Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems devised by the Eleatic Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.
Alexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism and a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform. He founded Mind, the first ever journal of psychology and analytical philosophy, and was the leading figure in establishing and applying the scientific method to psychology. Bain was the inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, where he also held Professorships in Moral Philosophy and English Literature and was twice elected Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen.
Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore, we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains, the mind and the brain.
George Croom Robertson was a Scottish philosopher. He sat on the Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and his wife, Caroline Anna Croom Robertson was a college administrator.
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.
Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids (1857–1942) was a British writer and translator. She made a contribution to economics before becoming widely known as an editor, translator, and interpreter of Buddhist texts in the Pāli language. She was honorary secretary of the Pāli Text Society from 1907, and its president from 1923 to 1942.
Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems.
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It was vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others.
Ullin Thomas Place, usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of Adelaide, he taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Leeds.
The Journal of Philosophy is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, especially the exploration of the borderline between philosophy and other disciplines." Subscriptions and online access are managed by the Philosophy Documentation Center.
Abstractionism is the theory that the mind obtains some or all of its concepts by abstracting them from concepts it already has, or from experience. One may, for example, abstract 'green' from a set of experiences which involve green along with other properties. Also, for example, one may abstract a generic concept like 'vegetable' from the already possessed concepts of its instances This view was criticized by George Berkeley and Peter Geach.
The University of Cambridge was the birthplace of the 'Analytic' School of Philosophy in the early 20th century. The department is located in the Raised Faculty Building on the Sidgwick Site and is part of the Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities. The Faculty achieved the best possible results from The Times 2004 and the QAA Subject Review 2001 (24/24). In the UK as of 2020, it is ranked second by the Guardian, second by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and fifth by the QS World University Rankings.
George Frederick Stout, usually cited as G. F. Stout, was a leading English philosopher and psychologist. He was the father of the philosopher Alan Stout.
James Ward was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was a Cambridge Apostle.
Justin Fritz Leiber was an American philosopher and science fiction writer. He was the son of fantasy, horror and science fiction author Fritz Leiber and the grandson of stage and film actor Fritz Leiber, Sr. Previously a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, Leiber was most recently a professor emeritus of philosophy at Florida State University. He was a visiting fellow at Linacre College, Oxford during the Trinity term on numerous occasions.
The Grote Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic is an endowed chair at University College London's Department of Philosophy.
Digital infinity is a technical term in theoretical linguistics. Alternative formulations are "discrete infinity" and "the infinite use of finite means". The idea is that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions.
