Essays In Group Cognitive Science

Essays in Group-Cognitive Science, intros to CSCL research, methodology and findings. Vol 10 of Gerry Stahl's assembled texts.

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early - though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne imme diately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. "Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science" aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question.

Phil Johnson-Laird's theory of mental models has proved to be an influential development in the cognitive sciences. This theory aims to provide a detailed account of both reasoning and inference on the one hand, and language on the other. It can therefore be regarded as a step toward the much-sought-after unified theory of cognition.; This book provides an overview of mental models research. Some of the contributors were collaborators or former graduate students of Johnson-Laird, and between them they cover the main strands of mental models theory. After an appreciation of Johnson-Laird, the book covers topics including language Processing, Reasoning, Inference, The Role Of Emotions, And The Impact Of mental illnesses on thought processes.

This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human inference is central to much cognitive science, although the commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is not the appropriate model for human thought. Oaksford and Chater's argument draws on research in computer science, artificial intelligence and philosophy of science, in addition to experimental psychology. The authors propose that probability theory, the calculus of uncertain inference, provides a more appropriate model for human thought. They show how a probabilistic account can provide detailed explanations of experimental data on Wason's selection task, which many have viewed as providing a paradigmatic demonstration of human irrationality. Oaksford and Chater show that people's behaviour appears irrational only from a logical point of view, whereas it is entirely rational from a probabilistic perspective. The shift to a probabilistic framework for human inference has significant implications for the psychology of reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and forour picture of ourselves as rational agents.

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states. The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them. Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve

The unifying theme of these thirteen essays is understanding. Haugeland addresses mind and intelligence; intelligibility; analog and digital systems and supervenience; presuppositions about the foundational notions of intentionality and representation; and the essential character of understanding in relation to what is understood.

The volume includes essays that address the philosophical issues raised in computer support of collaborative learning and by the concept of group cognition. In particular, philosophy of group cognition should tackle the following questions: * What is the nature of group cognition? * What are the conditions of possibility for the existence of group cognition? The essays explore intersubjectivity, joint attention, common ground, collaborative learning and related concepts through analysis of empirical examples and review of the most important philosophic sources.

This volume pulls together interdisciplinary research on cognitive representations in the mind and in the world. The chapters—from cutting-edge researchers in psychology, philosophy, computer science, and the arts—explore how structured representations determine cognition in memory, spatial cognition information visualization, event comprehension, and gesture. It will appeal to graduate-level cognitive scientists, technologists, philosophers, linguists, and educators.