Reconstructing Reason and Representation
Reconstructing Reason and Representation

Author: Murray Clarke

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0262545756

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A study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. In Reconstructing Reason and Representation, Murray Clarke offers a detailed study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology. In doing so, he offers new solutions to key problems in epistemology and philosophy of mind, including misrepresentation and rationality. He proposes a naturalistic approach to reason and representation that is informed by evolutionary psychology, and, expanding on the massive modularity thesis advanced in work by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, argues for a modular, adapticist account of misrepresentation and knowledge. Just as the reliability of representation can be defended on the basis of an account of the proper function of cognitive modularity, misrepresentation can be explained through an appeal to the "gap theory," by noting the divergence between the proper and actual domains of cognitive modules in a massively modular mind. Clarke argues for an externalist, modular reliabilism by suggesting that evolution has equipped us with generally reliable inferential systems even if they do not always produce true beliefs. He argues that reliable deductive and inductive inference occurs only when cognitive modules deal with actual domains that are sufficiently similar to their proper domains. This psychologically informed, naturalized adapticism leads to the suggestion that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. Typically, the proper function of these cognitive modules is to provide us with truths that enable us to satisfy our basic biological needs. Beyond reasoning modules, other cognitive modules discussed include the ability to orient ourselves in space, and our abilities with language, numbers, object reasoning, and social understanding. Clarke also defends Cosmides and Tooby's massive modularity hypothesis against such critics as Jerry Fodor by demonstrating that these critics consistently misrepresent Cosmides and Tooby's position.

Reconstructing Reason and Representation
Reconstructing Reason and Representation

Author: Murray Clarke

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-06-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262033224

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A study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. In Reconstructing Reason and Representation, Murray Clarke offers a detailed study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology. In doing so, he offers new solutions to key problems in epistemology and philosophy of mind, including misrepresentation and rationality. He proposes a naturalistic approach to reason and representation that is informed by evolutionary psychology, and, expanding on the massive modularity thesis advanced in work by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, argues for a modular, adapticist account of misrepresentation and knowledge. Just as the reliability of representation can be defended on the basis of an account of the proper function of cognitive modularity, misrepresentation can be explained through an appeal to the "gap theory," by noting the divergence between the proper and actual domains of cognitive modules in a massively modular mind. Clarke argues for an externalist, modular reliabilism by suggesting that evolution has equipped us with generally reliable inferential systems even if they do not always produce true beliefs. He argues that reliable deductive and inductive inference occurs only when cognitive modules deal with actual domains that are sufficiently similar to their proper domains. This psychologically informed, naturalized adapticism leads to the suggestion that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. Typically, the proper function of these cognitive modules is to provide us with truths that enable us to satisfy our basic biological needs. Beyond reasoning modules, other cognitive modules discussed include the ability to orient ourselves in space, and our abilities with language, numbers, object reasoning, and social understanding. Clarke also defends Cosmides and Tooby's massive modularity hypothesis against such critics as Jerry Fodor by demonstrating that these critics consistently misrepresent Cosmides and Tooby's position.

Reconstructing the Cognitive World
Reconstructing the Cognitive World

Author: Michael Wheeler

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780262232401

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An argument for a non-Cartesian philosophical foundation for cognitive science that combines elements of Heideggerian phenomenology, a dynamical systems approach to cognition, and insights from artificial intelligence-related robotics.

Reconstructing Reality
Reconstructing Reality

Author: Margaret Morrison

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0199380279

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Attempts to understand various aspects of the empirical world often rely on modelling processes that involve a reconstruction of systems under investigation. Typically the reconstruction uses mathematical frameworks like gauge theory and renormalization group methods, but more recently simulations also have become an indispensable tool for investigation. This book is a philosophical examination of techniques and assumptions related to modelling and simulation with the goal of showing how these abstract descriptions can contribute to our understanding of the physical world. Particular issues include the role of fictional models in science, how mathematical formalisms can yield physical information, and how we should approach the use of inconsistent models for specific types of systems. It also addresses the role of simulation, specifically the conditions under which simulation can be seen as a technique for measurement, replacing more traditional experimental approaches. Inherent worries about the legitimacy of simulation "knowledge" are also addressed, including an analysis of verification and validation and the role of simulation data in the search for the Higgs boson. In light of the significant role played by simulation in the Large Hadron Collider experiments, it is argued that the traditional distinction between simulation and experiment is no longer applicable in some contexts of modern science. Consequently, a re-evaluation of the way and extent to which simulation delivers empirical knowledge is required. "This is a, lively, stimulating, and important book by one of the main scholars contributing to current topics and debates in our field. It will be a major resource for philosophers of science, their students, scientists interested in examining scientific practice, and the general scientifically literate public."-Bas van Fraassen, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University

Ideals and Illusions
Ideals and Illusions

Author: Thomas McCarthy

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780262631457

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These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.

Connected Minds
Connected Minds

Author: Nicolas Payette

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-04-25

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1443839167

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The theme for this volume is social cognition, construed from a psychological and collective point of view. From the psychological point of view, the question is to understand how the human mind processes social information; how it encodes, stores and uses it in the social context. From a collective point of view, the question is to understand how individual cognition is influenced (improved, increased or impaired) by social interactions, for instance in communicating and collaborating with intelligent agents. These two dimensions of social cognition are obviously interdependent: the psychological dimension makes the collective dimension possible, which can in return modify the psychological dimension. The book is divided into four parts. The first part is about socio-cognitive skills. Among those, we count face recognition, imitation learning, embodied social interaction, cheater detection and psychological concept acquisition. The second part is about persons and memories: stereotypes, attraction judgements and impression formation are the subjects at hand. The third part is about understanding each other. A key part of that understanding is the motor system (whether or not we see it as a “mirror”), but community membership itself can also contribute to our understanding of others. The fourth and final part is about social cognition in societies. This section is unified by the common goal of understand how social cognition actually influences the structure of different societies, whether whole cultures, specific social networks, rural communities or even groups of caterpillars!

Language and Reason
Language and Reason

Author: Maeve Cooke

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780262531450

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Readers of Juergen Habermas's "Theory of Communicative Action" and his later social theory know that the idea of communicative rationality is central to his version of critical theory. This text provides a general introduction to Habermas's programme of formal pragmatics - his reconstruction of the universal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, operate in everyday communicative practices. Philosophers of language should discover connections between Habermas's account of language and validity (especially his theory of meaning) and their own concerns. This work introduces the theory of communicative action as the background against which the programme of formal pragmatics must be understood. It then outlines the idea of communicative rationality as a postmetaphysical yet nondefeatist conception of reason. Two central chapters detail the connections Habermas asserts between language and validity, with particular attention to his theory of validity claims and his pragmatic theory of meaning. A final chapter looks at Habermas's account of the pathologies of modern society and at communicative rationality as a yardstick for measuring these pathologies. -- from http://www.amazon.ca (August 22, 2011)

A Theory of Literary Explication
A Theory of Literary Explication

Author: Kenneth B. Newell

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1443832308

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This book presents current multidisciplinary research and theory from 17 different fields (most of them never before applied to literary explication) in order to provide (1) justification for the practice of a relative-probability type of explication as distinguished from interpretation, (2) a relativistic foundation for the preference of some explication(s) of a literary work over others, and thereby (3) a middle way between the postmodern pluralist view that a work has only an unlimited number of equally acceptable though different explications and the modern intentionalist view that it has only one acceptable explication (the author’s). Nine of the 17 fields are of primary relevance: critical theory, hermeneutics, probability theory, philosophy of science, second-order logic, and four fields of cognitive science (linguistics, epistemology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence). But the book also touches upon textual criticism, legal theory, measure theory, fuzzy logic, animal learning behavior, developmental psychology, evolutionary epistemology, and neurobiology. The book shows that those using a relative-probability type of explication on a literary work can achieve consensus because the healthy, adult human brain has an evolved, uniform, and probably innate ability to form relative-probability judgments and to form them in the practice of activities (like reading and explicating) that are not uniform and innate. Lastly, the book contributes to the scholarly areas of explication theory and practice, first, by providing a relativistic foundation for a craft (explication) that currently is not acknowledged to have any foundation but nonetheless continues and will continue to be practiced and, second, by presenting a means (relative epistemic probability) by which judging some explication(s) of a literary work to be more acceptable than others may be justified philosophically—an uncommon circumstance in this postmodern era in which philosophical justification of many beliefs and practices is thought to be untenable.

Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy
Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy

Author: Anton Killin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3030610527

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This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.