Philosophy
Modified: 2024-02-15 11:46 AM CST
Remember my model for this course. I'm providing you with the essentials of the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science. We must understand those first, at least in broad outline, before we can understand cognitive science itself. This page may appear scary and long but that is a consequence of philosophy's long history. A complete understanding of cognitive science presupposes an understanding of philosophy.
History of Philosophy
Philosophy and Cognitive Science
- Philosophy is the original source of many questions yet of interest to CS
- All modern academic departments, in one way or another, owe a deep debt to philosophy
- The philosophy of cognitive science
- Subdivided into:
- Academic Discipline
- Psychology, Neuroscience, AI, Linguistics, and more
- Topic
- Topics Specific to Cognition
- Mental Representation, Computation, Embodiment, Consciousness, and more
- Area of Cognition
- Perception, Motor Control, Language, Reasoning, Consciousness, and more
- Part of database PhilPapers
- shows many of the current areas of interest in both disciplines
- "PhilPapers is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. We monitor all sources of research content in philosophy, including journals, books, and open access archives. We also host the largest open access archive in philosophy. Our index currently contains 2,554,360 entries categorized in 5,671 categories. PhilPapers has over 270,000 registered users."
- Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science
(Chapter 1) (Limited free access)
- "The philosophy of cognitive science emerged out of a set of common and overlapping interests among philosophers and scientists who study the mind. We identify five categories of issues that illustrate the best work in this broad field:
(1) traditional philosophical issues about the mind that have been invigorated by research in cognitive science,
(2) issues regarding the practice of cognitive science and its foundational assumptions,
(3) issues regarding the explication and clarification of core concepts in cognitive science,
(4) first-order empirical issues where philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary investigation of particular psychological phenomena,
(5) traditional philosophical issues that aren’t about the mind but that can be informed by a better understanding of how the mind works."
- Why cognitive science needs philosophy and vice versa: Thagard
(2009)
- Abstract
- Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitive science, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitive science with respect to generality and normativity.
- General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of cognitive science.
- Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize expected utility, and how norms should be established.
- These kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of progress in cognitive science. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of findings in cognitive science.
- Keywords: Cognitive science; Philosophy; Generality; Normativity; Theories; Explanations;Computer simulation; Bayesian inference; Decision making
- Comments
- Generality: answering questions beyond disciplinary boundaries
- Normativity: understanding the difference between how things are and how they should be
- Theories and explanations: Both must be defined and researchers should especially attend to the issue of causality. Philosophers, because of their training and long history understand the big picture vis a vis theories and how to apply them across disciplines.
- Computer simulation: theories, models, and computer programs are distinct components for understanding data in cognitive science.
- Relations of the fields: As we have already seen in Nuñez et al.'s article, the original six fields of cognitive science have not all equally contributed to progress over the years. Instead, psychology has become more influential while anthropology and neuroscience have each become less involved. In addition, should the field now be called cognitive science or cognitive sciences?
- Normative questions: Normative means prescriptive (you should not get a tattoo) whereas descriptive simply reveals observations (you have red hair). How should cognitive science distinguish between these two? In other words, how should cognitive scientists make decisions that go beyond discoveries and impact on moral questions. A current example is facial recognition algorithms. Cognitive science invented those, but who should decide how to use them?
- Why philosophy needs cognitive science: Some styles of philosophy are not beneficial to cognitive science; they are: rationalist approaches (see above), analytic approaches, and postmodernist approaches. On the other hand, naturalist approaches are beneficial to cognitive science.
- Conclusions: Ignoring philosophical reflection leads to bad philosophy and to bad science. Metaphors for the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science include:
- foundation (Descartes)
- implies that philosophy must come first
- cable or chain (Peirce)
- implies a connection between the two
- ship (Neurath)
- but, a ship that must only repair itself at sea
- ants, spiders, and bees (Bacon)
- ants are the experimentalists
- spiders's webs are only made from themselves
- bees gather nectar from plants and transform that into honey by their own power
- Bacon, in his own words:
- Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. The reasoners resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course. It gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments, and lay it up in the memory whole as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.
- Bacon's notion best describes the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science (on the test, FYI)
Modern Subfields of Philosophy
- Metaphysics*
- Moral Philosophy*
- Epistemology*
- Esthetics*
- Logic/Language*
- Mind*
- Political
*CS related
If you crave more detail on these subjects and philosopher see my pages on them from the History of Psychology course
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