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OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Cognitive scientists seek to specify mechanistic explanations of psychological


phenomena.

Cognitive science offers the prospect of an empirically informed approach to


addressing issues about how such mental capacities as perception, reasoning,
and memory could result from the activity of mere physical systems.

The success and failures of research programs within cognitive science can
thus be seen as informing our assessment of different answers to the question
of how minds like ours manage to exist in a world whose ultimate constituents
are physical.

Over the past few decades, a number of different research programs have
emerged from the cognitive sciences that explore divergent proposals about the
fundamental nature of the mind.

Computationalism is the most enduring of these computationalists endorse


the general claim that certain mental capacities can be explained
computationally. What they disagree about is how to construe the nature of
computation and how to characterise the type of computation that is most
relevant to the explanation of our cognitive capacities.

Some computationalists, for example, maintain that cognition depends on


classical symbol manipulation, while others advocate connectionist
computation.
Questions: (1) what is means to say that a physical system is a computational
system; (2) how the distinction between digital and analog computation should
be drawn.

Although computationalism of some sort is the most prominent view of


cognition among cognitive scientists, it is not the only one. Another family of
views is often subsumed under the general heading of embodied or embedded
accounts of the mind.

One point of disagreement between traditional theorists and alternative views,


such as those advocated by embodiment theorists, concerns the nature and role
of mental representation. According to most computationalists, representations
have an essential role to play in cognition. In contrast, many embodiment
theorists urge that much of cognition can be explained in nonrepresentational
terms. This point of divergence forms a focal point.

Another philosophical issue concerning the preconditions for thought arises in


the study of concepts. If we assume that thoughts are composed of concepts,
concept possession is clearly essential for having thoughts. But what concepts
themselves are and what is required for concept possession are enormously
controversial matters. For example, different proposals vary in the claims they
make about the ontological status of concepts (whether they are abstract
entities or mental representation), the structural properties of concepts
(including whether word-size concepts have any structure at all), and the
acquisition of concepts (whether there are any innate concepts and how
concepts can be learned).

Some of the empirical issues on which philosophers of cognitive science have


focused concern quite specific mental capacities. For instance, philosophers
have been very active in research regarding what is often called theory of mind
- our ordinary yet remarkable ability to interpret one another as psychological
agents whose behaviour can be predicted in terms of our beliefs, desires, and
other mental states. Initial philosophical interest in this topic was motivated by
its prima facie connection to debates in mainstream philosophy of mind (e.g.,
those concerning eliminativim and commonsense functionalism).

1. CONSCIOUSNESS AND COGNITION

There are five distinguishable types of creature consciousness:

(1) An organism may be said to be conscious if it can sense and perceive its
environment and has the capacity to respond appropriately

(2) A second sense of creature consciousness requires not merely the capacity to
sense or perceive, but the current active use of those capacities

(3) Another notion of creature consciousness requires that organisms be not only
aware but also self-aware (self-awareness comes in degrees and varies along
multiple dimensions) the conscious creatures might be defined as those that
have an experiential life

(4) Organisms are sometimes said to be conscious of various items or objects.


Consciousness in this sense is understood as an intentional relation between the
organism and some object or item of properties or phenomenal character

(5) The representationalist theories claim that conscious states have no mental
properties other than their representational properties. Higher-order theories
analyse consciousness as a form of self-awareness. Higher-order theories come
in several forms. Some treat the requisite higher-order states as perception-like,
and thus the process of generating such states is a kind of inner perception or
perhaps inspection. The intermediate level representation model focuses on the
contents of conscious experience

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