Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies

In this paper we discuss the new Tweety puzzle. The original Tweety puzzle was addressed by approaches in non-monotonic logic, which aim to adequately represent the Tweety case, namely that Tweety is a penguin and, thus, an exceptional bird, which cannot fly, although in general birds can fly. The new Tweety puzzle is intended as a challenge for probabilistic theories of epistemic states. In the first part of the paper we argue against monistic Bayesians, who assume that epistemic states can at any given time be adequately described by a single subjective probability function. We show that monistic Bayesians cannot provide an adequate solution to the new Tweety puzzle, because this requires one to refer to a frequency-based probability function. We conclude that monistic Bayesianism cannot be a fully adequate theory of epistemic states. In the second part we describe an empirical study, which provides support for the thesis that monistic Bayesianism is also inadequate as a descriptive theory of cognitive states. In the final part of the paper we criticize Bayesian approaches in cognitive science, insofar as their monistic tendency cannot adequately address the new Tweety puzzle. We, further, argue against monistic Bayesianism in cognitive science by means of a case study. In this case study we show that Oaksford and Chater’s (2007, 2008) model of conditional inference—contrary to the authors’ theoretical position—has to refer also to a frequency-based probability function.

Reviewed by: Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists Claiborne Rice Hogan, Patrick Colm . 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. London and New York: Routledge. $85.00 hc. $19.95 sc. 244 pp. The cognitive revolution that has affected so many areas of contemporary thought is currently capturing literary studies as part of its stronghold. In addition to the many popular cognitive scientists who have extended the discipline's reach into the literary mind, like Steven Pinker or George Lakoff, we have begun to see an impact on current literature and also literary criticism. Patrick Colm Hogan's aptly named book, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, is a solid introduction to the growing range of artistic forms and functions amenable to explanation in the cognitive sciences. For many years now, Hogan has been a prolific scholar of literature who is fully conversant with what we have come to call "theory." His many books and articles rewardingly engage highly theorized sub-topics within literary studies, such as influence, social and cultural identity, professionalism, law, and colonialism, from a serious philosophical, psychoanalytic, and, now, cognitive scientific perspective. Like all of Hogan's work, the current volume is significantly informed by his easy familiarity with the literature, art, and philosophy of many distinct non-Western traditions. The book argues for the cognitive study of the arts because of the benefits such study offers to both the humanities and the cognitive sciences. Specifically, the issues familiarly addressed by humanists (Hogan's term for [End Page 242] humanities scholars) are rarely treated effectively by neurobiologists or psychologists who see in certain instances of art fodder for their own pet theories. Only practicing humanists comprehend the complexity and range of humanities questions and, as such, can be expected to see how what we are beginning to learn about functions of the mind and body can best be applied to humanistic concerns. Such complexity and range in turn challenges cognitive scientists to refine their models and methods. The book's opening chapter, "My Favorite Things," introduces the procedural model that a cognitivist approach to art suggests by analyzing the form of John Coltrane's famous version of the tune "My Favorite Things." Though much less is known specifically about how humans process music than, say, vision, music is a good place to start because it avoids some of the issues of "meaning" that language processing entails. In the course of introducing readers to certain basic concerns of cognitive science, such as short- and long- term memory structures, segmentation, and structuration, he also offers explanations of basic art appreciation issues like boredom, improvisation, and listener variability. Chapter two, "Is It Cognitive Science Yet?", moves on to a lengthier discussion of elements of cognitive science theory that will play a role in all of the analyses to follow. He introduces an overall framework of cognitive science approaches that helps guide the reader through the labyrinth of technical terminology. Briefly, three stages of analysis pertain to any cognitive science approach to a problem: conceiving of the problem in terms of information processing, specifying the exact steps (an algorithmic sequence) that will lead from input to output, and identifying the cognitive architecture that will be necessary for dealing with the problem. Cognitive architecture, in its turn, is understood as having three separate components: structures, processes, and contents. Structure refers to "the general organizational principles of the mind" (30), such as the distinction between long-term and short-term (working) memory. Content usually refers to representations or symbols that have specific locations in structures. Finally, processes are structurally constrained operations that are performed on contents. For example, our mental storehouse of words, the lexicon, is a substructure of our long-term memory system that provides structural links between individual words; the activation of one word primes, or prepares, many other words for access. The meanings of each word, in this view, are representational contents, and formulating a sentence for pronunciation would be a process that at some point involves accessing the lexicon to retrieve the phonemic profile for the appropriate words. Because of the complexities of mental contents and...

The cognitive science of religion: a new alternative in biblical studies

Analysis and collection of time-series data as a major role of machine learning has been emphasized with an important key in cognitive science. Because the cognitive mechanisms such as human sensation and perception from cognitive science are fast responses ranging from a few milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds, the method of pattern recognition and analysis of these brain signals must be done and it is necessary to derive some information. In this paper, we investigated time-series data of cognitive function of the brain obtained using a non-invasive technique on multiple channels via signal classification and analysis, using a cognitive science approach and experiments. The test dataset was collected in 19 channels using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) techniques with multiple rests and working conditions on eight subjects. From this perspective, the main contributions of this paper are that it completes the collection and analysis of cognitive-scientific time-series data and has scientific implications that extend to other integrated domains, energy, manufacturing, bioinformatics, and finance area. The use of Shapelet and DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) classification techniques on brain signal time-series shows the potential to identify neuro-biological phenomena that can proactively signal a disease or disorder. EEG bandwidth and frequency-specific data have also been categorized as machine learning algorithms and have shown accurate patterns and trends in measuring cognitive functions of scientific, biological and academic importance.

Núñezand colleagues (2019) question whether cognitive science still exists "as a coherent academic field with a well-defined and cohesive interdisciplinary research program." This worry may be premature on two grounds. First, we are not convinced that the Lakatosian criterion of coalescence around a core framework is the best standard for judging whether a field is well-defined and productive. Second, although we acknowledge that cognitive science is not as visible as we would like, we doubt that this low profile accurately reflects the state of actual research and teaching programs based on the cognitive science approach.

This paper reports the results of an international survey on the place and role of psychology in cognitive science (CS). The respondents were psychological societies from 31 countries illustrating a variety of situations, from countries where psychology has been established as a science for a long time to countries where it has been established more recently and is still developing. The paper reviews topics covered by the CS approach, as well as research operations and initiatives taken in this domain. The analysis of responses reflects the belief that psychology, in general, has a central role in CS. This is based on epistemological considerations, as well as on the recognition of the methodological expertise of psychology for collecting and analyzing empirical data. Psychology is reported to have a unique integrative capacity and to take care to maintain the place of the human being at the centre of CS. Limitations and obstacles to the development of pluridisciplinary research on cognition are also reported, and information is provided on the training programmes in CS and the institutions that support research in this domain.

This chapter is organized in two main sub-chapters: Cognitive Science Approach and Management Measurement Approaches. Its objectives are to give the reader an overview of the different disciplines that constitute cognitive science and to discuss the state-of-the art of the current measurement approaches in the knowledge management literature. The study of cognitive science is interdisciplinary, and it covers the fields of philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, computational intelligence, linguistics and language, and finally culture, cognition and evolution, all of which will be discussed. For cognitive scientists the objects under study are behavior and cognition in humans, animals and machines. The examination of cognitive science can be seen as a basic explanation of how humans are perceiving, learning, thinking, speaking, and acting. Its main focus lies in the discussion of how individuals reason under conditions of uncertainty and how perceived information is processed in the brain to build knowledge. A detailed explanation of all views, concepts, methods and methodologies in cognitive science is beyond this research.KeywordsCash FlowBayesian NetworkMental ModelStructural CapitalIntellectual CapitalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Despite the increase of both dynamic and embodied/situated approaches in cognitive science, there is still little research on how coordination dynamics under a closed sensorimotor loop might induce qualitatively different patterns of neural oscillations compared to those found in isolated systems. We take as a departure point the Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) model, a generic model for dynamic coordination between two oscillatory components, which has proven useful for a vast range of applications in cognitive science and whose dynamical properties are well understood. In order to explore the properties of this model under closed sensorimotor conditions we present what we call the situated HKB model: a robotic model that performs a gradient climbing task and whose “brain” is modeled by the HKB equation. We solve the differential equations that define the agent-environment coupling for increasing values of the agent's sensitivity (sensor gain), finding different behavioral strategies. These results are compared with two different models: a decoupled HKB with no sensory input and a passively-coupled HKB that is also decoupled but receives a structured input generated by a situated agent. We can precisely quantify and qualitatively describe how the properties of the system, when studied in coupled conditions, radically change in a manner that cannot be deduced from the decoupled HKB models alone. We also present the notion of neurodynamic signature as the dynamic pattern that correlates with a specific behavior and we show how only a situated agent can display this signature compared to an agent that simply receives the exact same sensory input. To our knowledge, this is the first analytical solution of the HKB equation in a sensorimotor loop and qualitative and quantitative analytic comparison of spatially coupled vs. decoupled oscillatory controllers. Finally, we discuss the limitations and possible generalization of our model to contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

The cognitive abilities explained by cognitive science and cognitive semantics can inform us concerning the use of metaphors in science. The thesis is that abstract ideas rest on experiences of the concrete world. In this paper I will explain the use of conceptual metaphors in science, with examples from the mechanistic worldview of the 17th and 18th century. If we proceed from the way people think in general, their mental abilities, reason and cognition, we could get close to an understanding of how scientists during the scientific revolution shaped their ideas about the invisible geometry of matter. This is a cognitive history of ideas. What is called the ‘cognitive turn’ in the humanities has generated vigorous growth of research, for example, in cognitive poetics, neuroaesthetics, and cognitive anthropology. These approaches try to arrive at an understanding of creative processes. In the historical sciences there is also a growing interest in cognitive-historical analyses, particularly in archaeology and history of science. The aim of the cognitive history of science is to reconstruct scientific thinking on the basis of cognitive theories. The starting point for a cognitive history of ideas that I defend here is that philosophy, science, and mathematics do not really happen just in texts, in language, in laboratories, or in social contexts, but in brains and minds in interaction with the world around the subject, and are thus connected to the body, to perception, thoughts, and feelings. We humans are captured in our brains situated in the world, we are dependent on our thoughts and senses, our prior knowledge, our mental images, when we try to create a picture of the world. Science, in other words, is shaped by our distinctive way of reasoning, not least in metaphors.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the notions of and counterintuitive beliefs and concepts in cognitive science of religion. Intuitive states are contrasted with those that are products of explicit, conscious reasoning. In many cases the intuitions are grounded in the implicit rules of mental models, frames, or schemas. I argue that the pathway from intuitive to concepts and beliefs may be distinct from that from intuitions to religion, and discuss how Christian theology might best interpret the results of studies in cognitive psychology of religion.In Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), religious concepts and beliefs have been characterized as or counterintuitive by psychologists (Barrett 2004; Bloom 2004; Kelemen 2004) and anthropologists (Boyer 2001); and others (Pyysiainen 2004, following Sperber 1997) have made use of a notion of representations in their accounts of religious cognition. The word 'intuition' and its variants are, of course, used in several different ways in ordinary language, and have also been used in multiple technical ways in philosophy, psychology, and other academic disciplines. I shall first examine recent uses of terms in CSR, clarifying them in relation to existing usages in philosophy and psychology which contrast states and processes with those that are products of conscious, explicit reasoning. I shall then outline an account of how intuitions are produced in the mind via the rules of what have variously been called mental models, schemas, or frames. In Section 3,1 shall examine a few possible implications of this model-based account of intuition for CSR-particularly, the possibility that a study of the cognitive processes that produce high theological or theologically correct religious views might (somewhat surprisingly) be undertaken separately from the study of folk concepts and beliefs. Whereas the first three sections are explorations in the philosophy of a particular area of cognitive science, the final section will explore two questions from the standpoint of religious belief (and more specifically, Christian theology). First, what sort of religious epistemology enjoys the best fit with the theories in CSR discussed in the article? And, second, what sorts of further research questions are suggested, in turn, by this religious epistemology?1. Overview of UsageOne cannot read very far in the literature of contemporary CSR without encountering claims that particular concepts and particular beliefs are or Indeed, it might seem that there is fundamental disagreement about whether particular concepts and beliefs -say, about the existence of disembodied spirits-should be deemed intuitive or counterintuitive. On examination, however, it will turn out that apparent disagreements are only apparent, and that the parties to them actually share important assumptions about the nature of intuition, and about what makes a concept or a belief intuitive or counterintuitive.1.1 Kelemen, intuitive teleology and intuitive theismBoston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen argues that teleological understanding comes early to children, and indeed predominates their understanding of nature (Kelemen 2004). Young children prefer explanations of natural objects and phenomena in terms of what they are for to causal explanations. By age five, they understand that natural objects do not have human makers, but nevertheless view them in teleological terms (Kelemen 1999a, b, 2003, 2004). And evidence from six to ten-year olds suggests that they relate their assignments of purpose to nonhuman intentional causation (Evans, 2000, 2001; Gelman and Kremer, 1991; Kelemen 2004). She suggests that these research findings tentatively suggest that children's explanatory approach may be accurately characterized as intuitive theism (2004, 199). What Kelemen seems to mean by this is that normal cognitive development includes an earlyarising capacity and disposition to explain objects and events in teleological terms that imply a designer and/or fabricator, that explanations persist in the absence of a perceptible candidate for such a role, and by mid-childhood dispose the child to attribute the causation of some natural objects and events to unperceivable agents. …

When rejecting and accepting hypotheses, it is important to determine the risk of false positive conclusions. Hierarchical Bayesian models are frequently applied in cognitive science, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychiatry to reduce the variability of low-level parameters through partial pooling, and to obtain more robust parameter estimates for complex models using limited data. This may lower the risk of false positive inferences from lower-level estimates. In contrast, higher-level (e.g. group-level) estimates may be more affected by modeling choices (e.g. prior distributions), population-level variances in effects, and inference methods, which may in turn affect false positive rates for group-level effects. Here we used simulation and computational modeling to systematically examine false positive rates and effects of specific modeling choices on inferences in a simple hierarchical Bayesian temporal discounting model. To this end, 600 data sets of a temporal discounting task with two conditions were simulated, drawing individual condition effect parameters from a null distribution with varying standard deviations. For each simulated data set, the group-level mean change in the discount rate was modeled with eight different prior variances of the condition effect. Results were subsequently evaluated using several commonly applied Bayesian inference methods: the Savage-Dickey Bayes factor (BF), the directional Bayes factor (dBF), P(effect > 0), and the highest density interval (HDI) against zero decision rule. Results confirm that inference methods that directly depend on the posterior distribution can be used regardless of prior variances, whereas the Savage-Dickey BF should only be used with sufficiently informative priors. Based on the simulation work, decision thresholds that ensure false positive rates below 5% are provided for each inference method. Results are discussed in the context of computational modeling approaches in cognitive (neuro-)science and psychology.

Welcome! The second issue of topiCS is devoted to two topics in cognitive science —Philosophy in and Philosophy of Cognitive Science and the Social and Cognitive Mechanisms of Joint Action. The first is being handled by Associate Editor Andrew Brook (Carleton University). This is an Integrative and Reflective topic (please see discussion of this category in my introduction to the first issue of topiCS) that is represented in this issue by three papers; Andrew’s wide-scoped introduction, a small and interesting paper on The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy by Daniel Dennett, and a longer, very readable paper by Paul Thagard on Why Cognitive Science Needs Philosophy and Vice Versa. This topic is intended as a theme that will be spread throughout many issues of the journal. In addition to the three papers in this first installment, Andrew has commitments from William Bechtel, Pierre Jacob, Thomas Metzinger, and Zenon Pylyshyn for contributions to future installments. As a continuing theme, we encourage the submission of new papers and commentaries by philosophers as well as other members of the Cognitive Science community. The topic on Joint Action fits in the New and Emerging category. Associate Editors Bruno Galantucci (U. Yeshiva and Haskins Laboratories) and Natalie Sebanz (U. Radboud, Nijmegan) have brought together an impressive and impressively diverse group of researchers. This issue provides an important venue for crosstalk within this group as well as an introduction of this emerging field to the wider Cognitive Science community. Although Joint Action will not be a continuing topic, space has been reserved in future issues for Commentary and Response on these papers. The easiest way to propose a new topic is to send an e-mail note directly to the Executive Editor, Wayne Gray, at [email protected]. Keep this first note short (about 300–650 words or fewer). Be sure to indicate the topic category that you think it fits (New and Emerging, Integration and Reflection, or Great Debates). Say something about why this is a topic for a cognitive science journal rather than a specialty journal. Also say something about the cognitive science perspectives that you envision contributing to the topic (e.g., behavioral, philosophical, neuroscience, computational, linguistic, robotic, anthropological, educational, and/or psychological). If your topic is based on a successful symposium, workshop, or a new grouping of researchers, then say something about this as well.

Adopting a cognitive and follower-centric approach to charismatic leadership, we hypothesized that followers show lower levels of cognitive effort, reflected in superficial processing of factually correct information when listening to and viewing a charismatic leader. We conducted two experiments, using a 2 (charismatic versus neutral) × 2 (female versus male leader) between-subjects design and videos of trained actors delivering a speech. We examined the effects of leader charisma on (1a) followers’ ability to detect factually false information, (1b) accuracy to remember information from the leader (study 1, N = 100), (2a) the persuasiveness of factual messages, (2b) followers’ prosocial behavior and (2c) the mediating effect of the leader’s persuasiveness on followers’ prosocial behavior (study 2, N = 140). We did not find support for the effect of leader charisma on detecting false information, the persuasiveness of messages, or increased prosocial behavior among followers. We found an effect of leader charisma on memory. Participants recognized fewer messages in the charismatic compared to the neutral leader conditions. Exploratory analyses provided mixed results for an interaction effect of leader charisma and sex on detecting and remembering false information. Our studies offer first insights into the cognitive outcomes of the charismatic signaling process.

Reviewed by: Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese Sasha Tamar Strelitz John Savarese. Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability. Ohio State UP, 2020. 192p. Part of our inherited understanding of Romanticism is that poetry exists as ruminations on and exercises of the inner workings of the mind. The movement’s fixation on the interior landscape—on thoughts and feelings—took form in the late eighteenth century, drawing influence from earlier movements such as the German Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). For both the German predecessor and its more broadly European successor, the shift towards emotion was a purposeful resistance to the Enlightenment’s staunch adherence to reason. Romantics preferred Maine de Biran’s turn of René Descartes’ rationalist statement Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”)—Volo, egro sum (“I will/desire, therefore I am”). But, what if our inherited knowledge of Romanticism divorces its fidelity to the sciences? What if Romantic poetry functioned as a sort of response to the early cognitive sciences? John Savarese’s Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability strives to reinscribe the relationship between Romanticism and science. His book-length recovery of Romanticism’s interrelation with the sciences takes an interdisciplinary approach to reading Romantic poetry with keen awareness of its ties specifically to the [End Page 134] early cognitive approaches produced contemporarily with the artistic movement. Savarese shows that Romanticism’s interrelation with science “reinforce[s] the Romantic idea that poetry was most at home in the inward domain of thought and feeling” (2). After all, cognitive functions include but are not limited to emotions. With his focuses on James Macphereson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott, Savarese reinforces the notion that early cognitive approaches to poetry are more diverse than remembered by post-Romantic inheritors. By reading these poets’ work through a cognitivist lens, which he claims recovers Romanticism’s own “cross-disciplinary ‘turn to phenomenality’,” Savarese spotlights the close relationship between the science of sensation and Romantic poetry (Richard Sha qtd. in Savarese 2). His resuscitation diverges from our inherited understanding of Romanticism, as the book traces and investigates the movement’s “exploration of interiority [as] thoroughly enmeshed in the emerging language of physiological psychology and the embodied mind,” which was not faithfully transmitted through time by the post-Romantic memory (2). As featured in the title, “other’s minds” and “science of sociability” are central to Savarese’s inquiry. In the introduction, he points to the post-1980s “cognitive turn” in literary studies, or what Lisa Zunshine previously termed as “cognitive cultural studies” as central to his methodology (7). Using cognitive cultural studies as a theoretical gateway, Savarese reimagines Romantic literature as scientifically-informed accounts focused on the mind’s social powers—social powers that are understood as in-built or natural. Therefore, the poetry not only elicits from private consciousness, but also the mind’s social powers as related to the social contexts the person involves herself in. In other words, Savarese troubles the notion that Romantic poetry elicits solely from introspection or affective intensity, but instead he posits that it relied on “social intelligence[…]social recognition, agent tracking, and perspective-taking” (4). For instance, the chapter on Wordsworth applies the previously established cognitivist methodology to poetic moments in order to better understand the poet’s own assertion that Nature, or larger yet, his external environment played an active role on his mental life (106). By understanding the mental structures Wordsworth built to process the world around him—“These chiefly are such structures as the mind / Builds for itself ”—through the cognitivist lens Savarese offers, the reader rethinks the external location of the poet’s creative [End Page 135] agency in Nature (Wordsworth qtd. in Savarese 131). The central purpose of Romanticism’s Other Minds is to offer a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature in order to reinscribe the fact that Romanticism was born alongside a fledgling cognitive science. Therefore, the book is a recovery project whose methodology is borrowed from Alan Richardson, who applies neuroscience in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, which is...

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has over 30 years of history. However, the language of CSR is still unfamiliar to contemporary scholars studying religion in Korea. This unfamiliarity must be resolved so that important advances in CSR can be carefully reviewed in the Korean academic community. This study analyzes how CSR deals with the concept of religion and its implications. First, CSR raises new research questions based on the achievements of classical religious studies. Second, it explores the evolutionary origins, cognitive mechanisms, and cultural success factors, not of religion per se, but of thoughts and behaviors considered religious, which do not contradict the lessons provided by debates on the concept of religion in classical religious studies. Third, even in naturalistic approaches to religion, where CSR belongs, there are controversies regarding the concept of religion between the cognitive byproduct model and adaptationist model. Fourth, the standard CSR model shows that several research questions in the study of religion can be empirically explored when the privileged value attributed to the concept of religion is reserved. Although CSR inherits the debates over the concept of religion from classical religious studies, it differs in its exploration of the evolutionary and cognitive factors that explain why religion is difficult to define as an autonomous system.