John Vervaeke

Ecological rationality claims human rationality emerges from the application of ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics. Although the adaptive toolbox contains many such tools, a heuristic selection mechanism interacts with situational cues to choose one that is contextually appropriate. The result is adaptive behavior and cognition. Ecological rationality evaluates the rationality of psychological mechanisms in terms of correspondence i.e., in terms of the ‘fit’ or ‘conformity’ between properties of the mechanism and features of the world. We argue, however, that ecological rationality presupposes more fundamental orientation processes not fully thematized but that are essential to being rational. We use Stegmaier’s (2008/2019) philosophy of orientation to bring out these processes. We maintain that the concepts of the standpoint, horizon, and footholds, and the existential structuring of our orientations into routines and orientation worlds can be fruitfully integrated into the ecological rationality framework. Orientation processes impose bottom-up and top-down constraints that help to make the heuristic selection process more tractable, complementing the strictly bottom-up approach taken by ecological rationality. These orientation processes also show that rationality is not only about conformity with states of the world but also about maintaining a coherent standpoint across situations. We end by proposing future research on how the philosophy of orientation can account for different orientations humans can take, specifically our ability to switch from individual to collective standpoints. This alters the types of situations we can survey and the cues we can uncover and respond to, thus expanding the horizon of intelligibility.

Self-transcendent experiences (STEs) represent profound shifts in cognition and consciousness, possessing significant transformative potential. With growing scientific interest in these phenomena, we propose the cognitive continuum as a unifying framework. Grounded in enactive cognitive science and complex dynamic systems perspectives, this approach takes the embodied person, embedded within their world, as the appropriate unit of analysis. The continuum illustrates how STEs, such as flow states and mystical experiences, reflect an enhancement of relevance realization, the organism’s active engagement with its environment to adaptively frame its world, across increasingly global levels of cognitive organization. We identify destabilization and complexification as central processes in this enhancement and propose entropy as their metric. We introduce the Entropy-Fluency hypothesis, which posits that increased entropy signals destabilization followed by increased fluency, thereby conceptually bridging first-person subjective experiences with third-person scientific observations of STEs. The cognitive continuum reveals STEs as dynamic, person-specific, and context-dependent phenomena emerging from person-world coupling, requiring idiographic and transdisciplinary methodological approaches. This framework provides conceptual tools for understanding these profound experiences, contributing to a comprehensive science of human flourishing.

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise (in a Bayesian sense). This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution.

This thesis reviews current progress in cognitive science towards satisfying the naturalistic imperative. Careful attention is paid to distinguishing metaphysical naturalism from methodological naturalism. Following this, methodological naturalism is further clarified as the set of imperatives: analyse, formalise, and mechanise. It is argued that simulation on its own is insufficient for satisfying these imperatives. Instead it must be supplemented and constrained by existing psychological theory which will indicate the relevant features for comparison in any simulation that seeks to be an explanation of human cognition. Therefore, we turn to an examination of current work in cognitive psychology. Specifically, we examine areas where attempts are being made to analyse and formalise cognition in terms of more basic psychological processes. So, the thesis proceeds to examine current work on categorisation and the nature of concepts, memory, problem solving, and inference. It shows how each can be considered a basic process in terms of which the rest of cognition might be analysed and formalised. However, we also discover that in each of these areas the naturalistic imperative is being seriously frustrated by a combination of conceptual and methodological problems. It is further shown that these problems are not independent but stem from a deep problem concerning the relationship between the two central notions of representation and relevance. The thesis argues for a very tight interdependence between the two notions so that whenever one is being used theoretically the other is being presupposed. In turn, it argues that this interdependence is frustrating current attempts to naturalise cognition. What then follows is an examination of attempts to break out of this bind by independently naturalising representation or relevance. These two projects are shown to fail precisely because they cannot break the interdependence between representation and relevance. It is argued that what is behind this representation-relevance problem is a very serious problem in any attempt to naturalise the notion of relevance. Finally, there is a discussion of what follows for philosophy and cognitive science if relevance cannot be completely naturalised

Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities.

This paper examines the enactment of agency in the Mars Exploration Rover mission. We argue that MER functioned as a distributed cognitive system, made up of highly specialized, though complementary, elements. To explain how a sense of shared agency was attained therein, we augment the distributed account with Tollefsen and Gallagher’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 47, 95-110, theory of joint agency. It claims joint actions involve a cascade of shared distal, proximal, and motor intentions, each with its own content and timescale, and that narrative processes are crucial for stabilizing shared intentions. We argue MER possessed these three levels of intention, though they fell on different elements of the distributed cognitive system, and their timescales were longer than mundane cases of joint action. Scientists, collaborating with engineers, enacted shared distal and proximal intentions, while rovers enacted the motor intentions. Moreover, we show that we-narratives, including a commitment to consensus-based operations and an epistemic strategy for discovering the geological history of Mars, constrained the formation of distal and proximal intentions such that they could genuinely be attributed to the group. Nonetheless, our distributed account does not fully capture how rovers shaped the sense of embodiment of team members. Scientists and engineers described themselves as ‘becoming the rover,’ which allowed them to have a sense of presence on Mars. We argue this can be explained by the Material Engagement Theory, which complements the distributed cognition theory.

The distinguishing feature of enactivist cognitive science is arguably its commitment to non-reductionism and its philosophical allegiance to first-person approaches, like phenomenology. The guiding theme of this article is that a theoretically mature enactivism is bound to be humanistic in its articulation, and only by becoming more humanistic can enactivism more fully embody the non-reductionist spirit that lay at its foundation. Our explanatory task is thus to bring forth such an articulation by advancing an enactivist theory of human personality. To this end, we synthesize core concepts from cognitive science, personality theory, and phenomenological philosophy in order to develop an Enactivist Big-5 Theory of personality. According to EB5T, personality traits are dispositional tendencies for how we come to optimally grip our distinctly human worlds. Individual differences in personality are therefore reflective of stylistic differences in optimal gripping tendencies between human beings. EB5T affords a non-reductionist understanding of the immanent teleology of the autopoietically embodied human mind as a kind of full-scale optimal gripping process that is achieved along five major dimensions of personality. To the degree that these dimensions are universal, therefore, we argue that our theory offers a viable path forward in advancing enactivist cognitive science beyond the life of a cell and into the mind of a person, a longstanding hope and ambition held by proponents of the enactive approach.

Connectionist models of cognition are all the rage these days. They are said to provide better explanations than traditional symbolic computational models in a wide array of cognitive areas, from perception to memory to language to reasoning to motor action. But what does it actually mean to say that they "explain" cognition at all? In what sense do the dozens of nodes and hundreds of connections in a typical connectionist network explain anything? It is the purpose of this paper to explore this question in light of traditional accounts of what it is to be an explanation. We start with an impossibly brief review of some historically important theories of explanation. We then discuss several currently-popular approaches to the question of how connectionist models explain cognition. Third, we describe a theory of causation by philosopher Stephen Yablo that solves some of the problems on which we think many accounts of connectionist explanation founder. Finally, we apply Yablo's theory to these accounts, and show how several important issues surrounding them seem to disappear into thin air in its presence.

The problem with many contemporary criticisms of Chomsky and linguistic nativism is that they are based upon features of the theory that are no longer germane; aspects that have either been superseded by more adequate proposals, or that have been dropped altogether under the weight of contravening evidence. In this paper, rather than rehashing old debates that are voluminously documented elsewhere, we intend to focus on more recent developments. To this end, we have put a premium on references from the 1990s and the latter half of the 1980s. First, we will describe exactly what is now thought to be innate about language, and why it is thought to be innate rather than learned. Second, we will examine the evidence that many people take to be the greatest challenge to the nativist claim: ape language. Third, we will briefly consider how an innate language organ might have evolved. Fourth we will look at how an organism might communicate without benefit of the innate language structure proposed by Chomsky, and examine a number of cases in which this seems to be happening. Finally we will try to sum up our claims and characterize what we believe will be the most fruitful course of debate for the immediate future