A dilemma for Heideggerian cognitive science

‘Naturalizing phenomenology’ by limiting it to the ontology of the sciences is problematic on both metaphysical and phenomenological grounds. While most assessments of the prospects for a ‘naturalized phenomenology’ have focused on approaches based in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, problems also arise for non-reductive approaches based in Heideggerian existential phenomenology. ‘Heideggerian cognitive science’ faces a dilemma. On the one hand, (i) if it is directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, and this subjectivity is assumed to be ontologically irreducible to its physical enablers yet still metaphysically dependent on them, then Heideggerian cognitive science will either leave that metaphysical dependence an unexplained instance of supervenience, or ground it in speculation about brute metaphysical laws that have an unclear relationship to the ontology of the sciences. On the other hand, (ii) if Heideggerian cognitive science is not directly concerned with the nature of subjectivity, but is instead merely aimed at the development of a Heideggerian phenomenological psychology, then it doesn’t fully address the ontological implications of phenomenology’s transcendental approach, and so, while it might succeed in explaining the realization of psychological phenomena scientifically, the existence of subjectivity will remain inexplicable based on the ontology of the sciences. Neither strategy succeeds in ‘naturalizing phenomenology’: (i) either rejects scientific naturalism, or makes its requirements trivial, while (ii) either rejects the transcendental dimension of phenomenology, or fails to address its ontological implications.     

Innateness in cognitive science

Innateness is one of the central concepts of cognitive science; but it is also a source of considerable confusion. In this article, I survey recent attempts to understand the notion of innateness as it figures in cognitive science and indicate which is likely to prove most fruitful. One approach draws directly on our "commonsense" views about innate traits. Another aims to characterize innateness in terms of concepts drawn from biology, such as genetic determination. Yet neither strategy has met with much success. This could indicate that a satisfactory account of innateness needs to make use of the conceptual resources of cognitive science itself. A proposal that takes this suggestion seriously is outlined, and an appeal is made for a more systematic assessment of the role and significance of the notion of innateness to cognitive science.     

Expert systems: A cognitive science perspective

The theory and technology of knowledge-based systems are intrinsically interdisciplinary and are closely related to the formalisms of cognitive psychology. In this paper, strategies of incorporating intelligence into a computer program are described along with a common architecture for expert systems, including choices of representation and inferential methods. The history of the field is traced from its origins in metamathematics and Newell and Simon’s (1961) GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER to the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project that produced DENDRAL and MYCIN (Buchanan & Shortliffe, 1984). MYCIN gave rise to EMYCIN and a shell technology that has radically reduced the development time and cost of expert systems. Methodology and concepts are illustrated by transactions with a shell developed for graduate education and a demonstration knowledge base for the diagnosis of senile dementia. Knowledge-based systems and conventional programs are compared with respect to formalisms employed, applications, program characteristics, procedures supplied by the development environment, consistency, certainty, flexibility, and programmer’s viewpoint. The technology raises basic questions for cognitive psychology concerning knowledge and expertise.     

Explanatory pluralism in cognitive science

This brief commentary has three goals. The first is to argue that "framework debate" in cognitive science is unresolvable. The idea that one theory or framework can singly account for the vast complexity and variety of cognitive processes seems unlikely if not impossible. The second goal is a consequence of this: We should consider how the various theories on offer work together in diverse contexts of investigation. A final goal is to supply a brief review for readers who are compelled by these points to explore existing literature on the topic. Despite this literature, pluralism has garnered very little attention from broader cognitive science. We end by briefly considering what it might mean for theoretical cognitive science.     

COGNET: A national network for cognitive science

A planning committee funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has agreed in principle on a draft proposal for the establishment of a national network of computers for research in cognitive science. The main ideas of the proposal are discussed in this paper.     

Tolerant enactivist cognitive science

Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is that the very idea of ascribing representational content to internal, sub-personal processes is a theoretical confusion. This paper criticises some of the arguments made by Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017) for the stronger anti-representational claim and suggests that the default Enactivist view should be the weaker non-representational position.     

Multidisciplinarity and cognitive science

The aim of Schunn, Crowley and Okada's (1998) study is to address the question of whether the current state of cognitive science, as represented by Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society, “reflects the multidisciplinary ideals of its foundation.” To properly interpret and respond to their results, we need to ask a prior question: What is cognitive science's multidisciplinary ideal? There are at least two conceptions—a “localist” conception, which seems to be implicit in Schunn, Crowley and Okada's discussion, and a “holist” conception. I argue that while both have been endorsed by some cognitive scientists, there are reasons for preferring the holist conception. I then consider what Schunn, Crowley and Okada's findings tell us about the state of cognitive science in light of a holist approach and report on an analysis of the journal's contents which looks at the domain, subdomain, and cognitive capacity investigated.     

Representation and cognitive science

‘Representation’ is a concept which occurs both in cognitive science and philosophy. It has common features in both settings in that it concerns the explanation of behaviour in terms of the way the subject categorizes and systematizes responses to its environment. The prevailing model sees representations as causally structured entities correlated on the one hand with elements in a natural language and on the other with clearly identifiable items in the world. This leads to an analysis of representation and cognition in terms of formal symbols and their relations. But human perception and cognition use multiple informational constraints and deal with unsystematic and messy input in a way best explained by Parallel Distributed Processing models. This undermines the claim that a formal representational theory of mind is ‘the only game in town’. In particular it suggests a radically different model of brain function and its relation to epistemology from that found in current representational theories.     

The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science

According to the dominant computational approach in cognitive science, cognitive agents are digital computers; according to the alternative approach, they are dynamical systems. This target article attempts to articulate and support the dynamical hypothesis. The dynamical hypothesis has two major components: the nature hypothesis (cognitive agents are dynamical systems) and the knowledge hypothesis (cognitive agents can be understood dynamically). A wide range of objections to this hypothesis can be rebutted. The conclusion is that cognitive systems may well be dynamical systems, and only sustained empirical research in cognitive science will determine the extent to which that is true.     

MERLOT: A faculty-focused Web site of educational resources

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a community of academic institutions, professional discipline organizations, and individual people building a collection of Web-based teaching and learning resources where faculty can easily find peer-reviewed materials for use in their classes. The MERLOT project is currently supported by 23 systems and institutions of higher education and by the National Science Foundation. MERLOT is developing collections of learning materials from many academic disciplines, including psychology.     

Online webcam-based eye tracking in cognitive science: A first look

Online experimentation is emerging in many areas of cognitive psychology as a viable alternative or supplement to classical in-lab experimentation. While performance- and reaction-time-based paradigms are covered in recent studies, one instrument of cognitive psychology has not received much attention up to now: eye tracking. In this study, we used JavaScript-based eye tracking algorithms recently made available by Papoutsaki et al. (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2016) together with consumer-grade webcams to investigate the potential of online eye tracking to benefit from the common advantages of online data conduction. We compared three in-lab conducted tasks (fixation, pursuit, and free viewing) with online-acquired data to analyze the spatial precision in the first two, and replicability of well-known gazing patterns in the third task. Our results indicate that in-lab data exhibit an offset of about 172 px (15% of screen size, 3.94° visual angle) in the fixation task, while online data is slightly less accurate (18% of screen size, 207 px), and shows higher variance. The same results were found for the pursuit task with a constant offset during the stimulus movement (211 px in-lab, 216 px online). In the free-viewing task, we were able to replicate the high attention attribution to eyes (28.25%) compared to other key regions like the nose (9.71%) and mouth (4.00%). Overall, we found web technology-based eye tracking to be suitable for all three tasks and are confident that the required hard- and software will be improved continuously for even more sophisticated experimental paradigms in all of cognitive psychology.     

Twelve issues for cognitive science

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one. Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect. I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole.     

Dynamical approaches to cognitive science

Dynamical ideas are beginning to have a major impact on cognitive science, from foundational debates to daily practice. In this article, I review three contrasting examples of work in this area that address the lexical and grammatical structure of language, Piaget's classic 'A-not-B' error, and active categorical perception in an embodied, situated agent. From these three examples, I then attempt to articulate the major differences between dynamical approaches and more traditional symbolic and connectionist approaches. Although the three models reviewed here vary considerably in their details, they share a focus on the unfolding trajectory of a system's state and the internal and external forces that shape this trajectory, rather than the representational content of its constituent states or the underlying physical mechanisms that instantiate the dynamics. In some work, this dynamical viewpoint is augmented with a situated and embodied perspective on cognition, forming a promising unified theoretical framework for cognitive science broadly construed.