The structure and formation of natural categories

Categorization and concept formation are critical activities of intelligence. These processes and the conceptual structures that support them raise important issues at the interface of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. The work presumes that advances in these and other areas are best facilitated by research methodologies that reward interdisciplinary interaction. In particular, a computational model is described of concept formation and categorization that exploits a rational analysis of basic level effects by Gluck and Corter. Their work provides a clean prescription of human category preferences that is adapted to the task of concept learning. Also, their analysis was extended to account for typicality and fan effects, and speculate on how the concept formation strategies might be extended to other facets of intelligence, such as problem solving

Artificial Intelligence and Human Error Prevention: A Computer Aided Decision Making Approach: Technical Report No. 4: Survey and Analysis of Research on Learning Systems from Artificial Intelligence

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryU.S. Department of Transportation / DOT FA79WA-4360 ABFederal Aviation Administratio

Genres, webs of fields, and institutional change:The development of dance in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, 1985 – 2005

This PhD dissertation addresses the question of how and why new genres become (un)successfully institutionalized. We know that genres—once institutionalized and “taken-for-granted”—help one to categorize works of art as well as the people associated with works of art. In this dissertation, I investigate how novel genres come to be and start to fulfill such an “ordering” function in social life. The dissertation focuses on the history of the dance music genre in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, three countries that show marked variation in the way in which the dance developed. It works with data on dance label foundings, the commercial success of dance records, coverage by traditional newspapers and the specialized music press, among others, which are analyzed using both computational social science and qualitative/historical methods. One common theme that runs through the empirical chapters is that they demonstrate the importance of analyzing how the dance fields in the US, UK, and the Netherlands were shaped by their relationships with so-called “proximate fields”: the media, other music genres, or, for instance, the state. Innovatively building on Fligstein and McAdam’s general theory of fields, this dissertation contributes to three more specific terrains related to genre trajectories, incumbent–challenger dynamics, and transnational fields

Cognitive Mechanisms and Computational Models: Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive Neuroscience seeks to integrate cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I critique existing analyses of this integration project, and offer my own account of how it ought to be understood given the practices of researchers in these fields. A recent proposal suggests that integration between cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be achieved `seamlessly' via mechanistic explanation. Cognitive models are elliptical mechanism sketches, according to this proposal. This proposal glosses over several difficulties concerning the practice of cognitive psychology and the nature of cognitive models, however. Although psychology's information-processing models superficially resemble mechanism sketches, they in fact systematically include and exclude different kinds of information. I distinguish two kinds of information-processing model, neither of which specifies the entities and activities characteristic of mechanistic models, even sketchily. Furthermore, theory development in psychology does not involve the filling in of these missing details, but rather refinement of the sorts of models they start out as. I contrast the development of psychology's attention filter models with the development of neurobiology's models of sodium channel filtering. I argue that extending the account of mechanisms to include what I define as generic mechanisms provides a more promising route towards integration. Generic mechanisms are the in-the-world counterparts to abstract types. They thus have causal-explanatory powers which are shared by all the tokens that instantiate that type. This not only provides a way for generalizations to factor into mechanistic explanations, which allows for the `upward-looking' explanations needed for integrating cognitive models, but also solves some internal problems in the mechanism literature concerning schemas and explanatory relevance. I illustrate how generic mechanisms are discovered and used with examples from computational cognitive neuroscience. I argue that connectionist models can be understood as approximations to generic brain mechanisms, which resolves a longstanding philosophical puzzle as to their role. Furthermore, I argue that understanding scientific models in general in terms of generic mechanisms allows for a unified account of the types of inferences made in modeling and in experiment

Quod Erat Demonstrandum: From Herodotus’ ethnographic journeys to cross-cultural research

A peer-reviewed book based on presentations at the XVIII Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2006, Isle of Spetses, Greece. (c) 2009, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1004/thumbnail.jp

PSA 2018

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018

PSA 2018

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018