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Bayesian approaches to human cognition have been extensively advocated in the last decades, but sharp objections have been raised too. We outline a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with prevalent strands of Bayesian cognitive science (pure Bayesian cognitive science), relying on selected illustrations from the psychology of reasoning and tools from...

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceContributed Papers

“According to [Bayesian] models” says a recent textbook in cognitive neuroscience, “the human mind behaves like a capable data scientist”. Do they? That is to say, do such models show we are rational? I argue that Bayesian models of cognition, perhaps surprisingly, do not and indeed cannot, show that we are Bayesian-rational. The key reason...

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceContributed Papers

Organisms use cues differently as they navigate their environments. One distinction researchers use to characterize differences between cues is the distinction between proximal and distal cues. The standard way of thinking about this distinction involves thinking of distal cues as beyond an experiment apparatus and proximal cues as within that appa...

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceContributed Papers

In the literature on enactive approaches to cognition, representationalism is often seen as a rival theory. In this paper, I argue that enactivism can be fruitfully combined with representationalism by adopting Frances Egan’s content pragmatism. This representational enactivism avoids some of the problems faced by anti-representational versions o...

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceContributed Papers

Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. Representations from an organized family are tokened on different occasions and systematically interrelated (eg. analogue magnitude representations). Organization has been elided with structural representation, but the two are in fact distinct. An under-appreciated m...

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceContributed Papers

Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceCognate Society