Cognitive science and philosophy

My approach in cognitive science and artificial interlligence presupposes that its topic can be viewed as the computational realization of some sorts of philosophy. Such a view on the research program of cognitive science is not totally new, similar claims have been expressed by researchers with different background positions, in particular, by Margaret Boden, Daniel Dennett, James Fetzer, Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, Francisco Varela (a list of modern references can be found in the comprehensive on-line bibliography maintained by David Chalmers, especially, sections 4 and 5.13). This view means a possibility of an exchange of ideas between cognitive science and classic philosophy of mind, leading to enrichment of methodology of cognitive science and debugging and further development of philosophical thought. In particular, some phenomenological notions such as intentionality, horizon and internal time consciousness can be interpreted from the viewpoint of cognitive science. Several researchers (for example, Dreyfus, Munch, van Gelder) claim that Husserl is a founder of cognitive science (due to his project of phenomenology as a rigorous research of the human mind). This is true with respect to the intent of Husserl's research, however, a lot of crucial phenomenological ideas are missed in modern cognitive science. In particular this concerns:

1. intentionality as a correlation of noema and noesis, i.e. of an experienced phenomenon and its mode of being experienced. In cognitive science terms this means a correlation of descriptive structures and phenomena that are represented using these structures.
2. the model of internal time consciousness (ITC) as the common pivot for unfolding all mental phenomena through continuous modification of manifold of retentions and constitution of protentions (expectations).

These two ideas suggest a new mechanism for cognitive science descriptions, which involve reflective capabilities, generation of abstractions, flexibility of human communication, operations under limited resources, the interpretation of short-term and long-term memory, etc. For example, if we apply this notion of intentionality to the description of language, the meaning of a sign corresponds to noema, its context to noesis. Thus the meaning of a word cannot be separated from the context it is expressed in. Instead of a traditional representation of word meanings as a set of formulae of semantic primitives, in the proposed model the meaning of a sign can be represented by means of a manifold of classification features, which subset is instantiated in concrete conditions determined by the context. The ITC model in this view provides a mechanism for dynamic relations between meaning and context (this idea is also inherited in two Jakobson's mechanisms of concurrence and concatenation).

My on-line papers on the topic

Comments/suggestions about their content are welcome.

A draft submitted to the special issue “Context in context” (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/cinc/):

The paper draws an opposition between two paradigms in treatment of lexical meanings. The first paradigm models lexical meanings by means of definitions of categories of some sort. According to the second paradigm, lexical meanings are treated as resources for communication. The paper advocates the second paradigm and investigates the relationship between lexical items and context they are used in. A meaning description mechanism proposed in this paper relates meaning-endowing acts (in the tradition of Husserl and Jakobson) and the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday). This mechanism is discussed in application to tasks of multilingual generation, in which the lexicogrammar serves as an intermediate layer for realization of concepts of the domain model in utterances of different natural languages.

A draft of yet unpublished paper, which is the result of my fellowship at the Gender Studies department of the Central European University:

One of the most debated questions at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy of mind is the problem of consciousness. The title for these debates has been given by the paper "What is it like to be a bat?" (Nagel, 1974), which questions the very possibility of an objective treatment of consciousness, since it misses the subjective viewpoint of, for example, a bat. A natural extension of this question includes topics: what is it like to be a drug-addict, an aardvark, or a rock. The paper is an attempt to stand this discussion on a more sound base: "What is it like to be a person of the opposite sex?". Firstly, I start with a discussion about the original design of the Turing Test as a sex differentiation game and about the parallelism of approaches in cognitive science and gender studies, which are developed not paying any attention to one another. Then, I introduce a Husserl-inspired model which is based on two notions: intentionality and internal time-consciousness reinterpreted in cognitive science terms. Finally, this model is applied to analysis of gender roles development, by taking into account intersubjectivity and empathy as our natural attitudes for making sense of others.

A paper submitted to the CICLING-2000 conference (http://www.cicling.org), its revised version is to be published as a chapter in the follow-up book:

A description of linguistic structures in terms of autonomous representation levels lacks phenomenological and psychological validity, and does not provide a computational advantage. Modularization that is required for a scientific description may be achieved using another computational model, namely, a hierarchy of classes, which properties may concern several levels, for example, both semantic structures and their syntactic realizations. However, application of the traditional OO-methodology to linguistics shows a problem of handling a contextual dependency of linguistic meanings. A way to overcome this problem is hinted by Husserl's model of correlation between noema and noesis.

A paper published in The Stanford Humanities Review, Vol. 4, No 2, 1995, pp. 190-206.

This is the position paper, which extends the description at the top of this page. I hope you'll enjoy other papers in the SHR special issue as well.

Look at the Map of the site for the relationship between my interests. My CV with the complete list of publications is also available.

Some useful links

1. Husserl page by Bob Sandmeyer
2. Center for advanced research in phenomenology
3. Cognitive science network
4. Cogprints: online papers in cognitive science
5. Cognitive Science Library
6. Philosophy pages
7. Autopoiesis Page