Talks: What is Cognitive Science?

I critically discuss Saul Kripke's treatment of the surprise examination puzzle propose an improved treatment and connect the puzzle with family of paradoxes discussed by Arthur Prior.

Identifying factors that contribute to the successful self-regulation of goal pursuit has been of utmost importance to researchers for decades given that failures of self-regulation are linked to societal problems

What is the purpose of perception? Perhaps the most common answer to this question is that perception is a way of figuring out *what's out there* so as to better

Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment how do young learners know what to attend to and learn about versus what to ignore? In this talk I

The interpretation of adjective-noun compounds is crucial to our ability to make inferences in natural language. In formal semantics adjectives are often placed in a hierarchy that should dictate their

Research by psychologists and philosophers connects generics to social prejudice and negative social stereotyping [see e.g. Leslie (2014 forthcoming) Haslanger (2007 2011) Rhodes et al. (2012) Waxman (2010) Langton (2015)

An assertion is an act that a speaker performs by using a declarative sentence to present a proposition for others to accept. Most work on assertion considers assertions performed only

In this paper I introduce a new principle in the logic of conditionals. Suppose there has been a murder on the estate. I claim that (1) implies (2): (1) If

The talk will be based on two separate studies each of which inter alia investigate the role that free-form pre-play communication plays in strategic decision making. The first paper reports

The extended mind thesis holds that mental states and processes can extend beyond the skin and the skull to be partly constituted by elements of the environment that play in

Does cognitive science discover metaphysical truths? If so does it discover identities? Supervenience relations? Grounding relations? Does it provide eliminative reductions? Or does cognitive science merely discover nomological correlations between

The so-called 'computational theory of mind' claims that mental processes are computational processes. After explaining how this claim should be understood I consider the popular view that it is just

In this talk I will share my research findings on how we understand time and the role that it plays in influencing our judgments and decisions. I will discuss results

Many authors have posited the existence of an “object file” system which is recruited by visual processes involved in the selection and tracking of individual objects. Moreover several theorists have

One of the oldest hypotheses in vision is that what we perceive does not depend only on the signals that come in through our eyes but also on the state

Research in cognition has primarily focused on understanding learning as belief updating in light of data. I will argue that this asocial approach overlooks a key source of the power

A traditional method of distinguishing language from gesture relies on mode of communication: language is produced from the mouth or written on a page while gesture occurs on the hands.

It is a familiar point emphasized by Kripke that we can use a definite description to designate an object and go on to truly say of the object designated that

In this talk I will present some basics of fMRI methods and provide a tutorial context for the acquisition of the MR signal which will allow us tocritically examine the

Abstract: Paul Thagard (2009: 237) famously draws a picture of position of philosophy within domain of cognitive sciences as a nightmare for scientists. In reaction to such the stance Andrew

Intellectualism about intelligent action maintains that for an action to be intelligent is for that action to be guided by knowledge of truths. In this paper I develop motivate and

It is widely accepted that humans participate in others’ emotional life in a way which cannot be reduced either to emotional contagion or to other forms of mental state attributions.

Given a set of people and a set of events attended by them we address the problem of measuring connectedness or tie strength between each pair of persons. The underlying

Did human language conversation reasoning and/or argument evolve? The answers to these question depend in part on how “evolution” is to be understood. Does evolution in the relevant sense involve

Many of our cognitive abilities state and intentions can be revealed from our behaviors. In this talk we will present a general framework for human motion and behavior analysis that

Acquiring the meaning of verbs is notoriously challenging for the young word learner. We know however that toddlers receive some support from the linguistic environment in which a verb appears

Pathological delusions such as the Capgras delusion the Cotard delusion and the florid delusions that accompany schizophrenia have a number of features that are curiously difficult to explain. Delusions are

If a semantic theory makes incorrect predictions defenders often attempt to rescue the theory by appealing to Gricean pragmatics. The idea is that we can successfully rescue the theory as

Many aspects of our experiences do not have to be explicitly remembered but can be inferred based on our knowledge of the regularities in our environment. Suppose you witnessed a

Processing a foreign language as an adult is cognitively demanding and working memory limitations force learners to process L2 input selectively. Latin Spanish and other morphologically rich languages can mark

Natural language semantics is often characterized as the study of the conventional meanings of linguistic expressions and how they can be combined to determine the meaning of complex expressions. Donald

In linguistics psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience it is almost a consensus that understanding a putatively indeterminate sentence such as "The man began a book" entails a process by which the

Left hemispheric "dominance" for processing speech signals is an accepted principle in cognitive neuroscience but its mechanism is not fully understood and some recent imaging studies suggest that it may

Block argues that relevant data in psychology and neuroscience shows access consciousness is not constitutively necessary for phenomenality. In this paper I present a dilemma for theorizing about the connection

What Women Want (and Give and Get). Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871) said " Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition chiefly in her

Pretty much everybody agrees that there's an interesting distinctive phenomenon of self-locating thought - there's something distinctive for example about the kind of doxastic state that tends to give rise

In this paper I consider the question of what it is to assert at all. I discuss and reject some competing answers to this question e.g. a simple syntactic view

Stephen Neale has made a bold empirical claim about the nature of noun phrases in natural language namely that noun phrases are either semantically structured restricted quantifiers or semantically unstructured

Professor Fu Xiaolan Director will present a talk on the overview of the Institute(research field is Cognitive Psychology) Professor Han Buxin will present a talk on Mental Health in Cognitive

Psychological states like believing and desiring are characteristic bearers of content. Content plays a central role in much of contemporary philosophy of mind and language as well as various

Several philosophers have argued recently that our credences should be sensitive not just to our evidence but to what we know about how good we are at processing evidence. This

This paper offers a new interpretation of Locke's challenge to the doctrine of innateness. I disagree with recent claims that Locke's arguments undermine nativism. But I also argue that this

There has been a long tradition of philosophers engaging in a more-or-less armchair analysis of the nature of such topics as knowledge justice freedom and the like. For quite

This presentation will examine how the conceptual representation from structure-behavior-function theory can be used as a tool for thinking about complex biological systems A study of expertise demonstrates that

Philosophers often see a deep connection between morality and guilt or shame but disagree about what the connection is and indeed about what guilt and shame consist in. For example

Having learned that hearts are red and bananas yellow we are more ready to perceive heart shapes as red and banana shapes as yellow (Delk and Fillenbaum 1965 ; Hansen

When is racetalk ok? Some argue that it is never morally permissible to engage in the language of racial classification. Others on the contrary think racetalk is sometimes useful and

After Saul Kripke's groundbreaking work in Naming and Necessity (1969) many philosophers have come to hold that names natural kind terms (like 'water' 'tiger' or 'lightning') and the corresponding

Health outcomes are determined in part by the behavior of individuals andthese behaviors are in turn guided by internal decision processes. Howcan an understanding of cognitive processes be harnassed

Why does meaning matter? It is common to think that communication depends on it:were I to fail to know what your words mean I would be unable to draw any