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10Rumors of Our Death…Topics in Cognitive Science 11 (4): 864-868. 2019.Núñez and colleagues (2019) question whether cognitive science still exists “as a coherent academic field with a well‐defined and cohesive interdisciplinary research program.” This worry may be premature on two grounds. First, we are not convinced that the Lakatosian criterion of coalescence around a core framework is the best standard for judging whether a field is well‐defined and productive. Second, although we acknowledge that cognitive science is not as visible as we would like, we doubt th…Read more
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15Rumors of Our Death…Topics in Cognitive Science 11 (4): 864-868. 2019.Núñez and colleagues (2019) question whether cognitive science still exists “as a coherent academic field with a well‐defined and cohesive interdisciplinary research program.” This worry may be premature on two grounds. First, we are not convinced that the Lakatosian criterion of coalescence around a core framework is the best standard for judging whether a field is well‐defined and productive. Second, although we acknowledge that cognitive science is not as visible as we would like, we doubt th…Read more
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16Religious Practice, Brain, and BeliefJournal of Cognition and Culture 5 (1-2): 75-117. 2005.It is a common assertion that there is a fundamental epistemological divide between religious and secular ways of knowing. The claim is that knowledge of the sacred rests on faith, while knowledge of the natural world rests on the evidence of our senses. A review of both the psychological and the neurophysiological literatures suggests, to the contrary, that for many people, religious experiences provide powerful reasons to believe in the supernatural. Examples are given from reports of mystical…Read more
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37Cultural adaptation and evolved, general-purpose cognitive mechanisms are sufficient to explain belief in soulsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5): 480. 2006.It is suggested that general-purpose cognitive modules are the proper endophenotypes on which evolution has operated, not special purpose belief modules. These general-purpose modules operate to extract adaptive cultural patterns. Belief in souls may be adaptive and based in evolved systems without requiring that a specific cognitive system has evolved to support just such beliefs.
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64What Fodor means: Some thoughts on reading Jerry Fodor's A Theory of Content and Other EssaysPhilosophical Psychology 6 (3): 289-301. 1993.Jerry Fodor's Asymmetric Dependency Theory (ADT) of meaning is discussed in the context of his attempt to avoid holism and the relativism it entails. Questions are raised about the implications of the theory for psychological theories of meaning, and brief suggestions are offered for how to more closely link a theory of meaning to a theory of perception
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37Concept acquisition and use occurs in (real) contextBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 77-78. 1998.A realist story of concepts like Millikan's can and should accommodate facts about how the context of items available for comparison during concept formation affects just what concept is formed or reidentified. Similarly, the contribution of the goals and purposes of the conceptualizer are relevant to how concepts are acquired and deployed, but can be understood as entirely consistent with a view of concepts as objectively evaluable.
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46The case for general mechanisms in concept formationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 581-582. 1998.Reasons are given for believing that it is premature to abandon the idea that domain-general models of concept learning can explain how human beings understand the biological world. Questions are raised about whether the evidence for domain specificity is convincing, and it is suggested that two constraints on domain-general concept learning models may be sufficient to account for the available data.
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30The neurocomputational mind meets normative epistemologyPhilosophical Psychology 9 (1): 33-59. 1996.The rapid development of connectionist models in computer science and of powerful computational tools in neuroscience has encouraged eliminativist materialist philosophers to propose specific alternatives to traditional mentalistic theories of mind. One of the problems associated with such a move is that elimination of the mental would seem to remove access to ideas like truth as the foundations of normative epistemology. Thus, a successful elimination of propositional or sentential theories of …Read more