Bayesianism
Bayesian decision theory is a mathematical model of reasoning and decision-making under uncertain conditions. Proponents of Bayesian decision theory are usually called Bayesians. Their viewpoint is usually called Bayesianism. The Bayesian framework hinges upon two core concepts: subjective probabili
Belief
Belief is the attitude we have when we regard something as true. People regard a large number and variety of things as true: for example, that 2 + 2 = 4, that God exists, that Trenton is the capital of New Jersey, that Jakarta is bigger than a breadbox, that birds are cute, etc. What is commonly tak
Cognitive Ontology
Scientific theories always presuppose an ontology: a set of entities, relationships, and processes that together form the basic building blocks of theories. Chemistry has atoms, molecules, and ways of making and breaking bonds. Evolutionary biology has species and processes of reproduction, competit
Cognitive Penetrability
The effects of perception on cognition are generally incontrovertible. For example, in normal circumstances, seeing a yellow banana typically leads to the formation of the belief that there is a yellow banana. By contrast, whether cognition can affect perception is a subject of debate. For instance,
Concepts
Concepts are recombinable elements of deliberate conscious thoughts. When I think birds fly, I use my concept of birds and my concept of flying. We think about the world by categorizing things under concepts. This allows us to use existing knowledge (the bird may well fly off). And when we learn som
Conceptual Analysis
Conceptual analysis is concerned with clarifying concepts in the sense of illuminating what it takes to fall under a concept. Thus, when political theorists offer accounts of what it takes to be a democracy, and statisticians offer accounts of what it takes to be a random sequence, they are doing co
Counterfactual Thinking
What if I had not missed my meeting this morning? What if the axis of the earth was tilted three degrees to the left? What if Napoleon had won Waterloo? These questions exemplify the all-too-human psychological tendency to think about alternative ways in which the world could have been. This imagina
Foundations of Rationality
Rationality is one of the most central concepts in cognitive science, yet also one of the least well defined. In some contexts, it is used interchangeably with terms like intelligence or even reasonableness. Rationality in its narrower conception is taken to be adherence to a set of normative standa
Free Will
While there is continuing disagreement about the definition of free will, philosophers typically understand it as consisting of the kind and degree of control agents need over their actions and decisions to be blameworthy (or praiseworthy) for them. The focus of the debate over free will has centere
Meaning
The meaning of an expression is the idea or message it communicates. For example, “tennis balls are yellow” communicates a fact about the color of tennis balls in virtue of the meaning of “yellow.” Language has often been the focus of theories of meaning, but it is not the exclusive object of study.
Mechanistic Explanation
A mechanistic explanation shows how a phenomenon came about or how something works. A distinctive feature of mechanistic explanation is its emphasis on information about the component parts of a system, their activities, and the spatial and temporal constraints on their organization in virtue of whi
Mental Representation
Cognitive scientists often try to provide explanations of how a human, animal, or artificial cognitive system manages to perform a certain cognitive task. For this, they often find it useful to postulate the existence of entities, localized somewhere within that cognitive system, that stand for, or
Modularity
The term “module” is typically used by cognitive scientists to denote mental components or subsystems that are, in some suitable way, distinct and specialized. So construed, debates regarding modularity have been widespread in large measure because of their connection to a core assumption of cogniti
Multiple Realizability
In the cognitive sciences, multiple realizability is the phenomenon of one cognitive kind or process being actually or possibly realized by more than one relevantly different physical realizer. For example, we might think that the cognitive kind of memory is actually realized by different types of n
Personal/Subpersonal Distinction
When we say that someone recognizes a famous painting, prefers Mexican food, or judges the winner of a competition, we are attributing cognitive capacities to the person. These personal-level attributions of cognition can be contrasted with the subpersonal-level attributions made by cognitive scient
Physicalism
Physicalism is the thesis that in some fundamental sense, everything in the universe is physical—even things that don’t appear at first glance to be physical, such as biological, psychological, or social phenomena. Applied to human beings, it says that the capacities to think, feel, speak, and reaso
Proxemics
Proxemics is the study of how people use and experience physical space during social interactions. Proxemic analyses focus on interpersonal distancing and orienting as well as individuals’ subjective and physiological responses to the proximity of others. The methodological approaches to studying pr
Self-Consciousness
To be self-conscious is to be aware of oneself. This deceptively simple formulation raises a host of important questions that have long been a central focus within philosophy. Some of these questions are metaphysical, to do with what sort of object, if any, a self is. Others are epistemological, to
Sense of Agency
Sense of agency refers to the subjective experience of controlling one’s own actions and, through them, events in the outside world. The subjective sense of agency should be distinguished from the objective facts of agency (i.e., who did what) and from propositional judgments about those facts. This
Skepticism
In everyday life, people think of skepticism as the position of a stubborn person who rejects what other people believe in. Some skeptics may deny that climate change is real, while others claim that the first moon landing did not take place. Contemporary philosophers think of skepticism in a differ
Social Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related phenomena, such as attitudes (e.g., belief, understanding, trust), attributes of these attitudes (e.g., justification, warrant, reliability), and traits (e.g., intellectual humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and their opposed vices suc
Supervenience
Philosophers and cognitive scientists sometimes say that one phenomenon obtains in virtue of some other phenomenon. While expressions like this can indicate causation, they are also frequently used in a more synchronic and constitutive way that suggests connections between phenomena at different “le
The Language of Thought Hypothesis
The language of thought hypothesis is a thesis about the structure of mental representations. It is an example of the computational–representational theory of mind, according to which much of cognition consists in formal computations over mental representations. What distinguishes the language of th
The Mind-Body Problem
The mind–body problem is the problem of explaining how our minds are related to our bodies and to the rest of the material world. It is obvious that our experiences and thoughts, feelings, and emotions are closely connected to our bodies and brains. But what exactly is the nature of this connection?