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Enactive
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: ''they enact a world''." These authors su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognitive features include high-level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built into the organism's functional structure. The embodied mind thesis challenges other theories, such as cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism. It is closely related to the extended mind thesis, situated cognition, and enactivism. The modern version depends on insights drawn from up to date research in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, dynamical systems, artificial intelligence, robot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Situated Cognition
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, ''in situ'', inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. History While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century,Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989 it shares many principle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of ''Les Temps modernes'', the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Explanatory Gap
In the philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the proposed difficulty that physicalist philosophies have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel subjectively when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine. In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels. The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as " the hard problem".David Chalmers''Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness'' , pp. 200-19. To take an example o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Universal Darwinism
Universal Darwinism, also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics, is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics. Basic mechanisms At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted. The process has three components: * variation of a given form or template. This is usually (but not ne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolutionary Epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions. As a branch of inquiry in epistemology, evolutionary epistemology lies at the crossroads of philosophy and evolutionary biology. Cognition in biological evolution "Evolutionary epistemology" can refer to a branch of inquiry in epistemology that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of animal and human cognition. It argues that the mind is in part genetically determined and that its structure and function reflect adaptation, a nonteleological process of interaction between the organism and its environment. A cognitive trait tending to increase inclusive fitness in a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Introduction To Evolution
Evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms' observable traits. Genetic changes include mutations, which are caused by damage or replication errors in organisms' DNA. As the genetic variation of a population drifts randomly over generations, natural selection gradually leads traits to become more or less common based on the relative reproductive success of organisms with those traits. The age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see today. Based on the similarities between all present-day organisms, all life on Earth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual". His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate constructivist-based strategies. Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, and directed the center until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding made possible, and their impact, ultimately led to the Center being referred to in the scholarly literature as "Piaget' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernst Von Glasersfeld
Ernst von Glasersfeld (March 8, 1917, Munich – November 12, 2010, Leverett, Franklin County, Massachusetts) was a philosopher, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, research associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a member of the board of trustees of the American Society for Cybernetics, from which he received the McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991. He was a member of the scientific board of the Instituto Piaget, Lisbon. Glasersfeld is known for the development of radical constructivism. Biography Glasersfeld was born in Munich, where his father, Leopold, worked as a cultural attaché in Vienna before going into photography after World War I. He was a student of mathematics at the University of Vienna before having to move out because of the Nazi threat, considering that his Pan-European family (they subscribed to the ideol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."Peirce, C.S. (1878), " How to Make Our Ideas Clear", ''Popular Science Monthly'', v. 12, 286–302. Reprinted often, including ''Collected Papers'' v. 5, paragraphs 388–410 an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shaun Gallagher
Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012–2018). Since 2014 he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS (Paris); École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University. He is also known for his philosophical notes on the effects of solitary confinement. Career Gallagher received his PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College where he studied with George Kline and José Ferrater-Mora. He also studied philosophy at Villanova University and Leu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
