Connectionism and the Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science

This is an overview of recent philosophical discussion about connectionism and the foundations of cognitive science. Connectionist modeling in cognitive science is described. Three broad conceptions of the mind are characterized, and their comparative strengths and weaknesses are discussed: (1) the classical computation conception in cognitive science; (2) a popular foundational interpretation of connectionism that John Tienson and I call "non-sentential computationalism"; and (3) an alternative interpretation of connectionism we call "dynamical cognition." Also discussed are two recent philosophical attempts to enlist connectionism in defense of eliminativism about folk psychology.     

The Place and Role of Psychology in Cognitive Science: An International Survey

This paper reports the results of an international survey on the place and role of psychology in cognitive science (CS). The respondents were psychological societies from 31 countries illustrating a variety of situations, from countries where psychology has been established as a science for a long time to countries where it has been established more recently and is still developing. The paper reviews topics covered by the CS approach, as well as research operations and initiatives taken in this domain. The analysis of responses reflects the belief that psychology, in general, has a central role in CS. This is based on epistemological considerations, as well as on the recognition of the methodological expertise of psychology for collecting and analyzing empirical data. Psychology is reported to have a unique integrative capacity and to take care to maintain the place of the human being at the centre of CS. Limitations and obstacles to the development of pluridisciplinary research on cognition are also reported, and information is provided on the training programmes in CS and the institutions that support research in this domain.     

Cognitive Science: What One Needs to Know

Cognitive science is a new paradigm that informs and involves several disciplines, including artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive ethology, and the philosophy of mind. Cognitive science studies the mind as an information processor, with the computer often operating as a metaphor for the operations of the mind. Developments in the cognitive sciences stand to affect tremendously how we think of the mind and, consequently, how we think of theological and religious claims that concern the human subject. The unity of self, claims of human uniqueness, the relation of mind and body, human nature, and the personal agency of God are all areas of religious import in which the cognitive sciences need to be taken into account.     

NEO-PIAGETIAN THEORIES: CROSS-CULTURAL AND DIFFERENTIAL PERSPECTIVES

The neo-Piagetian theories represented in this special issue are examined from the cross-cultural and differential perspectives. The goals, methods and achievements of these two approaches are briefly reviewed, and the similarities and differences between the two are pointed out. Six criteria are proposed that psychological theories should meet from the point of view of these perspectives. After a review of the few existing empirical cross-cultural and differential studies inspired by neo-Piagetian theories, the latter are matched to the six criteria, and the potential advantages of these new models over classical structuralist approaches are spelled out.     

The emergence of Cognitive Hearing Science

Cognitive Hearing Science or Auditory Cognitive Science is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research concerning the interactions between hearing and cognition. It follows a trend over the last half century for interdisciplinary fields to develop, beginning with Neuroscience, then Cognitive Science, then Cognitive Neuroscience, and then Cognitive Vision Science. A common theme is that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand complex human behaviors, to develop technologies incorporating knowledge of these behaviors, and to find solutions for individuals with impairments that undermine typical behaviors. Accordingly, researchers in traditional academic disciplines, such as Psychology, Physiology, Linguistics, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Sociology benefit from collaborations with each other, and with researchers in Computer Science and Engineering working on the design of technologies, and with health professionals working with individuals who have impairments. The factors that triggered the emergence of Cognitive Hearing Science include the maturation of the component disciplines of Hearing Science and Cognitive Science, new opportunities to use complex digital signal-processing to design technologies suited to performance in challenging everyday environments, and increasing social imperatives to help people whose communication problems span hearing and cognition. Cognitive Hearing Science is illustrated in research on three general topics: (1) language processing in challenging listening conditions; (2) use of auditory communication technologies or the visual modality to boost performance; (3) changes in performance with development, aging, and rehabilitative training. Future directions for modeling and the translation of research into practice are suggested.     

The Concrete Universal and Cognitive Science

Cognitive science depends on abstractions made from the complex reality of human behaviour. Cognitive scientists typically wish the abstractions in their theories to be universals, but seldom attend to the ontology of universals. Two sorts of universal, resulting from Galilean abstraction and materialist abstraction respectively, are available in the philosophical literature: the abstract universal—the one-over-many universal—is the universal conventionally employed by cognitive scientists; in contrast, a concrete universal is a material entity that can appear within the set of entities it describes, of which it represents the essential, paradigmatic case. The potential role of concrete universals in cognitive science is discussed.     

新联结主义产生的心理学背景

新联结主义虽然是20世纪80年代早期所复兴的认知心理学的一种新的研究范式．但心理学史中早已存在这种思想的萌芽．这为新联结主义的产生提供了重要的心理学背景,本文主要从六个方面对此进行了分析。     

The Interdisciplinarity of Collaborations in Cognitive Science

We introduce a new metric for interdisciplinarity, based on co‐author publication history. A published article that has co‐authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively “interdisciplinary,” in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent work, we have shown that this interdisciplinarity metric can predict citations. Here, we show that the journal Cognitive Science tends to contain collaborations that are relatively high on this interdisciplinarity metric, at about the 80th percentile of all journals across both social and natural sciences. Following on Goldstone and Leydesdorff (2006), we describe how scientometric tools provide a valuable means of assessing the role of cognitive science in broader scientific work, and also as a tool to investigate teamwork and distributed cognition. We describe how data‐driven metrics of this kind may facilitate this exploration without relying upon rapidly changing discipline and topic keywords associated with publications.     

The Notion of Dynamic Unit: Conceptual Developments in Cognitive Science

We suggest a common ground for alternative proposals In different domains of cognitive science which have previously seemed to have little in common. The underlying common theme is associated with a redefinition of the basic unit of analysis in each domain of thought. Our framework suggests a definition of unity which is based not on inherent properties of the elements constituting the unit, but rather on dynamic patterns of correlation across the elements. We introduce a set of features that characterize the new dynamic units, and distinguish them from traditional units of analysis. A conceptual connection is made with the identification of elementary units in modern physics theories, as well as with concepts and structures in the study of complex dynamical systems and connectionism. The paper analyses the evolution of the concept of unit in different domains of thought in cognitive science, and examines the proposed framework of “dynamic unity” with regard to various theoretical problems within each domain. The particular cognitive science issues discussed in the paper include: (1) the binding problem in the brain; (2) the mental unit of conceptual organization; (3) defining ‘wordhood’ in linguistics; and (4) identifying the unit of cognition in the natural environment.