Two Kinds of Cognitive Expertise

Expertise is traditionally classified into perceptual, cognitive, and motor forms. I argue that the empirical research literature on expertise gives us compelling reasons to reject this traditional classification and accept an alternative. According to the alternative I support there is expertise in forming impressions, which further divides into expertise in forming sensory and intellectual impressions, and there is expertise in performing actions, which further divides into expertise in performing mental and bodily actions. The traditional category of cognitive expertise splits into two--expertise in forming intellectual impressions and expertise in performing mental actions. I consider and address a challenge to my case in favor of adopting this alternative classification of expertise that derives from dual process theories of cognition

A Tale of Two Dilemmas: Cognitive Kinds and the Extended Mind

First paragraph: Most work in cognitive science and naturalistic philosophy of mind is unashamedly internalist in outlook, in at least the following sense: the parts of the physical world where psychological states occur and where psychological processes happen are held to be located entirely inside the head. One’s first reaction to this sort of internalism about the mind might well be that it must be right. Indeed, given all those wonderful ‘pictures of the brain thinking’ that have been delivered over the past few years by contemporary neuroimaging techniques, where else could the material machinery of mind be? Enter the hypothesis of extended cognition (henceforth ExC). If ExC is true, there are actual (in this world) cases of intelligent thought and action, in which the material machinery that realizes the thinking and thoughts concerned is spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that the external (beyond-the-skull-and-skin) factors concerned are rightly accorded cognitive status. Here, ‘cognitive status’ is just a place-holder for ‘whatever status it is that we standardly grant the brain when explaining intelligent thought and action’

Angry Rats and Scaredy Cats: Lessons from Competing Cognitive Homologies

There have been several recent attempts to think about psychological kinds as homologies. Nevertheless, there are serious epistemic challenges for individuating homologous psychological kinds, or cognitive homologies. Some of these challenges are revealed when we look at competing claims of cognitive homology. This paper considers two competing homology claims that compare human anger with putative aggression systems of nonhuman animals. The competition between these hypotheses has been difficult to resolve in part because of what I call the boundary problem: boundaries between instances of psychological kinds (e.g., anger and fear) cannot be directly observed. Thus, there are distinctive difficulties for individuating psychological kinds across lineages. I draw four conclusions from this case study: First, recent evidence from the neuroscience of fear suggests that one of the proposed homologies involves a straightforward conflation of anger and fear. Second, this conflation arises because of the boundary problem. Third, there is an implicit constraint on the operational criteria that is easy to overlook in the psychological case. In this case, ignoring the constraint is part of the problem. Fourth, this is a clear case in which knowledge of homology cannot be accumulated piecemeal. Identifying homologs of human anger requires identifying homologs of fear

It\u2019s a Matter of Mind! Cognitive Functioning Predicts the Athletic Performance in Ultra- Marathon Runners

The present study was aimed at exploring the influence of cognitive processes on performance in ultra-marathon runners, providing an overview of the cognitive aspects that characterize outstanding runners. Thirty runners were administered a battery of computerized tests right before their participation in an ultra-marathon. Then, they were split according to the race rank into two groups (i.e., faster runners and slower runners) and their cognitive performance was compared. Faster runners outperformed slower runners in trials requiring motor inhibition and were more effective at performing two tasks together, successfully suppressing the activation of the information for one of the tasks when was not relevant. Furthermore, slower runners took longer to remember to execute pre-defined actions associated with emotional stimuli when such stimuli were presented. These findings suggest that cognitive factors play a key role in running an ultra-marathon. Indeed, if compared with slower runners, faster runners seem to have a better inhibitory control, showing superior ability not only to inhibit motor response but also to suppress processing of irrelevant information. Their cognitive performance also appears to be less influenced by emotional stimuli. This research opens new directions towards understanding which kinds of cognitive and emotional factors can discriminate talented runners from less outstanding runners

Unification Strategies in Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary conglomerate of various research fields and disciplines, which increases the risk of fragmentation of cognitive theories. However, while most previous work has focused on theoretical integration, some kinds of integration may turn out to be monstrous, or result in superficially lumped and unrelated bodies of knowledge. In this paper, I distinguish theoretical integration from theoretical unification, and propose some analyses of theoretical unification dimensions. Moreover, two research strategies that are supposed to lead to unification are analyzed in terms of the mechanistic account of explanation. Finally, I argue that theoretical unification is not an absolute requirement from the mechanistic perspective, and that strategies aiming at unification may be premature in fields where there are multiple conflicting explanatory models

Intellectualism and the argument from cognitive science

Intellectualism is the claim that practical knowledge or ‘know-how’ is a kind of propositional knowledge. The debate over Intellectualism has appealed to two different kinds of evidence, semantic and scientific. This paper concerns the relationship between Intellectualist arguments based on truth-conditional semantics of practical knowledge ascriptions, and anti-Intellectualist arguments based on cognitive science and propositional representation. The first half of the paper argues that the anti-Intellectualist argument from cognitive science rests on a naturalistic approach to metaphysics: its proponents assume that findings from cognitive science provide evidence about the nature of mental states. We demonstrate that this fact has been overlooked in the ensuing debate, resulting in inconsistency and confusion. Defenders of the semantic approach to Intellectualism engage with the argument from cognitive science in a way that implicitly endorses this naturalistic metaphysics, and even rely on it to claim that cognitive science support Intellectualism. In the course of their arguments, however, they also reject that scientific findings can have metaphysical import. We argue that this situation is preventing productive debate about Intellectualism, which would benefit from both sides being more transparent about their metaphilosophical assumptions

The Narrow Conception of Computational Psychology

One particularly successful approach to modeling within cognitive science is computational psychology. Computational psychology explores psychological processes by building and testing computational models with human data. In this paper, it is argued that a specific approach to understanding computation, what is called the ‘narrow conception’, has problematically limited the kinds of models, theories, and explanations that are offered within computational psychology. After raising two problems for the narrow conception, an alternative, ‘wide approach’ to computational psychology is proposed

Neuroscientific Kinds Through the Lens of Scientific Practice

In this chapter, I argue that scientific practice in the neurosciences of cognition is not conducive to the discovery of natural kinds of cognitive capacities. The “neurosciences of cognition” include cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology, two research areas that aim to understand how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. Some philosophers of neuroscience have claimed that explanatory progress in these research areas ultimately will result in the discovery of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive capacities. Once such mechanistic understanding is achieved, cognitive capacities purportedly will be relegated into natural kind categories that correspond to real divisions in the causal structure of the world. I provide reasons here, however, in support of the claim that the neurosciences of cognition currently are not on a trajectory for discovering natural kinds. As I explain, this has to do with how mechanistic explanations of cognitive capacities are developed. Mechanistic explanations and the kinds they explain are abstract representational byproducts of the conceptual, experimental and integrative practices of neuroscientists. If these practices are not coordinated towards developing mechanistic explanations that mirror the causal structure of the world, then natural kinds of cognitive capacities will not be discovered. I provide reasons to think that such coordination is currently lacking in the neurosciences of cognition and indicate where changes in these practices appropriate to the natural kinds ideal would be required if achieving this ideal is indeed the goal. However, I suggest that an evaluation of current practices in these research areas is suggestive that discovering natural kinds of cognitive capacities is not the goal

Towards a systemic research methodology in agriculture: Rethinking the role of values in science

The recent drastic development of agriculture, together with the growing societal interest in agricultural practices and their consequences, pose a challenge to agricultural science. There is a need for rethinking the general methodology of agricultural research. This paper takes some steps towards developing a systemic research methodology that can meet this challenge – a general self-reflexive methodology that forms a basis for doing holistic or (with a better term) wholeness-oriented research and provides appropriate criteria of scientific quality. From a philosophy of research perspective, science is seen as an interactive learning process with both a cognitive and a social communicative aspect. This means, first of all, that science plays a role in the world that it studies. A science that influences its own subject area, such as agricultural science, is named a systemic science. From this perspective, there is a need to reconsider the role of values in science. Science is not objective in the sense of being value-free. Values play, and ought to play, an important role in science – not only in form of constitutive values such as the norms of good science, but also in the form of contextual values that enter into the very process of science. This goes against the traditional criterion of objectivity. Therefore, reflexive objectivity is suggested as a new criterion for doing good science, along with the criterion of relevance. Reflexive objectivity implies that the communication of science must include the cognitive context, which comprises the societal, intentional, and observational context. In accordance with this, the learning process of systemic research is shown as a self-reflexive cycle that incorporates both an involved actor stance and a detached observer stance. The observer stance forms the basis for scientific communication. To this point, a unitary view of science as a learning process is employed. A second important perspective for a systemic research methodology is the relation between the actual, different, and often quite separate kinds of science. Cross-disciplinary research is hampered by the idea that reductive science is more objective, and hence more scientific, than the less reductive sciences of complex subject areas – and by the opposite idea that reductive science is necessarily reductionistic. Taking reflexive objectivity as a demarcator of good science, an inclusive framework of science can be established. The framework does not take the established division between natural, social and human science as a primary distinction of science. The major distinction is made between the empirical and normative aspects of science, corresponding to two key cognitive interests. Two general methodological dimensions, the degree of reduction of the research world and the degree of involvement in the research world, are shown to span this framework. The framework can form a basis for transdisciplinary work by way of showing the relation between more and less reductive kinds of science and between more detached and more involved kinds of science and exposing the abilities and limitations attendant on these methodological differences

Alice in wonderland: experimental jurisprudence on the internal point of view

Humans have this extraordinary cognitive ability: They imagine inexistent objects, they treat them as if they were real, and by doing so they make them real. They thus give rise to a shared institutional reality that enables them to cooperate in ways that would be impossible otherwise. In this paper, we would like to revisit the account that HLA Hart gives of the practice of collective acceptance that makes a legal system possible. We try to provide an explanation of what Hart calls the 'internal point of view', on the basis of experiments on institutional concepts, drawing on the paradigm known as 'embodied cognition'. Experts and non-experts in law rated the role of several cognitive dimensions for a list of words referring to two kinds of abstract concepts (institutional and theoretical/scientific) and two kinds of concrete ones (food and artifact). Institutional concepts were distinguished into pure-institutional (e.g., 'contract', 'state', 'property') and meta-institutional (e.g., 'norm', 'duty', 'justice'). The results provide an empirical account of how our way of thinking about institutions changes as we acquire expertise in the legal field, thus shading light on the cognitive underpinnings of the 'internal point of view'