antique, Renaissance and Modern, and Post-modern Platonisms—in an effort to help readers gauge the argument of the book, which may or may not be endorsed by each of the individual contributors. The editors, at least in compiling this anthology, do so in the belief that Platonism might better be considered “as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories each of which helps us to see the richness of Platonic texts,” rather than “as a series of determinate doctrines” .Thomas Slezak opens the volume with a rehearsal of his programmatic way of reading Plato’s dialogues, involving two possibly competing claims: what Plato means by philosophy is not contained within the. (shrink)

Reflections on moral discourse and its contexts are provided and the authors discuss the nature and tasks of moral philosophy. The collection creates a dialogue between different philosophical views.

This paper aims to understand how we reason from historical premises to normative conclusions, tracing this question through the work of Muhammad Iqbal. On our reading, he wavers between two views of history, one a kind of natural science, and the other akin to religious interpretation. These tell different stories about the lessons we draw from history.

Formal representations drawn from rational choice theory have been used in a variety of ways to fruitfully model the way in which actual agents are approximately rational. This analysis requires bridging between ideal normative theory, in which the mechanisms, representations, and other such internal parts are in an important sense interchangeable, and descriptive psychological theory, in which understanding the internal workings of the agent is often the main goal of the entire inquiry. In this paper, I raise a problem brought (...) on by this gap: for almost every theory of approximate rationality, there will be an empirically indistinguishable alternative that individuates the parts of the agent in a significantly different way. (shrink)

I will argue the free market in babies or in women's bodies created by an institution of paid surrogate motherhood is contrary to Kantian principles of personhood and to the feminist principle that men do not have-and cannot gain through contract, marriage, or payment of money-a right to the sexual or reproductive use of women's bodies.

Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement. We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provides a (...) different sort of baseline for understanding how obedience to arbitrary requirements could, in principle, be rational. (shrink)

In paediatric oncology, research and treatments are often closely combined, which may compromise voluntary informed consent of parents. We identified two key scenarios in which voluntary informed consent for paediatric oncology studies is potentially compromised due to the intertwinement of research and care. The first scenario is inclusion by the treating paediatric oncologist, the second scenario concerns treatments confined to the research context. In this article we examine whether voluntary informed consent of parents for research is compromised in these two (...) scenarios, and if so whether this is also morally problematic. For this, we employ the account of voluntary consent from Nelson and colleagues, who assert that voluntary consent requires substantial freedom from controlling influences. We argue that, in the absence of persuasion or manipulation, inclusion by the treating physician does not compromise voluntariness. However, it may function as a risk factor for controlling influence as it narrows the scope within which parents make decisions. Furthermore, physician appeal to reciprocity is not controlling as it constitutes persuasion. In addition, framing information is a form of informational manipulation and constitutes a controlling influence. In the second scenario, treatments confined to the research context qualify as controlling if the available options are restricted through manipulation of options. Although none of the influences is morally problematic in itself, a combination of influences may create morally problematic instances of involuntary informed consent. Therefore, safeguards should be implemented to establish an optimal environment for parents to provide voluntary informed consent in an integrated research-care context. (shrink)

Philosophical writing is challenging for students new to philosophy. Many philosophy classes are populated, for the most part, by students who have never taken philosophy before. While many institutions offer general writing support services, these services tend to be most beneficial for helping to identify problems with style and grammar. They are not equipped to help students with the particular challenges that come with writing philosophy for the first time. We implemented the “Home Base” Mentoring Program in two introductory level (...) philosophy courses to target the specific challenges that novice learners have when learning how to write philosophy. Through the program, students had access to writing mentors who were undergraduate senior philosophy majors. Based on surveys given to the students who have participated in this program, we found that the program boosted student confidence in writing and also worked to develop a welcoming, judgment-free, and encouraging environment in the philosophy department more generally. (shrink)

Memory structures range across the dimensions that distinguish language-like thought. Recent work suggests agent- or situation-specific information is embedded in these structures. Understanding why this is, and pulling these structures apart, requires observing what happens under major changes. The evidence presented for the language-of-thought (LoT) does not look broadly enough across time to capture the function of representational structure.

I årtusenden har människan försökt definiera livet – hur levande djur och växter skiljer sig från död materia. Problemet är dock att livet är mångfacetterat, och varje regel har sitt undantag. Vi försöker möta kommande utmaningar med nya livsformer, genom att lyfta fram en ny definition av liv.

Il concetto di "libertà" descrive uno dei valori fondamentali della società occidentale contemporanea. Tuttavia, sebbene tutti concordino circa la necessità di difendere la libertà, persone che incarnano convinzioni politiche, morali e sociali diverse interpretano la libertà in maniere differenti, se non perfino contrapposte. Nonostante queste evidenti divergenze, è opinione diffusa che questo concetto si caratterizzi alla sua base per una sorta di denominatore comune, a proposito del quale sussiste un’unanimità pervasiva e che delinea l’orizzonte di una comune battaglia. Questo studio (...) investiga questa opinione da un punto di vista cognitivo allo scopo di determinare come sia costituito e di quale informazione si componga il concetto astratto di “libertà”. La ricerca – che si rifà in parte alla teoria di G. Lakoff – identifica un nucleo cognitivo comune concreto del concetto e chiarisce come questo si contamini ideologicamente nel corso del suo sviluppo da concetto concreto a concetto astratto. Le conclusioni di questo studio evidenziano tuttavia come il nucleo universale del concetto sia eccessivamente indeterminato per costituire un denominatore comune politicamente rilevante che fornisca una base di accordo a proposito di un valore condiviso ed evidenzia alcuni limiti dell'impostazione data da Lakoff al problema, avanzando delle ipotesi per futuri sviluppi della ricerca su questi temi. (shrink)

A sense of belonging is an integral feature of an online community of learners. This article explores the ways in which digital technologies in an online teacher education programme can facilitate social presence and in turn nurture a sense of belonging in an OCL. A sense of belonging can lower attrition rates in distance programmes that attract learners who are marginalised from on campus education. This can help address issues of social justice by supporting equitable access and participation in higher (...) education. Findings from a qualitative case study indicate the power that digital technologies can have in facilitating social presence and a sense of belonging in an OCL. This study identifies the importance of several factors in this. Firstly, the importance of pedagogical understandings that digital technologies have different affordances in nurturing an OCL, and secondly, that each participant had a different perspective on the affordances of each digital technology in their usefulness for fostering social presence and a sense of belonging. (shrink)

The debate between Ursin (2019) and Wilkinson and colleagues (2019) in this issue of The American Journal of Bioethics underscores the long-standing theoretical controversy about the equivalence of...

The project “A Plurality of Lives” was funded and hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University, Sweden. The aim of the project was to better understand how a second origin of life, either in the form of a discovery of extraterrestrial life, life developed in a laboratory, or machines equipped with abilities previously only ascribed to living beings, will change how we understand and relate to life. Because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the project aim, (...) the project took an interdisciplinary approach with a research group made up of 12 senior researchers representing 12 different disciplines. The project resulted in a joint volume, an international symposium, several new projects, and a network of researchers in the field, all continuing to communicate about and advance the aim of the project. (shrink)

Research on dyscalculia in neurodegenerative diseases is still scarce, despite high impact on patients’ independence and activities of daily living function. Most studies address Alzheimer’s Disease; however, patients with Parkinson’s Disease also have a higher risk for cognitive impairment while the relation to arithmetic deficits in financial contexts has rarely been studied. Therefore, the current exploratory study investigates deficits in two simple arithmetic tasks in financial contexts administered within the Clinical Dementia Rating in a sample of 100 PD patients. Patients (...) were classified as cognitively normal or mildly impaired according to Level I consensus criteria, and assessed using a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery, neurological motor examination, and sociodemographic and clinical questionnaires. In total, 18% showed arithmetic deficits: they were predominately female, had longer disease duration, more impaired global cognition, but minor signs of depression compared to PD patients without arithmetic deficits. When correcting for clinical and sociodemographic confounders, greater impairments in attention and visuo-spatial/constructional domains predicted occurrence of arithmetic deficits. The type of deficit did not seem to be arbitrary but seemed to involve impaired place × value processing frequently. Our results argue for the importance of further systematic investigations of arithmetic deficits in PD with sensitive tests to confirm the results of our exploratory study that a specific subgroup of PD patients present themselves with dyscalculia. (shrink)

This paper examines the outcomes of Preserving the Past Together, a workshop series designed to build the capacity of local heritage managers to engage in collaborative and community-based approaches to archaeology and historic preservation. Over the past two decades practitioners of these approaches have demonstrated the interpretive, methodological, and ethical value of integrating Indigenous perspectives and methods into the process and practice of heritage management and archaeology. Despite these benefits, few professional resources exist to support the development of collaborative relationships (...) between local heritage managers and Tribal nations. Filling this need, Preserving the Past Together’s interactive workshops and keynote lectures involved participants in a discussion of the central themes in collaborative and Indigenous approaches to archaeology today, highlighting the local challenges and opportunities that exist for archaeologists, heritage managers, and Tribal nations to work together to care for the past. This paper presents an overview of the event series’ goals, the strategies it used to foster collaboration among the diverse stakeholders of the Salish Sea, and the next steps the project’s co-directors are taking to further support communication and collaboration between stewards and stakeholders in the Pacific Northwest. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine how weather phenomena affect the landscape, not only in terms of its visual or geomorphological appearance, but also by modifying the emotional disposition that the landscape evokes. By adopting an atmospheric perspective, I intend to demonstrate that each landscape possesses its own mood (Stimmung), closely linked to the atmospheric-climatic events that unfold within it. My hypothesis is that such phenomena, due to their pervasiveness on a sensory level, can produce a real metamorphosis (...) of the landscape, which also extends to the affective qualities that the landscape ‘radiates’, and which therefore do not primarily depend on the perceiver. My analysis is structured into two parts. In the first part, a) I attempt to prove that meteorological and climatic atmospheres, due to their extra-psychic nature, cannot be explained in empathic-projective terms; and b) I propose understanding the landscape as an expressive whole whose ‘emotional physiognomy’ changes according to the atmospheres that pass through it. In the second part, I support my argument with a literary example to show how the fundamental emotional tone (Grundstimmung) of the landscape can change radically following the manifestation of a specific atmospheric phenomenon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hercules Cross-dressed, Hercules Undressed: Unmasking the Construction of the Propertian amator In Elegy 4.9Sara H. LindheimVain trifles as they seem, clothes have, as they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.—Virginia Woolf, OrlandoPropertius begins 4.9 with his version of the story of Hercules and Cacus that he adapts from Virgil’s recently published Aeneid. (...) 1 Once he has recovered his stolen cattle, slain the monstrous, thieving Cacus and founded the Forum Boarium, the Propertian Hercules feels an overwhelming thirst. He hears the laughter of women and follows the sound to a grove in which the worship of the Bona Dea is taking place. Arriving on the threshold of the sanctuary, he pleads for some water from the spring he hears inside the grove, citing his heroic deeds as credentials for admittance. When his request achieves no immediate results, however, he considers that perhaps the women hesitate to open their sanctuary to a strong hero. He then offers a second self-presentation, this time telling how he once dressed as a woman and served Omphale, queen of Lydia. When the high priestess denies him entrance, reminding him that men, by religious prescription, cannot look upon the rites, Hercules gains access to the grove violently, drinks the spring dry, and announces that the Ara Maxima which he establishes 2 will forever exclude women from worship.The poem purports to offer a myth of origins for the Ara Maxima. Indeed, in the opening elegy to his fourth and final poetic collection, the poet proclaims his desire to dispense with love and to concentrate [End Page 43] instead on aetiology. Subscribing to Callimachean poetics, he will now compose aetiological verse on Roman subjects. Yet a second voice threatens the unity of the poet’s declaration, suggesting a second and incompatible thematic focus. Even as Propertius proclaims his bold, new stance, Horos the astrologer interrupts, insisting on the poet’s inability to leave behind themes of erotic elegy. 3 The programmatic elegy never resolves the tensions between the two poles of the bipartite agenda, promising that warring interests will haunt the elegies in the fourth book.It comes as no surprise, therefore, that antithetical arguments surface in poem 4.9. I argue that the tension animating the poem emerges from its two competing discourses about gender identity. An exploration of the three stories about the hero in the poem—the opening account offered by the poet, as well as the two self-defining, yet contradictory, narratives that Hercules weaves, in which he presents himself first as a great masculine force and then as the cross-dressed servant of Omphale—suggests the ephemeral nature of “real” gender identity. Considering briefly a modern theoretical model of cross-dressing, I examine Propertius’ own manipulation of transvestism to categorize gender, on the one hand, as a fluid construction, a social performance. On the other hand—and here lies the poem’s tension—a second, antithetical argument also emerges from the poem, which insists on the possibility of assigning persons to a specific gender category based on firm, stable criteria. When the priestess reads Hercules as man, and when the hero ultimately differentiates himself from woman by establishing male-only worship at the Ara Maxima, gender becomes essential or biological. The question I want to pose is: why do these discourses stand side by side, and what kind of synthesis between them ultimately materializes? Finally, I suggest that this debate about gender reaches beyond poem 4.9. By constructing Hercules so that the hero comes to represent, on an exaggerated scale, the Propertian amator, who himself vacillates between “masculine” and “feminine” identities, Propertius invites the reader to see a similar tension in the poet’s first three books of elegies. Thus, towards the end of his poetic career, the poet issues a reconsideration [End Page 44] of the portrait of the lover/poet in light of the questions elegy 4.9 raises about gender identity.While some might consider that to seek out, within ancient texts, whether gender appears essential or constructed in nature reveals an... (shrink)

Professor d’Hoine claims that Proclus assigns a specific ontological function to the Form of Likeness in his Commentary on the Parmenides. According to d’Hoine, for Proclus, each individual must, qua individual striving to imitate the form, present a difference; this difference or unlikeness of one member of a coordinate kind to another, the plurality of participants in a Form, is Form’s by the Form of Unlikeness. And in a similar way, the Form of Likeness then guarantees the imitation of the (...) Form by the particular. I try to show that in other passages in Proclus’ oeuvre, likeness extends to include many more relationships than the Forms instantiation as a material particular. Hence, Likeness is not confined to this specific ontological function. (shrink)

La relación entre lenguaje y creación no se reduce para San Agustín en los recursos que presenta un término de la analogía para ilustrar al otro, sino que el lenguaje tiene un poder de agenciamiento en la realidad cuya eficacia está en su capacidad de determinar, contaminar, purificar o enredar las relaciones del ordo amoris. A lo largo de La Ciudad de Dios puede verse como la palabra performa, su potencia es una promesa en sí misma, su posibilidad o imposibilidad (...) comunicativa son asuntos que devienen, para el de Hipona, de la palabra en relación, del cuerpo de una palabra inserta y encarnada en una trama de vínculos visibles e invisibles que se ordenan o no, según su condición, a lo divino. (shrink)

Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder, especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse, during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist. Crucially, the (...) correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists “stands out” against the others and is therefore identifiable as implicit thinker or speaker. This so-called “prominence” status of a protagonist is based on linguistic properties, in other words, the perspective is “hidden” and has to be inferred from the text material. In order to test whether this implicit perspective taking ability that is required for the interpretation of FID is preserved in persons with ASD, we presented short texts with three sentences to adults with and without ASD. In the last sentence, the perspective was switched either to the more or the less prominent of two protagonists. Participants were asked to rate the texts regarding their naturalness. Both diagnostic groups rated sentences with FID anchored to the less prominent protagonist as less natural than sentences with FID anchored to the more prominent protagonist. Our results that the high-level perspective taking ability in written language that is required for the interpretation of FID is well preserved in persons with ASD supports the conclusion that language skills are highly elaborated in ASD so that even the challenging attribution of utterances to protagonists is possible if they are only implicitly given. We discuss the implications in the context of claims of impaired perspective taking in ASD as well as with regard to the underlying processing of FID. (shrink)

_Abstract_: In this introduction to the thematic issue on _the future of the cognitive science(s)_, we examine how challenges and uncertainties surrounding the past and present of this discipline make it difficult to chart its future. We focus on two main questions. The first is whether cognitive science is a single unified field or inherently pluralistic. This question can be asked at various levels: First, with respect to the disciplines that should be included in the cognitive hexagon and their reciprocal (...) relationships: should we speak of cognitive science or of the cognitive sciences? Second, with regard to the conceptual and methodological changes (turns or revolutions) that have taken place within the cognitive project from its inception to the present day. Third, it pertains to cognitive psychology as a discipline. Before the emergence of cognitive science psychology was a fragmented discipline characterized by different traditions and approaches: has cognitive science been able to stem this fragmentation? Finally, we can question the unity of the cognitive architecture itself: is cognition produced by homogeneous or heterogenous mechanisms for information processing? We show that the issue of unity is addressed by several of the papers included in this thematic issue. In the second part of this introduction, we query the role that each component discipline should play in the cognitive project and in particular which should lead the project going forward, and why. Again, we show how this issue has been tackled by several articles featured in this collection. _Keywords_: Future of Cognitive Science; Cognitive Psychology; Pluralism and Cognitive Science; Philosophy and Cognitive Science; Fragmentation of Psychology _Quale futuro per la scienza cognitiva?_ _Riassunto_: In questa introduzione al fascicolo tematico dedicato al _futuro della scienza cognitiva_ prendiamo in considerazione sfide e incertezze che caratterizzano il passato e il presente di questa disciplina, rendendo difficile prevedere il suo futuro. Due le questioni principali su cui concentriamo l’attenzione. La prima: la scienza cognitiva è un ambito unitario o intrinsecamente pluralistico? Questo problema si manifesta a diversi livelli. In primo luogo, riguarda le discipline che dovrebbero comporre l’esagono cognitivo e le loro relazioni reciproche: dovremmo parlare di scienza cognitiva o di scienze cognitive? In secondo luogo, riguarda le trasformazioni (svolte o rivoluzioni) concettuali e metodologiche avvenute all’interno di questo progetto dalla sua nascita fino ai giorni nostri. In terzo luogo, riguarda la psicologia cognitiva. Prima della nascita della scienza cognitiva la psicologia era una disciplina frammentaria caratterizzata da diverse tradizioni e approcci: possiamo dire che la scienza cognitiva abbia posto rimedio a tale frammentazione? Infine, il problema dell’unità sorge anche in relazione all’architettura cognitiva stessa, considerando che la cognizione potrebbe o potrebbe non essere prodotta da meccanismi omogenei di elaborazione delle informazioni. Nella presentazione che segue si cerca di mostrare come l’unità, in tutte queste varianti, sia una questione affrontata da diversi articoli presenti in questo fascicolo tematico. Nella seconda parte di questa introduzione prendiamo in considerazione il problema del ruolo che ciascuna disciplina componente dovrebbe svolgere nel progetto cognitivo e, in particolare, quale dovrebbe guidare il progetto e perché, ponendo in evidenza come anche questa sia una questione centrale, tematizzata da diversi lavori presentati in questo fascicolo. _Parole chiave_: Futuro della scienza cognitiva; Psicologia cognitiva; Pluralismo e scienza cognitiva; Filosofia e scienza cognitiva; Frammentazione della psicologia. (shrink)