1 / 7

Concepts and proto-concepts in cognitive science

Concepts and proto-concepts in cognitive science. Ron Chrisley Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science Centre for Research in Cognitive Science School of Informatics University of Sussex SweCog Summer School in Cognitive Science Marston Hill, August 9 th -13 th 2010. Overview 1.

abla
Download Presentation

Concepts and proto-concepts in cognitive science

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Concepts and proto-conceptsin cognitive science Ron Chrisley Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science Centre for Research in Cognitive Science School of Informatics University of Sussex SweCog Summer School in Cognitive Science Marston Hill, August 9th-13th 2010

  2. Overview 1 • The concept: The workhorse of orthodox cognitive science • Concepts are constituents of mental content that are: • Articulable • Recombinable • Rational • Deployable • Because of these features, concepts present the objective world as the objective world • Often thought to be required for any intentional explanation of cognitive phenomena SweCog Summer School 2010

  3. Overview 2 • However, there seem to be mental phenomena not adequately characterized in terms of concepts: • the fineness of grain of experience • the incorrigibility of illusion • non-circularity requirements on a theory of perception • the graded nature of development and evolution • commonalities in perception for those who do not share the same concepts • the minds of animals and infants • the context-sensitivity and situatedness of some cognitive processes • the phenomenology of non-objectual thought SweCog Summer School 2010

  4. Overview 3 • Proposal: Employ a notion of non-conceptual content that does not suffer from these limitations • Non-conceptual constituents of content can be called proto-concepts • Challenges for non-conceptual content: • Specification • Relation between conceptual and non-conceptual content (McDowell) • Conceptual objections (McDowell) • Empirical objections (e.g., Clark) SweCog Summer School 2010

  5. The limits ofconceptual explanation • However, there seem to be mental phenomena not adequately characterized in terms of concepts: • the fineness of grain of perceptual experience • the incorrigibility of illusion • non-circularity requirements on a theory of perception • the graded nature of development and evolution • commonalities in perception for those who do not share the same concepts • the minds of animals and infants • the context-sensitivity and situatedness of some cognitive processes • the phenomenology of non-objectual thought • Probably won’t have time to discuss all of these SweCog Summer School 2010

  6. Alternative specifications •  Therefore, an alternative means of content specification is needed • A point not fully appreciated in literature • Has restricted non-conceptual content research to theoretical, general discussions, rather than explanatory applications of particular non-conceptual contents • Alternatives have been proposed by • Peacocke (scenarios) • Bermudez (augmented success semantics) • Chrisley (various, including enactive depictions) • Gives purpose to the debate SweCog Summer School 2010

  7. Thank you. Comments welcome: ronc@sussex.ac.uk SweCog Summer School 2010

More Related