Functional Models of Cognition: Self-Organizing Dynamics and Semantic Structures in Cognitive Systems

✍ Scribed by Arturo Carsetti (auth.), Arturo Carsetti (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 300
• Series: Theory and Decision Library 27
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Our ontology as well as our grammar are, as Quine affirms, ineliminable parts of our conceptual contribution to our theory of the world. It seems impossible to think of enti­ ties, individuals and events without specifying and constructing, in advance, a specific language that must be used in order to speak about these same entities. We really know only insofar as we regiment our system of the world in a consistent and adequate way. At the level of proper nouns and existence functions we have, for instance, a standard form of a regimented language whose complementary apparatus consists of predicates, variables, quantifiers and truth functions. If, for instance, the discoveries in the field of Quantum Mechanics should oblige us, in the future, to abandon the traditional logic of truth functions, the very notion of existence, as established until now, will be chal­ lenged. These considerations, as developed by Quine, introduce us to a conceptual perspective like the "internal realist" perspective advocated by Putnam whose principal aim is, for cer­ tain aspects, to link the philosophical approaches developed respectively by Quine and Wittgenstein. Actually, Putnam conservatively extends the approach to the problem of ref­ erence outlined by Quine: in his opinion, to talk of "facts" without specifying the language to be used is to talk of nothing.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-5
Introduction....Pages 7-23
Front Matter....Pages 25-25
Functional Realism....Pages 27-38
Complexity and Cognition....Pages 39-49
From Visual Perception to Decision Making: A Synergetic Approach....Pages 51-66
Connectionist Psychology and Synergetics of Cognition....Pages 67-90
Self-Organisation in Perception the Case of Motion....Pages 91-100
Front Matter....Pages 101-101
Expressiveness and Complexity of Formal Systems....Pages 103-120
Imposing Polynomial Time Complexity in Functional Programming....Pages 121-126
Self-Organizing Networks: Weak, Strong And Intentional, the Role of Their Underdetermination....Pages 127-142
Self-Organization: Epistemological and Methodological Aspect of the Unity of Reality....Pages 143-166
How Science Approaches the World: Risky Truths Versus Misleading Certitudes....Pages 167-187
On Self-Reference and Self-Description....Pages 189-197
Front Matter....Pages 199-199
Self-Organization and Computability....Pages 201-209
The Difference between Clocks and Turing Machines....Pages 211-232
Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition....Pages 233-252
Linguistic Structures, Cognitive Functions and Algebraic Semantics....Pages 253-286
Back Matter....Pages 287-310

✦ Subjects

Interdisciplinary Studies; Systems Theory, Control; Theory of Computation; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Epistemology