Anna Estany

The philosophy of science has always focused on the representation of knowledge, which manifests itself in different ways, such as the analysis of concepts, laws, theories, and explanatory models. Despite this, there is no unanimous agreement on which of these categories is the fundamental unit of representation. This study will explore various approaches, including the symbolic paradigm, connectionism, enactivism, and motor representation. Our purpose is to analyze these perspectives on knowledge representation, link them with key theses in the philosophy of science, and finally, propose a neurocognitively founded conceptualization of knowledge representation, integrating the various examined views. For this monograph, Patricia S. Churchland's Neurophilosophy will serve as a reference work for the analysis of cognitive science approaches to knowledge representation.

Design seems to have emerged from the niche in which it had remained for decades, not to say centuries, at least as far as research in the history of philosophy and science are concerned. Nowadays, the idea of design has reached our theories of epistemology: a field that, at first glance, seems to be quite far removed from the analysis of practical situations. The objective of this chapter is to explore just how far design epistemology (DE) can be adopted as a methodological framework for research in the field of public health, and precisely what it adds to classic epistemology or even to the standard methodology of applied science. On the one hand, we will analyse different approaches to DE and related terms and expressions such as “design thinking”, “design theory” and “designerly ways of knowing”; on the other, we will consider where to place public health within the field of academic knowledge and research and the disciplines involved in this field of research range from biomedical science to sociology and demography. Finally, we will see how DE can offer proposals and solutions to the challenges that a phenomenon as complex as public health currently faces. That is, we will measure up DE proposals against public health research needs.

The questioning of the introduction of new diseases is a typical feature of psychiatry: Does ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) exist? Why “hysteria” has not disappeared from diagnosis taxonomies? Here, we show that this characteristic is not exclusive to psychiatry. In the case of coeliac disease and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), an important tension arises between a pragmatist position, in favour of diagnosing NCGS, and an opposing essentialist conception, since no “biological core” specific to NCGS can be identified. When proposals for new diseases appear, practitioners adopt positions in favour or against their acceptance, supported by different epistemological approaches. In this work, we analyse these approaches, which lie behind many nosological and taxonomic discussions in medicine.

There are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an “affordance” and “scaffolding” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously.

El abordaje de la razón puede rastrearse a lo largo de la historia de la filosofía de Aristóteles a Kant hasta nuestros días. La emoción tampoco ha sido ajena a la filosofía, aunque su relación con la razón ha motivado debates en los que las posiciones al respecto han dado lugar a sistemas epistemológicos dispares. La obra de Antonio Damasio es extensa con aportaciones relevantes sobre procesos cerebrales, emociones, sentimientos y conciencia. El objetivo de este artículo es el análisis de algunas ideas desarrolladas por Damasio a lo largo de su obra que tienen especial relevancia para la filosofía de la ciencia y la epistemología.

Abordar los modelos sanitarios supone situarnos frente a fenómenos complejos que implican perspectivas diversas que van desde la medicina hasta el diseño de los espacios sanitarios pasando por la salud de los ciudadanos. Esto requiere una aproximación innovadora y democrática en la que hay que tener en cuenta valores epistémicos, cognitivos y contextuales. Para ello es ineludible abordar los marcos teóricos que engloban las posibilidades de un cambio de paradigma en los modelos sanitarios, entre los que podemos destacar los siguientes: las teorías del diseño y su consideración como tercera cultura entre las humanidades y las ciencias; la gestión de la complejidad y su importancia para la interacción a fin de llevarla a cabo con eficacia; el papel de las instituciones en tanto constituyen un elemento clave de los modelos sanitarios; y la relevancia del factor cognitivo en una explicación naturalizada del diseño institucional.

Design has usually been linked to art and applied in scenarios related to everyday life. Even when design has, on occasion, made its way into the world of academia, it has always been closely linked to art and scenarios related everyday life. At last, however, the idea of design has reached the field of epistemology: an area within the very heart of philosophy that has always focused, in theory, on the foundations of knowledge. Consequently, design is being studied from different approaches interested in the foundation of knowledge, theoretical and practical. This is one of the reasons why abduction and pragmatism have been considered relevant from a design perspective. This paper first shows the main features of abduction and pragmatism, describes their evolution and considers their mutual implications. Second, the epistemology of design is analysed considering its most relevant characteristics. Third, the connection between abduction and, on the one hand, pragmatism and, on the other, design epistemology is addressed. Finally, the role of abductive inference in grounding a real epistemology for design theory from the naturalised cognitive perspective of abduction is outlined. The central proposition is that this approach is essential as a methodological innovation, as it allows us to analyse both the inquiry process and the design process as interdependent when dealing with practical problems of a social and cultural nature. This approach allows us to analyse how human actions determine changes in the theoretical framework from which we make our inquiry. In short, the world is an open-ended project that humans design through our daily inquiry.

Starting from the naturalistic program and within the framework of cognitive sciences, issues such as the representation of knowledge, the role of technology, the relationship between theory and experiment and the theoretical burden of observation have been addressed. In any of these analyses, the idea is to contrast the philosophical proposal with some of the theories and results of the cognitive sciences, with the purpose of seeing to what extent they reinforce each other, one reinforces the other but not the other way around, or they are irrelevant. The objective of this work is to place design at the center of philosophical analysis from the perspective of cognitive science. However, the cognitive approach has been applied much less to the analysis of design sciences, despite the fact that its possibilities are not less when it comes to addressing the challenges involved in the application of scientific knowledge to the transformation of the world. The starting hypothesis is that there are implications between design sciences and motor cognition; therefore, they are not irrelevant. The degree of connection and neurocognitive foundation of the design sciences will be elucidated as the analysis progresses in order to draw conclusions, both for the design processes and for the cognitive approach in general.

The debate on rationality of science go round the influence of external factors {psychological, sociological, political and religious) on the development of scientific theories. All models of scientific change analyse the relationship between external and internal factors. The aim of this paper is to explain the role played by the external factors in models of scientific change. Fist of all, I look over the models of T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos and L. Laudan, expounding their characterization of external factors. Secondly, I show several historical cases, where one can see the influence of external factors in the development of science, and I analyse them from externlist and internalist positions. Finally, I propose to incorporate the external factors in a new perspective of models of scientific change out of externalist positions.

The approach to issues such as good and evil from philosophy leads us to specify what is understood by ethics and morals. Canonically, ethics is a branch of philosophy that studies and systematizes these concepts and aims to rationally define what constitutes a good or virtuous act, regardless of the culture in which it is framed. Morality is defined as the set of norms that govern the behavior of people who are part of a given society, thus contributing to the maintenance of stability and social structure. Based on these definitions, naturalization consists of seeking foundations in the empirical sciences to justify moral principles. The objective of this work is to see to what extent science can contribute knowledge that supports ethics and moral principles, a project based on the naturalization of philosophy, questioning any apriorism that ignores science. First, the naturalizing program and its main variants in philosophy will be examined. Second, two proposals from the philosophy of science that can be framed in naturalism will be analyzed, namely: Philip Kitcher and Patricia S. Churchland. Next, some of the main theses that provide scientific explanation of human behavior from the point of view of moral virtues will be addressed.

Este artículo parte del debate en filosofía de la ciencia entre la tradición teórica y la experimental, y muestra su relación con el estudio de los procesos de innovación e invención en ciencia, cruzando así los planteamientos de análisis más teóricos de la filosofía de la ciencia con cuestiones más relacionadas con la filosofía de la tecnología y la ciencia aplicada. De esta manera, analizamos la interrelación entre experimento y teoría en los procesos de invención e innovación y conectamos los campos de la ciencia teórica y la aplicada, mostrando la continuidad entre ambas. Así, podemos mostrar también cómo en ciencia hay siempre dependencia mutua de teoría y experimentación, y cómo esa dependencia es extrapolable también a los procesos de innovación e invención.Tomando como punto de partida el debate en torno a las tradiciones teóricas y experimentales, veremos hasta qué punto los argumentos que cuestionan las tradiciones teóricas y apuestan por las tradiciones experimentales encajan con los fenómenos de invención e innovación. El caso que vamos a tomar como referencia para aplicar este análisis es el de «aprendizaje automático», como una rama de los algoritmos computacionales diseñados para emular la inteligencia humana aprendiendo del entorno. Este campo es relevante pues, a pesar de su naturaleza eminentemente teórica —en substancia es matemática aplicada—, presenta toda una serie de características que lo hacen muy afín al análisis desde las tradiciones experimentales.

While the extended cognition (EC) thesis has gained more followers in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind and knowledge, our main goal is to discuss a different area of significance of the EC thesis: its relation to philosophy of science. In this introduction, we outline two major areas: (I) The role of the thesis for issues in the philosophy of cognitive science, such as: How do notions of EC figure in theories or research programs in cognitive science? Which versions of the EC thesis appear, and with which arguments to support them? (II) The potentials and limits of the EC thesis for topics in general philosophy of science, such as: Can naturalism perhaps be further advanced by means of the more recent EC thesis? Can we understand “big science” or laboratory research better by invoking some version of EC? And can the EC thesis help in overcoming the notorious cognitive/social divide in science studies?

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar no sólo que no hay incompatibilidad entre los factores cognitivos y sociales en el análisis de fenómenos científicos y tecnológicos, sino que se complementan. Esta idea se ejemplifica con el estudio del error humano desde una doble perspectiva: la de un científico cognitivo como James Reason y la de un ingeniero como Henry Petroski. El análisis de catástrofes a causa de fallos en estructuras arquitectónicas o en procesos industriales muestra que sólo teniendo en cuenta sus elementos cognitivos y sociales podemos disminuir los fracasos y aumentar los éxitos de la actividad científico-tecnológica.

La muerte de Thomas Kuhn el verano de 1996 ha supuesto una pérdida para la comunidad filosófica y científica. Kuhn propuso una teoría sobre las revoluciones científicas en su obra La estructura de las revoluciones científicas, publicada en 1962. El aspecto más novedoso de la obra de Kuhn es su propuesta de un análisis global de la ciencia, teniendo en cuenta tanto los factores internos como externos. Una buena parte de las corrientes en filosofía de la ciencia que en la última década se han desarrollado están presentes en la obra de Kuhn.

La revolución química del siglo XVIII ha sido uno de los casos históricos más estudiados por los filósofos interesados en explicar el progreso de la ciencia. T. Kukn, I. Lakatos, S. Toulmin y L. Laudan, entre otros, hacen referencia a este cambio en sus modelos de cambio científico. La mayoría de los autores hacen análisis globales del paso de la química del flogisto a la química del oxígeno pero descuidan los cambios parciales aunque importantes. El objetivo de este trabajo es el estudio de los cambios ontdógicos que se produjeron durante el siglo XVIII, tomando para ello algunas teorías de la referencia a fin de evaluar la capacidad referencia! de la ontología de la química del flogisto y la de la química del oxígeno. Esto nos permite penetrar en la microestructura de la revolución química del siglo XVIII y perfilar una parte de su estructura fina.