Philosophy Lecture 1

Gardner MNS begins his ``survey of the cognitive sciences'' with Philosophy: ``Not only is philosophy the oldest of the cognitive sciences, but its epistemological branch has supplied the initial agenda - the list of issues and topics upon which empirically oriented cognitive scientists are working today.''

The state of cognitive science today is analogous to the early stages of development of natural science, in which philosophy played a major role. In contrast to the day-to-day business of doing natural science today in which one's philosophical position is perhaps not so germane, in cognitive science it is philosophy that crucially helps, at a very basic level, in making explicit those implicit naive stances on cognition that all of us, schooled or unschooled, hold.

Further, as Gardner emphasises, beyond acting as mere commentator on the practice of cognitive science, philosophy helps to define problems, criticise models and suggest lines of enquiry. The very questions considered in Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Logic and Philosophy of Science are relevant to cognitive science today:

• Epistemology: The problem of How do we know? is at the root of our attempts to model cognition. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, its sources, nature and limitations. How does the knower progress from perception to concepts? ... Form and content of mental representations; concept of truth.

• Philosophy of mind: Ontology - nature of mind; relation between mental and material realms; consciousness, intentionality, will; brain state and conscious representations.

• Philosophical logic: Study of modes of reasoning, inference, proof. Relation of evidence with truth; criteria for evaluating the soundness of reasoning methods; aims to be normative and descriptive unlike pure mathematical logic; widely used in AI.

• Philosopy of science: Formulation of hypotheses, observation, experiments, data and theory construction, conceptual change.