The Cognitive Sciences

Abstract

Contributors: none Current version (on 2006-09-18) The characteristics of the mind-world connection have a special appeal for philosophers. In parallel to discoveries in neurophysiology, the development of artificial intelligent and of new interfaces based on action and perception, solicitate the redefinition of relevant questions for the philosophy of mind and give contents to the special group of studies dedicated to cognition and grown up under the name of "cognitive sciences". The cognitive sciences constitute a gerrymandered group of approaches to the problems connected with cognition. They include approaches directed to different objects that can be quite general or very specific: cognition in general (human and animal cognitive processes as well as machine cognition and the simulation of human cognitive abilities), symbolic processes, memory, attention, consciousness, action planning and execution, learning, knowledge, reasoning, speech and language understanding and reading, perception, including vision, hearing, touch and kinesthesis, the mind-body problem. The cognitive sciences are not necessarily committed to a particular vision of mind and its functioning. However, there has been a consensus for a working paradigm for many years, although of late cognitive scientists have been divided in their opinion which has lead to a paradigmatic shift in the domain during the last few years. This paradigm broadly presumes that the mind is an information processor that receives, stores, retrieves, transforms, and transmits information. The information and the corresponding information processes can then be studied as forms, patterns, and functions.