the mit encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences

THE MIT ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE COGNITIVE SCIENCES EDITED BY ROBERT A. WILSON AND FRANK C. KEIL PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE CULTURE, C OGNITION, AND EVOLUTION NEUROSCIENCES The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences [...]... MITECS illustrates the richness and intricacy of this process and the immense value of cognitive science approaches to many questions about the mind All three of the motivations for MITECS were instrumental in the internal organization of the project The core of MITECS is the 471 articles themselves, which were assigned to one of six fields that constitute the foundation of the cognitive sciences One or... the historical debate between rationalists and empiricists has been revisited in contemporary discussions of the INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE, the MODULARITY OF MIND, and CONNECTIONISM A second dimension to the issue of the structure of the mind concerns the place of CONSCIOUSNESS among mental phenomena From WILLIAM JAMES’s influential analysis of the phenomenology of the stream of consciousness in his The. .. zoomer (to adjust the relative sizes of the features on the map) But here again we face the problem of the homunculus, because such “mechanisms” themselves require further psychological decomposition To be faced with the problem of the homunculus, of course, is not the same as to succumb to it We might distinguish two understandings of just what the “problem” is here First, the problem of the homunculus... constituted the core of the developing field of cognitive science in the 1970s, what is sometimes called classic cognitive science, as well as its successors If we were to pose questions central to each of these three issues the mentalphysical relation, the problem of the homunculus, and the possibility of a genuinely cognitive science, they might be: a What is the relation between the mental and the physical?... DEMONSTRATIVES, on theories of REFERENCE and the propositional attitudes, and on the idea of RADICAL INTERPRETATION Here I will restrict myself to some brief comments on theories of reference, which have occupied center stage in the philosophy of language for much of the last thirty years One of the central goals of theories of reference has been to explain in virtue of what parts of sentences of natural languages... about the different views one might have of the relationship between science and reality Apart from raising issues concerning the relationships between psychology and other sciences and their respective objects of study, and questions about the relation between science and reality, the philosophy of science is also relevant to the cognitive sciences as a branch of epistemology or the theory of knowledge,... Both of us are surprised at the extent to which we have already come to rely on drafts of articles in MITECS for these purposes in our own scholarly pursuits In the long list of people to thank, we begin with the contributors themselves, from whom we have learned much, both from their articles and their reviews of the articles of others, and to whom readers owe their first debt Without the expertise of. .. concatenated through the rules of some language of thought Rather, connectionists posit a COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE made up of simple neuron-like nodes, with activity being propagated across the units proportional to the weights of the connection strength between them Knowledge lies not in the nodes themselves but in the values of the weights connecting nodes There seems to be nothing of a propositional... in their very own alternative to introspectionism The two versions of the problem of the homunculus are still with us as a Scylla and Charybdis for contemporary cognitive scientists to steer between On the one hand, theorists need to avoid building the very cognitive abilities that they wish to explain into the models and theories they construct On the other, in attempting to side-step this problem they... 1991) These fundamental developments in logical theory have had perhaps the most widespread and pervasive effect on the foundations of the cognitive sciences of any contributions from philosophy or mathematics They also form the basis for much contemporary work across the cognitive sciences: in linguistic semantics (e.g., through MODAL LOGIC, in the use of POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS to model fragments of . KEIL PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE CULTURE, C OGNITION, AND EVOLUTION NEUROSCIENCES The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences