Cognition, Semantics and Philosophy

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE During the last few years, many books have been published and many meetings have been held on Cognitive Science. A cursory review of their contents shows such a diversity of topics and approaches that one might well infer that there are no genuine criteria for classifying a paper or a lecture as a contribution to Cognitive Science. It is as though the only criterion is to have appeared in a book or in the programme of a meeting or title we can find the expression " . . . Cognitive Science" in whose name or something like that. Perhaps this situation is due to the (relative) youth of the field, which is seeking its own identity, still involved in a process of formation and consolidation within the scientific community; but there are actually deep disagreements about how a science of the mind should be worked out, including how to understand its own subject, that is, "the mind. "While for some the term makes reference to a set of phenomena impossible to grasp by any scientific approach, for others "the mind" would be a sort of myth, and the mental terms await elimination by other more handy and empirically tractable terms.

Zusammenfassung
Proceedings of the First International Colloquim on Cognitive Science

Inhalt
1: Animal Cognition and Human Cognition: A Necessary Dialogue.- I. Introduction.- II. Characterization of Comparative Cognition.- III. Cognitive Modules and Evolution.- IV. Two Goals of Comparative Research: General Processes and Evolutionary Sequences.- V. Consciousness and Cognition.- VI. Conclusions.- 2: User Modelling in Knowledge-Based Systems.- I. Introduction.- II. Situations of Interactive Communications.- III. The Content of the User Model.- IV. Characteristic Dimensions of a User's Model.- V. Domain-Knowledge: Shallow Versus Deep Modelling.- VI. Modelling Intentions.- VII. Building a User's Model.- VIII. Learner's Model.- IX. Conclusion.- 3: Changing Beliefs Rationally: Some Puzzles.- I. Background.- II. A Justification of Generalized Conditionalisation.- III. The Judy Benjamin Problem.- IV. An Apparent Counterexample to Simple Conditionalisation.- V. The Three Prisoners.- VI. Judy Benjamin Again: The Strong Strategy.- VII. Independence.- 4: On the Representation of Linguistic Information.- I. Introduction.- II. The Modularity Hypothesis.- III. Grammar, Pragmatics and Modularity.- IV. Interdisciplinarity in the Analysis of Linguistic Information.- V. Disjunct Adverbials Pragmatically Oriented Towards the Speaker or Hearer.- VI. On The Representation of Disjunct Constituents: A Multidimentional Approach.- VII. Conclusions.- 5: Modelling Memory for Models.- I. Introduction.- II. Two Senses of Model.- III. Models in Working Memory.- IV. Representations for Syllogistic Reasoning.- V. Distributed Bindings and Syllogistic Reasoning.- 6: On The Study of Linguistic Performance.- I. A Proposal for Cognitive Science and A Specification of it.- II. Current Situation in Linguistic Performance Theory.- III. Some Issues Regarding Research Programs on Linguistic Performance.- IV. Appendix.- 7: Partiality and Coherence in Concept Combination.- I. Introduction.- II. Flexibility and Specificity.- III. Sense Selection.- IV. Sense Generation.- V. Partiality, Coherence andConcept Combination.- VI. Conclusions.- 8: The Labyrinth of Attitude Reports.- I. Mental States.- II. Semantic Contents.- III. Attitude Reports as Explanations.- IV. The Crimmins-Perry Theory.- V. Reports and Reporting.- VI. Two Kinds of Attitude Reports.- VII. Reporting and Explaining.- 9: Aunty's Own Argument for the Language of Thought.- I. Introduction: Aunty and the Language of Thought.- II. The Threat of Regress.- III. First Stage: Systematic Cognitive Processes.- IV. First Stage: From System to Syntax.- V. Second Stage: The Structure of Thought.- VI. Second Stage: Concepts and Inference.- VII. Two Objections to the Second Stage.- VIII. Conceptualised Thought and the Connectionist Programme.- IX. An Invitation to Eliminativism?.- 10: Cognitive Science And Semantic Representations.- I. Cognitive and Other Sciences as Using Representations.- II. Natural and Rational Representations.- III. Sources of Variability in Representations.- IV. Use of Prescriptive Rules.- V. Description ofNatural Representations.- VI. Token Representations, Long Term Memory Representations, and the Notion of Activation.- VII. Cross-Compatibility with Neurobiology and Artificial Intelligence.- VIII. Conclusion.- 11: Anchoring Conceptual Content: Scenarios And Perception.- I. Scenarios Introduced.- II. Scenarios: Consequences and Comparisons.- III. A Further Level of Content: An Application.- IV. Spatial Reasoning and Action.