The naturalistic imperative in cognitive science (original) (raw)
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Artificial Intelligence, 2001
For me, this is an exciting time to be a cognitive scientist and a cognitive linguist. Cognitive Linguistics has developed rapidly and with enormous success over the past two decades, providing a cognitively based account of language. When results in cognitive linguistics are taken together with results in the other cognitive sciences, a radically new view of the mind and language-and their relation to the brain-emerges. As a result, the original formalist nativist paradigm of cognitive science as it developed in the 1960s and early 1970s has been stood on its head. I was one of the originators of that paradigm, among the researchers first bringing formal logic as an account of natural language semantics into linguistics in the early 1960s. The hope then was to fit logic and Chomskyan transformational generative grammar into a unified approach to language and mind. The formalist nativist paradigm that subsequently developed tried to fulfill that dream, with the hope of merging Anglo-American analytic philosophy with formal logic, generative grammar, early AI, cognitive psychology, and cognitive anthropology. By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the formalist nativist paradigm did not fit the facts.
Computational Linguistics, 2000
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Three levels of naturalistic knowledge - Preprint.pdf
Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications, 2019
A recent naturalistic epistemological account suggests that there are three nested basic forms of knowledge: procedural knowledge-how, conceptual knowledge-what, and propositional knowledge-that. These three knowledge-forms are grounded in cognitive neuroscience and are mapped to procedural, semantic, and episodic long-term memory respectively. This article investigates and integrates the neuroscientifically grounded account with knowledge-accounts from cognitive ethology and cognitive psychology. It is found that procedural and semantic memory, on a neuroscientific level of analysis, matches an ethological reliabilist account. This formation also matches System 1 from dual process theory on a psychological level, whereas the addition of episodic memory, on the neuroscientific level of analysis, can account for System 2 on the psychological level. It is furthermore argued that semantic memory (conceptual knowledge-what) and the cognitive ability of categorization are linked to each other, and that they can be fruitfully modeled within a conceptual spaces framework.
Philosophy in review, 2014
Frankish and Ramsey have brought us a collection of solid contributions covering a range of topics central to contemporary cognitive science from world leading experts. The handbook will be useful for teaching purposes, especially providing first readings on topics, or for researchers seeking to diversify their knowledge and needing clear and broad introductions to unfamiliar areas. Additionally, if like me you have had hostile reactions to one or other controversial theme in cognitive science then you will likely find the sympathetic accounts of, say cognitive neuroscience (Standage and Trappenberg C12) or evolutionary psychology (Barrett C13) helpful.
From Life-Like to Mind-Like Explanation: Natural Agency and the Cognitive Sciences
PhD Dissertation, 2020
This dissertation argues that cognition is a kind of natural agency. Natural agency is the capacity that certain systems have to act in accordance with their own norms. Natural agents are systems that bias their repertoires in response to affordances in the pursuit of their goals. Cognition is a special mode of this general phenomenon. Cognitive systems are agents that have the additional capacity to actively take their worlds to be certain ways, regardless of whether the world is really that way. In this way, cognitive systems are desituated. Desituatedness is the root of specifically cognitive capacities for representation and abstraction. There are two main reasons why this view needs defending. First, natural agency is typically viewed as incompatible with natural science because it is committed to a teleological mode of explanation. Second, cognition is typically held to be categorically distinct from natural agency. This dissertation argues against both of these views. It argues against the incompatibility of agency and natural science by demonstrating that systems biology, general systems theory, and sciences that deal with complex systems have typically underappreciated conceptual and theoretical resources for grounding agency in the causal structure of the world. These conceptual resources do not, however, reduce agency to systems theory because the normativity inherent in agency demands descriptive resources beyond those of even the most sophisticated systems theory. It argues against the categorical difference between natural agency and cognition by pointing out that separating cognition from a richer web of situated, ecologically embedded relations between the agent and the world generates the frame problem, which is an insuperable obstacle to making cognition that is sufficiently responsive to the complexity of the world. Rooting cognition in natural agency is a more robust empirical bet for theorizing cognition and artificial intelligence.
2005
and scholars whose relevant research became known to us in the course of the project. These chapters were displayed in draft on a closed website for the other participants to read and take account of, and were rewritten in the light of feedback provided by the editors and the referees. The result, we believe, is an integrated volume of cutting-edge essays, pushing forward the boundaries of nativist inspired research in cognitive science. Many people have helped to make this a better volume. We would like to thank everyone who attended the workshops and conference for their contributions through comments and discussions. We would especially like to express our gratitude to all those who presented a talk or a commentary at the conference or one of the workshops, but who for a variety of reasons don't have a chapter in the present volume (some of this work will be included in later volumes). In this regard we would like to thank: