NICOLAS SHEA: LAKATOS AWARD (0807 2020) (Cayetano Acuña)

NICOLAS SHEA: LAKATOS AWARD (0807 2020)

NIKLAS  SHEA

Reenvío el texto del Profesor Hasok Chang:

"The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2020 Lakatos Award, which goes to Nicholas Shea for his book Representation in Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Representation in Cognitive Science is praised by selectors as “a blockbuster of a book” and “a landmark study”. Its argument is acclaimed to be “original in interesting ways, without losing touch with the existing literature” and the book is reported to be “well-written and convincingly argued”. 

This is all the more important given that “the problem is a really difficult one, that is arguably the key problem in the philosophy of psychology and cognitive science” and “making a novel contribution in this area, as Shea has done, is no small feat: it requires mastery of a massive and complex philosophical literature, and a deep familiarity with cognitive science, both of which Shea has”. The book is praised for how it “integrates the abstract philosophical arguments with examples and case studies from cognitive science”. For these reasons “the book certainly constitutes a major advance on the problem of naturalizing representational content and is a welcome contribution to the teleosemantic tradition”."  

Saludos cordiales,

Miguel

𝔐ℑ𝔊𝔘𝔈𝔏 𝔏𝔈𝔒𝔑

independent.academia.edu/MiguelLe%C3%B3n

.................

Representation in Cognitive Science

Monographs

 Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. 

Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience can now reveal information processing in the brain in unprecedented detail. They show how the brain performs complex calculations on neural representations.

Drawing on this cutting-edge research, Nicholas Shea uses a series of case studies from the cognitive sciences to develop a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation. His approach is distinctive in focusing firmly on the 'subpersonal' representations that pervade so much of cognitive science. The diversity and depth of the case studies, illustrated by numerous figures, make this book unlike any previous treatment. It is important reading for philosophers of psychology and philosophers of mind, and of considerable interest to researchers throughout the cognitive sciences.

Functionalist Interrelations Amongst Human Psychological States Inter Se, ditto for Martians

Chapters

In Smortchkova, J., Dolega, K., Schlicht, T. (eds.) What Are Mental Representations? (Oxford: OUP), to be published in 2019

Abstract: One job for theories of mental representation is to distinguish between different kinds of mental representation: beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptual states, etc. What makes a mental state a belief that p rather than a desire that p or a visual representation that p? Functionalism is a leading approach for doing so: for individuating mental states.

Functionalism is designed to allow that psychological states can be multiply realized. Mark Sprevak has argued that, for a functionalist account of psychological states to apply to creatures that are organised in a very different way to humans (call them Martians), the way a psychological state is functionally individuated has to be relatively coarse-grained (Sprevak 2009). Psychological research might show that human beliefs are directly available to consciousness, that they are formed as the result of deliberate judgement, and so on, but theorists would be precluded from including these roles in their account of belief, if Sprevak is right.

The argument for coarse-grained individuation fails if we distinguish functionalism about what it takes to be a psychological state in general from functionalism about a particular state type such as belief. Functionalism individuates a psychological state like believing that p partly by reference to its relations to other psychological states: desiring that p, perceiving that p, intending that p, etc. 

Functionalist motivations do indeed suggest that Martians with a functional organisation and physical substrate quite unlike humans could have psychological states, but not that they should have states with the interrelated collection of functional roles to count as beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Thus, theorists are not precluded from including functional relations to consciousness or deliberate judgement in their account of (human) belief, consistent with allowing that Martians would have their own collection of functionally interrelated psychological states.

Sprevak’s coarse-grained functionalism implies an implausibly liberal form of extended cognition. The point about functional interrelations allows us to avoid that conclusion without jettisoning functionalism (as Sprevak suggests we should): records in a human notebook may not enter into the right interrelations with other human psychological states to count as beliefs; nor do they enter into any interrelations with Martian psychological states. Functionalism can, therefore, allow that Martians have psychological states while holding that few if any of the beliefs we humans have are, as a matter of fact, extended.

Concept MetacognitionJournal articles

Abstract: Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has been studied is a person’s judgement about how well they have learnt a new category. There are many other forms that concept-metacognition could take. This paper offers a preliminary taxonomy of different forms of metacognition directed at concepts. It suggests that concept-metacognition may affect the way one concept from a range of candidates is selected for use, and the way a concept is relied on in reasoning. Concept-metacognition may also play a pivotal role in the social process of constructing concepts, in replacing the old and constructing the new tools for thinking.

(Pre-print)