Petar Nurkić

Cognitive scientists used to deem reasoning either as a higher cognitive process based on the manipulation of abstract rules or as a higher cognitive process that is stochastic rather than involving abstract rules. I maintain that these different perspectives are closely intertwined with a theoretical and methodological endorsement of either cognitivism or connectionism. Cognitivism and connectionism represent two prevailing and opposed paradigms in cognitive science. I aim to extoll the virtues of connectionist models of enthymematic reasoning by following means: via the phenomenon of creative enthymeme, viz. the inference where one cannot even articulate the missing premise, I introduce a connectionist mechanism of pattern recognition as underlying expertise; via Gestalt switch or Gestalt click, I demonstrate how differences in pattern recognition of an expert and a novice can be construed as qualitatively different, and not merely a matter of faster reasoning.

Three decades ago, William Ramsey, Steven Stich & Joseph Garon put forward an argument in favor of the following conditional: if connectionist models that implement parallelly distributed processing represent faithfully human cognitive processing, eliminativism about propositional attitudes is true. The corollary of their argument (if it proves to be sound) is that there is no place for folk psychology in contemporary cognitive science. This understanding of connectionism as a hypothesis about cognitive architecture compatible with eliminativism is also endorsed by Paul Churchland, a radical opponent of folk psychology and a prominent supporter of eliminative materialism. I aim to examine whether current connectionist models based on long-short term memory (LSTM) neural networks can back up these arguments in favor of eliminativism. Nonetheless, I will rather put my faith in the eliminativism of the limited domain. This position amounts to the claim that even though connectionist cognitive science has no need whatsoever for folk psychology qua theory, this does not entail the illegitimacy of folk psychology per se in other scientific domains, most notably in humanities, but only on condition that one regards folk psychology as mere heuristics.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the most influential science-fiction epic of all time. Published as a series of books and short stories from the 1940s to the 1980s, the series has impacted most subsequent science fiction, and also influenced sciences like sociology, statistics, and psychology. The story has now been made into a highly acclaimed TV serial (Foundation), on Apple TV, the second season now shooting in Prague. The story begins 45,000 years in the future, and spans centuries in which a vast and successful interstellar human empire is unknowingly headed for total collapse. Using an advanced mathematical technique called psycho-history, a brilliant scientist, Hari Seldon, predicts the collapse and establishes a “foundation” to bring about the resurrection of human civilization many generations in the future. Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy is a collection of twenty-four chapter by philosophers exploring the philosophical issues and puzzles raised by this epic story. Topics include whether one individual can make a big difference in history, the ethics of manipulating large populations of people to bring about a desirable future result, the Dao of non-action, the impact of education on future generations, whether human affairs are governed by predictable cycles, whether attempts to plan for the future must be thwarted by free will, the futility of empire-building, the ethics of cloning human beings, and the use of logic in analyzing human behavior.