books — The Brains Blog

2. A Tale of Two Theories

Majid D. Beni April 16, 2019 November 9, 2022 M.D. Beni: Cognitive Structural Realism / Philosophy of Science

Previously I introduced the problem of scientific representation and remarked that Cognitive Structural Realism (CSR) aims to address it. CSR is (evidently) a version of SR, but it is also the inheritor of Ronald Giere and colleagues’ Cognitive Models of Science Approach (CMSA). In this post, I explain how CSR …

1. Cognitive Structural Realism

Majid D. Beni April 15, 2019 April 14, 2019 M.D. Beni: Cognitive Structural Realism / Philosophy of Science

I am grateful to John Schwenkler for giving me the opportunity to present my first book Cognitive Structural Realism, which aims to consolidate the ties between the philosophy of science and cognitive science. There already is some connection between these fields, given that the philosophy of cognitive science is a …

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John Schwenkler April 15, 2019 April 23, 2019 books

We are grateful to Majid Davoody Beni for blogging this week on Cognitive Structural Realism: A Radical Solution to the Problem of Scientific Representation (Springer, 2019). To view all of Majid’s post on a single page, please click here.

Where Are All the Successful Analyses?

Michael Strevens March 29, 2019 March 27, 2019 analytical philosophy / Cognition / Concepts / Explanation / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

I promised a surprise for today’s post. It’s a nasty one. Philosophical analysis is a search for the essential natures of such things as knowledge, justice, and causality. I’ve been defending analysis on two fronts. First, I’ve argued that it its inputs—the case judgments delivered by our “starter theories” of …

The Substantiality of Philosophical Analysis

Michael Strevens March 28, 2019 March 28, 2019 analytical philosophy / Concepts / Experimental Philosophy / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

The story so far: Concepts of philosophical categories such as knowledge or justice, are, or gain their cognitive significance from, explanatory theories of the relevant domain (involving epistemic explanation in the case of knowledge and moral explanation in the case of justice). Thanks to the way that concepts semantically hook …

The Reliability of Case Judgments

Michael Strevens March 27, 2019 March 26, 2019 analytical philosophy / Cognition / Concepts / Content / Experimental Philosophy / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

If the “theory-theory“ of concepts sketched in the previous post is correct, then we begin the philosophical analysis of a category such as knowledge equipped with nothing more than some rudimentary beliefs about the place of knowledge in the explanatory order. These beliefs may paint a rather partial or even …

Philosophical Concepts as Natural Kind Concepts

Michael Strevens March 26, 2019 March 24, 2019 analytical philosophy / Cognition / Concepts / Michael Strevens: Thinking Off Your Feet

I want to argue that philosophical analysis, a.k.a. the method of cases, is a worthy pursuit: that it reliably gives us substantial knowledge. The linchpin of my strategy is an appeal to cognitive psychology to show that philosophical concepts—the concept of knowledge, the concept of justice, the concept of causality, …