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Fundamentals of Cognitive Science
Minds, Brain, Magic, and Evolution
Thomas Hardy Leahey
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eBook - ePub
Fundamentals of Cognitive Science
Minds, Brain, Magic, and Evolution
Thomas Hardy Leahey
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About This Book
Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. While structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory to information processing, thinking, and decision making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles.
The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers the evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists' empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine.
Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in an accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications.
Please visit www.fundamentalsofcognitivescience.com for further resources to accompany the book.
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1 What Is a Mind?
DOI: 10.4324/9780429322822-1
ContentsMind and KnowledgeThe Problem of MindDualismsFolk Psychology, or Theory of MindSocrates and the Problem of KnowledgeKnowledge (Reality) vs. Opinion (Appearances)What Is the Object of Knowledge?Platoâs Master Formulation of the ProblemPlatoâs PsychologyPlatoâs EpistemologyFour Classical Positions in Cognitive ScienceRealism 1.0. (NaĂŻve Realism): Sensation Reveals: We See the World as It IsIdealism 1.0 (Plato): Sensation Deceives: Truth Is in HeavenEmpiricism 1.0 (Aristotle): Sensation Hints: Truth Is Perceptually Extracted from Sensation by the Cognitive Operations of the Human MindComputationalism 1.0 (Stoicism): Ignore Sensation: Truth Is PropositionalImpact of the Scientific Revolution: Origins of Cognitive ScienceSome Necessary MetaphysicsThe Death of Realism and the Rise of PsychologyThe Mechanization of the World PictureWhich Sensations Are Real? The Creation of ConsciousnessThe Cartesian Paradigm: The Immaterial Soul in the Mechanical BodyThe Way of Ideas as Cognitive Science: Three-Dimensional PerceptionThe Way of Ideasâ Revisions to the Classic Positions in Cognitive ScienceEmpiricism 1.1: Associationismâs Lego Theory of the MindRealism 1.1: Scottish Common Sense Psychology: A New Brief for PerceptionIdealism 1.1: German Idealism: A New Brief for MetaphysicsConclusionsWhere We Are Now: Mind DesignTake awayReadingsMoviesMagic
Mind and Knowledge
How many windows do you have at home?
Although I once had a student who simply remembered his number of windows because he had just finished painting them, most people use mental imagery, calling up to their mindâs eye an inner picture of home through which they stroll counting windows. As familiar as mental images are (though some people donât have them, a condition called aphantasia; Dawes et al., 2020), their existence implies an important distinction between the world outside us and a world in our heads generally called mind. Once we make this distinction an important question arises about the relation between things in the world and ideas in our minds. We have ideas about things, but we must acknowledge that they are not always true. For example, you might have forgotten to count a small decorative window above your front door. The distinctions between mind and world and between knowledge (true ideas) and opinion (potentially false ideas) form the starting line of the study of cognition.
The Problem of Mind
Dualisms
In every culture, we find that people separate nonliving from living things by saying that only living things have souls. For example, the ancient Greek word psyche, from which psychology takes its name, meant the breath of life. When a warrior died, it was said that his psyche had left his body. Psyche was not immortal and did not carry the personality of the deceased, nor did it perform cognitive functions, which the Greeks assigned to about a dozen mini-souls located in other parts of the body such as the eye (perception) or the heart (emotion). Because it says living beings are made of two things, body and soul, this idea is called dualism.
Soul as a bearer of a personâs entire personality, morally responsible, and capable of surviving bodily death seems to have appeared in Hindu thought and is found in all but one of the great world religions. The exception is Buddhism, which denies the existence of souls. Consciousness is acknowledged but is regarded as a process rather than a thing separate from the body. Because it is compatible with scientific materialism, many cognitive scientists regard Buddhism favorably and practice Buddhist mindfulness (Blackmore, 2005a, b).
Folk Psychology, or Theory of Mind
Alongside religious conceptions of the mind, or soul, there is another universal human psychology, without metaphysical commitments or claims about bodily location. It is called common sense psychology (in social psychology), folk psychology (in philosophy), or Theory of Mind (TOM) (in developmental psychology). Itâs powerful, giving us the ability to explain behavior with little effort and is an important human adaptation.
Consider the following video. You see a child in a kitchen with two cabinets, one on the left and one on the right. The child gets a jar from the left cabinet, takes some candy, replaces the jar in the left cabinet, and leaves. Another child enters, takes candy from the jar, and places it in the right cabinet. The first child returns, the video is stopped, and you are asked which cabinet the child will open to fetch the candy jar. Adults and children over about age four say that it will be the left cabinet, while younger children say the returning child will try the right cabinet, where the candy jar really is.
In this false belief test1 (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Wellman, 1985; Slaughter, 2015), older participants show they know others have minds and can ascribe false beliefs to them. Theory of Mind posits two mental states that interact to cause behavior. The first state is desire, which provides motivation for action; in this case, it is hunger or enjoyment of sweets. The other state is belief, an idea about how the world is. Very young children do not attribute inner beliefs to actors, saying that the returning child will look for the candy jar in the new location given to it by the second child. Older children and adults attribute to the first child a private mental state about the last known location of the candy jar and predict that the child will act upon that mistaken belief.
Positing the existence of private minds raises the problem of knowledge, the origin of cognitive science. We can summarize the problem this way: We want knowledge about things in the world, but beliefs are mental. Truth, therefore, lies in correspondence between things and beliefs.
Socrates and the Problem of Knowledge
The philosophical tradition leading to cognitive science began with the philosopher Socrates (c. 470â399 BCE). He defined the problem of knowledge and raised it to the paramount position in Western philosophical thought.
Knowledge (Reality) vs. Opinion (Appearances)
Like a coin, the problem of knowledge has two sides. One side is philosophical, investigated by the branch of philosophy called epistemology: What is knowledge? What distinguishes knowledge, i.e., truth, from unproven candidates for knowledge, i.e., opinion? The other side of the coin is psychological: By what mental processes does the mind obtain ideas and determine which are true? Socrates made a strong and historically decisive claim on the philosophical question, but he left the psychological question open for development.
Socratesâ interlocutors suggested that an idea is true if it corresponds to some thing; thus, if I claim I have 17 windows at home, that claim is true, i. e., is knowledge, if and only if my house has 17 windows. Socrates, however, rejected correspondence to things as the definition of knowledge. Suppose I reach into my pants pocket and dig out some coins, holding them in my fist and asking you how much change I have. Now, you might guess 77 cents, and you would be right (three quarters + two pennies). Your guess (idea) corresponds to the sum of the change (things) in my hand but Socrates would say, and you would likely agree, that your guess was only accidentally true. To Socrates, this meant that for an idea to count as knowledge it needs more than just correspondence to the world.
To show what this is, Socrates makes a characteristic move, pointing to expertise. If you want knowledge of good food, whom do you seek? A great chef. If you seek knowledge of beauty, whom do you seek? An art connoisseur. If you seek knowledge of justice, whom do you seek? A great jurist. Because they cook well, collect well, and judge well, these experts must possess knowledge of cookery, beauty, justice, and should therefore be able to explain the good, the beautiful, and the just.
Socrates recognized that sometimes a chef, connoisseur, or judge might have trouble articulating their knowledge, and he disparaged such âexpertsâ as possessing halfway truth. They acted well but could not justify their actions to others. Importantly, he did not accept that right action might flow from intuition but insisted instead that expert judgment depended upon knowledge, even when that knowledge was tacit, as it would be in an expert who could not explain his actions or decisions. His famous Socratic method was designed to draw out unconscious knowledge through a series of penetrating questions. Socrates described himself therefore not as a teacher of truth but as a midwife of truth.
For Socrates, then, knowledge was not true belief but explicit and justifiable true belief.
What Is the Object of Knowledge?
Another important feature of Socratesâ epistemology has important implications for studying the higher cognitive processes. Letâs go back to the change in my pocket. As you inspect my quarters and pennies, a closer look at one of the quarters shows itâs not quite right; itâs a little too shiny, too light, and too thin, and it has a top hat insignia on one side. I seem to have left in my pocket what magicians call a palming coin, made in the same size as a real coin, but easier to manipulate. At first glance, this appears to be a simple illustration of the gap between appearances (it looks like a quarter at first) and reality (oops! Itâs not a quarter; donât try to spend it!). You at first formed a false perceptual belief that could not be justified.
However, thereâs more here than your fooled perception. Why, Socrates might ask, is the palming coin not a real quarter? You would probably say itâs because itâs made of the wrong metal and carries the wrong engravings. But suppose that I made my palming coins out of the same cupro-nickel alloy as the US Mint, and used an advanced 3-D printer to manufacture the coin so that in every physical aspect it was indistinguishable from a US Mint quarter, there being no differences whatsoever in material or appearances? The Treasury Department would still not regard it as legitimate, spendable money, and itâs not guaranteed by blockchain-like cryptocurrencies.
Socrates saw that there are two types of knowledge having different objects to be known. Thereâs the largely perceptual knowledge of particular things, such as the coins in my pocket or a cat in a video. On the other hand, there is knowledge of the classes to which objects belong, such as QUARTER, COIN, or CAT. The names used in philosophy for these objects and classes are individuals (or particulars) and universals. Today, philosophers tend to use the terms token for individuals and type for universals. Thus, every physical quarter is a token of the types QUARTER and COIN, and every cat is a token of the type CAT.
The most perfect knowledge, said Socrates, is knowledge of universals. The laws of science do not apply only to a few objects. Newton called his law of gravity the universal law of gravity, applying to any two objects of any mass anywhere in the universe. However, the existence of universals complicates the requirement that knowledge be justified true belief. Socrates saw the problem when dealing with expertise. A connoisseur says that a Greek kuros (statue of a young man) is beautiful, that Monetâs water lilies are beautiful, or a difficult touchdown catch was beautiful. What do they have in common that makes them members of the universal category BEAUTY?
The problem of universals is important for cognitive science both as science and as application. Do animals have universal concepts or do they respond only to immediate stimuli? Children possess a drive to acquire language, which is rich in universal term...