Contemporary Cognitive Science Research Articles

Self-Consciousness as a Construction All the Way Down.

Contemporary mind and brain sciences provide theories and data that seem to confirm a hypothesis about human nature that we might formulate as follows. Human life is conditioned by a need that is no less important than elementary biological needs (such as survival and reproduction) or universal forms of social competition: the need to build and, indeed, defend a subjective identity whose solidity and clarity are the foundation of our intra- and inter-personal equilibrium and therefore of psychological well-being and mental health. In this article, distancing ourselves from a neo-Cartesian position still prevalent in the philosophy of mind and approaching instead the outcomes of contemporary cognitive sciences, we sketch the complex interweaving of the cognitive, emotional, and affective elements that are constitutive of subjective identity, with a focus on the role played in self-identity construction by Theory-of-Mind abilities. We will suggest that, at every stage of self-construction, individuals engage in processes of understanding others that have a largely innate basis. In this perspective, a mature self-awareness is somewhat secondary to the knowledge of others, an evolutionarily refined acquisition primarily serving as a defense mechanism.

Language Education Activties for Young Preschoolers Involving Embodied Cognition Versus Traditional Language Education Activities for Young Preschoolers

"Currently, in contemporary cognitive science, embodied cognition is a controversial research topic. This article draws a parallel between how early childhood teachers conduct early language education activities involving embodied cognition and how they conduct traditional language education activities. Language education activities involving embodied cognition are empirically supported, engage the motor system, the perceptual system and make use of elements of the proximal environment. Traditional language teaching activities are purely theoretical and do not lead preschoolers to deepen and extend connections so that they can make connections between sound perception and word meaning. Our interest in the current approach was to collect descriptive data from preschool teachers in Romania in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of language education activities involving embodied cognition and traditional language education activities. It also aimed to identify, for the teachers involved in the research, the difficulties that young preschoolers encounter in the process of comprehension of new words and pronunciation. We believe that understanding word meaning and pronunciation are processes that underpin effective language teaching. The method used was the survey and the research instrument applied, the questionnaire. The study involved 224 pre-school teachers from eight counties in the country, namely Alba, Arad, Bihor, Caraș-Severin, Cluj, Gorj, Hunedoara and Timiș."

Affordances from a control viewpoint

ABSTRACT Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections.

Virtue for affective engines

ABSTRACT Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. Practical wisdom is the traditional ideal of practical reasoning associated with virtue ethics. Practical wisdom requires the knowledge and skills necessary to act rightly across a wide range of situations. Critics allege that this notion does not cohere well with what contemporary cognitive science tells us about the production of human behavior. After briefly discussing these criticisms, I sketch an alternative account of these cognitive processes that I call affective engine theory. I then discuss a normative conception of practical reasoning that complements this account. Finally, adopting an approach according to which the virtues are those character traits necessary for excellence in practical reasoning, I argue that these accounts can provide the basis for a nontraditional theory of virtue. I discuss three traits that are plausible candidates for virtues on such an account.

Composição e análise de uma ópera cômica: investigando a construção do sentido musical

I intend to demonstrate the contribution of specific cognitive devices in regulating processes that determine the perceptive choices and the ways of constructing musical meaning in the compositional process of a comic opera. To this end, from the libretto A Sonâmbula, by Machado de Assis, I develop the composition and a reflective analysis of the composition of an opera in two cycles: (i) In the first, according to the principles of formalist semantics, I generate the first version of opera; and (ii) in the second, from the application of devices of an incorporated semantics, I produce the final version of the opera. Comparing the artistic re-sults of the two cycles, I discuss the process of producing the musical meaning that regulates compositional acts, highlighting the role of cognitive devices described by enacting theories of contemporary cognitive sciences, still little addressed by the literature on musical compo-sition, particularly in the operatic genre.

How a Minimal Learning Agent can Infer the Existence of Unobserved Variables in a Complex Environment

According to a mainstream position in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, the use of abstract compositional concepts is amongst the most characteristic indicators of meaningful deliberative thought in an organism or agent. In this article, we show how the ability to develop and utilise abstract conceptual structures can be achieved by a particular kind of learning agent. More specifically, we provide and motivate a concrete operational definition of what it means for these agents to be in possession of abstract concepts, before presenting an explicit example of a minimal architecture that supports this capability. We then proceed to demonstrate how the existence of abstract conceptual structures can be operationally useful in the process of employing previously acquired knowledge in the face of new experiences, thereby vindicating the natural conjecture that the cognitive functions of abstraction and generalisation are closely related.

Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe

Stephanie Kinzinger, “Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka’s Cosmology, Dupin’s Intuition” (pp. 124–144) This essay argues that Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka (1848) anticipates contemporary cognitive science’s theories of embodied cognition, particularly the notion that individuals’ minds and bodies are inextricable from their environments. Eureka’s cosmology of environmental entanglement, furthermore, surprisingly elucidates detective Auguste Dupin’s uncanny “intuitive” knowledge, as imbrication with cosmic processes affords limited, temporary access to extrapersonal knowledge. Dupin, I contend, capitalizes on the interconnectedness of mind and body, self and environment to attune himself to others, and in the process enacts a precursive version of “social mirroring.” However, along with the enabling possibilities inherent in such interconnectedness, Poe also illuminates its ontological dangers, as Dupin when intuiting transforms into a semi-abstracted self and loses some of his discrete individuality—without going as far as Poe’s mesmerists, whose complete opening to the universe’s extrapersonal forces leads to their annihilation as individual beings. I argue that such dangers shadow not only nineteenth-century transcendentalism’s cosmic egotism but also twenty-first-century cognitive science’s therapeutic agenda.

Archimedes for the rest of us: Thinking commentary with Guidobaldo dal Monte

For Archimedes’ work to have furnished the ‘key theoretical tools’ for the scientific revolution, the texts must have been comprehensible to early modern readers. Yet as Archimedes’ readers and commentators have observed for centuries, his work can be very difficult going indeed. In this chapter, I explore how commentaries and other explanatory texts, like Guidobaldo dal Monte’s 1588 ‘paraphrase’ commentary to Archimedes’ Planes in Equilibrium, can help unfurl the difficulties of Archimedes’ sparse proofs by means of additional explanations and examples that help the reader develop their own ability to follow Archimedes’ reasoning. I give particular attention to insights from contemporary cognitive science into how strategic repetition of information, the materiality of the text, and highlighting connections between mathematics and the material world can all aid in the learning process.

Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology

For decades, Anderson has been pressing critical theorists and literary scholars to acknowledge the inescapably normative dimensions of their work. Through careful attention to rhetorical styles, she has persuasively argued that epistemological positions and social theories are tethered to “characterological” judgments—to implicit endorsements of ethos. Meanwhile, critical discourse has warmed to the claims of lived experience (the “turn to ethics,” the interest in “affect”), but the “ethical” has remained a negative movement, either as the critique of social and discursive structures or as clearing space for the “other”—and “affect” has been construed as the pleasure and self-care that enable resistance to the pressure of these structures. The questions that galvanize ethical criticism (What is wrong with the way things are?) and theories of affect (How can I survive?) continue to evade the deeper one that Anderson sees as basic to any theorizing: How should I live?The lesson of Anderson's The Way We Argue Now is that ethics without ethos is shallow. In Psyche and Ethos, the lesson is that psychology without morality is benumbed. Though Anderson is characteristically judicious in her reconstruction of the arguments she opposes, there are several rhetorical targets in these lectures. The first is contemporary cognitive science, which pictures moral thinking as either the “belated” rationalization of decisions really made by “automatic” psychological processes or as a mechanism for eliminating “cognitive dissonance.” Anderson shows how these pictures assume an abstracted, “punctual” model of moral experience; their “deflationary” zeal ironically depends on an untenable ideal of moral voluntarism that is then speciously “debunked.” By contrast, novels are able to explore the temporal dimension of moral consciousness, especially through their representation of what she calls “moral rumination,” a concept further developed in her recent contribution to Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies. Anderson shows, moreover, that narrative fictions like The Winter's Tale, Middlemarch, and The Beast in the Jungle understand “belatedness” not as evidence for the superficiality of morality but as a distinct mode of moral recognition that can unfold only across time.Anderson worries that the new “eudaimonic” literary criticism, which explores “enabling moods,” unwittingly perpetuates the moral confusion of empirical psychology and “privileg[es] psychological over moral desiderata,” even as certain “psychological states” are “presented as morally desirable.” This contradiction is another iteration of one she has been confronting throughout her career: the strange incapacity of critical discourse either to recognize or to avow the normative claims—the elaboration of an ethos as good or valuable—with which it is nonetheless saturated. Still, the contradiction has been a defining feature of modern “therapeutic culture” (a formulation she employs): the neutral, functionalist descriptions of empirical psychology ostensibly bracket morality, yet some descriptions are inevitably coded as “better” or “worse,” and they are consistently harnessed to fully moral evaluations. It is rare to hear a literary theorist of Anderson's provenance reanimate, if indirectly, the criticism that Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and Jackson Lears directed toward “therapeutic culture,” which has largely been forgotten or vulgarized by right-wing pundits. In essence, however, her plea is similar to theirs: she wants us to acknowledge that the moral life is integral to the “healthy” life; and she wants critics to stop dismissing it as epiphenomenal to either psychology or politics. She sees the novel, and the humanities more broadly, as the preeminent cultural vehicles for “clarifying” the moral life.

The Enactive and Interactive Dimensions of AI: Ingenuity and Imagination Through the Lens of Art and Music.

Dualisms are pervasive. The divisions between the rational mind, the physical body, and the external natural world have set the stage for the successes and failures of contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence.1 Advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been developed to draw art and compose music. Many take these facts as calls for a radical shift in our values and turn to questions about AI ethics, rights, and personhood. While the discussion of agency and rights is not wrong in principle, it is a form of misdirection in the current circumstances. Questions about an artificial agency can only come after a genuine reconciliation of human interactivity, creativity, and embodiment. This kind of challenge has both moral and theoretical force. In this article, the authors intend to contribute to embodied and enactive approaches to AI by exploring the interactive and contingent dimensions of machines through the lens of Japanese philosophy. One important takeaway from this project is that AI/ML systems should be recognized as powerful tools or instruments rather than as agents themselves.

Believing is seeing: A Buddhist theory of creditions.

The creditions model is incredibly powerful at explaining both how beliefs are formed and how they influence our perceptions. The model contains several cognitive loops, where beliefs not only influence conscious interpretations of perceptions downstream but are active in the subconscious construction of perceptions out of sensory information upstream. This paper shows how this model is mirrored in the epistemology of two central Buddhist figures, Dignāga (480–540 CE) and Dharmakı̄rti (c. 550–650 CE). In addition to showing these parallels, the paper also demonstrates that by drawing on Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti's theory, we can extend the explanatory power of the creditions model. Namely, while creditions explain how beliefs influence both the conscious interpretation and subconscious construction of sensory information, Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti suggest beliefs can even be generative of sensory-like information. I recruit ancient Buddhist texts in conjunction with contemporary cognitive science scholarship to offer a hypothesis for the cognitive mechanisms responsible for this.

Situating Mental Depth

Is the mind flat? Chater (2018) has recently argued that it is and that, contrary to traditional psychology and standard folk image, depth of mind is just an illusory confabulation. In this paper, we argue that while there is a kernel of something correct in Chater’s thesis, this does not in itself add up to a critique of mental depth per se. We use Chater’s ideas as a springboard for creating a new understanding of mental depth which builds upon findings in contemporary cognitive science. First, we rely on the predictive processing framework in order to determine a proposed neural contribution to mental depth, specifically in hierarchical predictive knowledge. Second, drawing from an embodied approach to cognition, we argue that mental depth results from the depth of our embodied skills and the situations in which we are embedded. This allows us to introduce to a new realist notion of mental depth, one which can only be explained once we attend to the dense patterns of skillful interaction within a rich artefactual and social environment.

Between Legal Philosophy and Cognitive Science: The Tension Problem

AbstractMuch controversy has arisen in recent years about the relation between legal philosophy and cognitive science, with some authors announcing a revolution brought about in law by the advances in the scientific study of cognition. At the same time, pessimistic declarations were made, and the significance of cognitive science for law and legal philosophy was denied. In this paper I argue that representatives of legal philosophy are now facing a “tension problem” which comes as a consequence of the following beliefs: that legal philosophy should be naturalized; that contemporary cognitive science is not a source of knowledge proper, that is, a source of naturalization; and that contemporary cognitive science is the best available source of knowledge about cognitive mechanisms. To illustrate the significance of the problem, a case study is presented that concerns research devoted to abstract concepts and its significance for the issues analyzed by legal philosophers, such as legal concepts and legal cognition. More general remarks about the manner of naturalizing jurisprudence are also presented.

Deep Culture

Deep Culture

Rule-following robots? Transitional legal disruption through regulatee design and engineering

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR) technologies present regulators with powerful tools to manipulate human behaviour, but more perniciously, human desire and indeed human being. This is because AI applications can interfere with our internal decision-making processes, and XR applications can affect our sensations by creating and mediating our experiences of the external world. When these technologically driven affordances are strained through contemporary cognitive science research to ground the notion that perceptions are processes for prediction error minimisation, such interferences can amount to designing and engineering the regulatee herself. Effectively, regulation no longer needs to be signalled in a normative regulatory environment, nor must it hardcoded into the architecture or technologically managed. Instead, AI and XR make it possible to design and create regulatees that embody the desired regulatory outcome. Paradoxically, however, such regulatory incorporation looks very much like the exercise of the agency of an agent and therefore is not recognised as a problem by contemporary legal principles and processes which seek to push back against obviously external influences or pressures. As a result, it is immensely difficult to articulate the legal or regulatory challenges posed by these developments, and to identify the harms through these doctrinal lenses.

Intentionality, Qualia, and the Stream of Unconsciousness

According to Brentano, mentality is essentially intentional in nature. Other philosophers have emphasized the phenomenal-qualitative aspect of conscious experiences as core to the mind. A recent philosophical wave – the ‘phenomenal intentionality programme’ – seeks to unite these conceptions in the idea that mental content is grounded in phenomenal qualities. However, a philosophical and scientific current, which includes Freud and contemporary cognitive science, makes widespread use of the posit of unconscious mentality/mental content. I aim to reconcile these disparate, influential strands of thought concerning mentality’s essence, by defending a conception of the mark of the mental as consisting in content-carrying qualitative character (or mental qualities) – but understood as properties that can exist both in conscious (i.e. phenomenal) form and unconsciously. I describe this conception, deal with major historical objections to the notions of unconscious qualitative character and mentality, and explain the virtues of construing the mark of the mental in this way.

Cosmopolitanism, Creolization, and Non-Exceptionalist Buddhist Modernisms: On Evan Thompson’s Why I am Not A Buddhist

In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson argues that inter-tradition or cross-cultural philosophical dialogue ought to be governed by cosmopolitan conversational norms that do not subsume any one tradition’s deep commitments under those of any other tradition, but rather bring those commitments into the discussion so that they can be challenged and defended. He argues on this basis for the application of a deeply contextualist and historicist interpretive methodology to Buddhist texts, concepts, and theories in dialogue with philosophy and contemporary cognitive sciences. Buddhist modernism, in eschewing that deeply contextualist and historicist methodology, falls short of those cosmopolitan commitments. We argue that Thompson’s cosmopolitan commitments do not mandate the deeply contextualist and historicist methodology he recommends. As an alternative, we propose a creolizing methodology that finds value in mixing, reinterpreting, and reinventing cultural traditions and other forms of belonging to address the complex problems the world faces. We suggest that such a creolizing methodology can be found in other forms of Buddhist modernism than those Thompson criticizes. We provide, as two examples, the thought of the Chinese monk Taixu and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Coming together: Embodied and pre‐reflective interaction in The Plague

AbstractAlbert Camus’s The Plague has often been investigated as a moral deliberation on humans’ responsibilities in the face of a deadly threat, be it as an allegory of World War Two or in a more general fashion. In this article, I argue that by looking at the pre‐reflective and embodied aspects of the interaction between the protagonists, the novel can be read in a new light. Seen from the perspective of contemporary cognitive science, especially what is known as “enactivism,” I argue that central cognitive and interactive processes in the novel seem to be running below the level of explicit dialogue. Thus, we can understand the moral process of The Plague more accurately if we take into account new insights into the important role that the body, our surroundings, and the interaction itself play when humans come together and interact. Finally, I argue that an analysis of The Plague should pay special attention to how Rieux, the narrator and main protagonist, operationalizes these embodied and pre‐reflective mechanisms through his use of narrative techniques.

Enacting Culture

Pragmatic approaches can effectively address questions of cultural dynamics—how culture is renewed, contested, or changed in historical situations. The practice-oriented direction of much of contemporary cognitive science offers an emerging opportunity to more fully integrate thought and emotion into anthropological pragmatism. Here I urge attention to a realm of enacted culture that illustrates how certain interactive processes bring cultural conventions into a communicative environment where they are renewed, transformed, created. As an example, I discuss depictions, improvisational performances in which speakers use material resources such as their hands or voices to formulate and portray thoughts. In a close analysis of three short narratives, I show that depictions are used by speakers to help to create an affect-rich environment in which cultural conventions are introduced into interactional space, whence they become subject to negotiation. It is not only in these spontaneous and improvisational practices that cognition and culture unfold in time as a dialectical interplay of mind and environment; this also occurs in stylized formats such as public rituals and narratives.

The Natural Syntax of Local Coreference.

Emergentist approaches to language are burdened with two responsibilities in contemporary cognitive science. On the one hand, they must offer a different and better understanding of the well-known phenomena that appear to support traditional formal approaches to language. On the other hand, they must extend the search for alternative explanations beyond the familiar languages of Europe and East Asia. I pursue this joint endeavor here by outlining an emergentist account for constraints on local anaphora in English and Balinese, with a view to showing that, despite numerous proposals to the contrary, the two languages manifest essentially the same system of coreference and that the system in question is shaped by processing pressures rather than grammatical principles.