Gary,
Sigh. I said that I didn’t mean biosciences when I referred to the “workings of brains”. I meant “any aspect of ‘thinking’”, which is the work that brains
do. The bioscientists look at the problem of cognition from a very different viewpoint from that of philosophers and linguists and psychologists. But they are all about HOW people think, just different versions of “how”. But if for you the ‘working of brains’
is only the subject of neuroscience, I won’t use the term. John didn’t really mean ‘part of’ and I didn’t really mean ‘workings’. (I should have known better. We are now on email #4 of explaining a contribution of little value in the first place.)
Let me rephrase my contention: I do not believe that you can study cognition without tying phenomena to thinking. Duh!
J
-Ed
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Gary Berg-Cross
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 3:33 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Objectivist Context vs. Cognitive Science
We may largely agree including the idea that some of this old style talking about things. But I think we
do have a difference of opinion on this:
"in essence, I do not believe that you can “study cognition without tying phenomena ... to the working of
brains”.
I think that we do study such phenomena and make useful models that are not or may not yet be tied to "brains."
To be sure there is an area called cognitive neuroscience that is increasingly important but the early studies of sensory, store, short and long term memory were all
done with minimal attempts at neuralizing the explanations.
They are pretty empirical and have quantitative formulations going back to the Magic #7 + or -2 that preceded any comparable neural model.
Areas like vision are heavily tied to brain structures and activity, but other cognitive models going back to Piaget are less so.
SOCoP Executive Secretary
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J <edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Gary,
Not to put too fine a point on it, I understood “cognition” and “the workings of brains” to be essentially
synonymous. I explicitly did not mean to restrict the term “workings of brains” to biophysics and biochemistry, which is why I explicitly included the other disciplines.
So, in essence, I do not believe that you can “study cognition without tying phenomena ... to the
working of brains”.
But I am quite sure that what we have here is a difference in our native understanding of the term.
I fully agree that “all the listed disciplines include a cognitive perspective”, but a cognitive
perspective applies to political science, management sciences, and history as well, and I would not describe them as “cognitive science”. And the anthropologist who works on the evolutionary biophysics of standing upright rarely adopts a “cognitive perspective”,
while his colleague who studies toolmaking explicitly does so.
In the long run, I think John is right that we are trying to define an obsolete term that once denoted
a specific scope of research. (I just watched a Nova special on how certain birds plan and solve problems. Add ornithology to the list. ;-))
-Ed
Two small points on this discussion.
I think that part of Ed's definition is a bit misleading.
Ed B>" It involves the selection and integration of concepts
from neuroscience (and other biophysical and biochemical sciences), psychology, linguistics, and possibly philosophy, in attempting to understand the workings of brains, particularly human ones.
One may study cognition without tying phenomena so explicitly to the working of brains, although the cognitive phenomena are ultimately
based on some neuronal activity but perhaps understood in interaction with environments and influenced by past events.
Another thing I would add to this attempt to locate constituent disciplines of Cognitive Science is that we sometimes mix the idea of
disciplines and perspectives. So I can have a developmental perspective and say what disciplines use that perspective - and many do, but they also have other perspectives. So all the listed disciplines include a cognitive perspective although they may professionally
not consider themselves part of a discipline called Cognitive Science.
SOCoP Executive Secretary
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 6:02 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J <edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
John,
You wrote:
> JFS
> >> Any branch of science, engineering, or philosophy that addresses
> >> aspects of cognition is part of cognitive science.
>
> EJB
> > I think most practitioners of all those trades would disagree with that.
> > 'Cognitive science' is a particular discipline. [It involves the selection and
>> integration of concepts from neuroscience (and other biophysical and
>> biochemical sciences), psychology, linguistics, and possibly philosophy,
>> in attempting to understand the workings of brains, particularly human ones.]
>
> First paragraph of the home page of the Cognitive Science Society:
> > The Cognitive Science Society, Inc. brings together researchers from
> > many fields who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the
> human mind.
> > The Society promotes scientific interchange among researchers in
> > disciplines comprising the field of Cognitive Science, including
> > Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience,
>> Philosophy, and Education.
>
> Source:
http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/index.html
>
> I believe that my summary is compatible with the CSS paragraph.
Well, I thought the CSS paragraph was consistent with what I said. We're good at reading support into someone else's treatise, what a colleague of mine at GE used to call a 'Rohrschach
text' -- you get to read your own model into it. :-)
What I said is that Cognitive Science comprises *elements of* these several disciplines (and I agree with the additions, certainly). But I don't believe that *all* of neuroscience, anthropology, and artificial intelligence, are *part of* 'cognitive science',
just because they contribute importantly to it. It is the "part of" that I objected to. But maybe we just have different mereologies in mind.
-Ed
P.S. [With apologies for the pedagogy involved] I would argue that the use of 'comprising' in the quoted paragraph is dubious, although the word has become ambiguous in English. If X comprises Y, which is the part and which is the whole? The dictionary says
'comprising' means 'including' in the first two meanings (which imply different mereological axioms) and 'composing' in the third meaning, which is exactly the inverse relationship. I doubt that the Society meant that the fields of AI, Linguistics etc., *include*
'cognitive science', and I would argue that they didn't really mean the reverse, either. And OBTW, I attribute my reaction to usages like this to many years of writing standards and formally capturing knowledge.
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