Waskan Jonathan A. Models and Cognition: Prediction and Explanation in Everyday Life and in Science

The MIT Press. 2006. — xvi, 323 p. — (Bradford Books). — ISBN: 978-0-262-23254-8 / 0-262-23254-5.In this groundbreaking book, Jonathan Waskan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic (propositional) model of mental representation. This logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem--the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes available. Proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not so far resolved this problem. Waskan proposes instead the Intrinsic Cognitive Models (ICM) hypothesis, which argues that representational states can be conceptualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models. Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate these cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: their capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations.Thoughts about the Mind: Past, Present, and Future
Philosophy, the Mind, and the Mechanical Worldview
The History of the Science(s) of the Mind
Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Folk Psychology and Cognitive ScienceThe Gauntlet of Irrealism
Archaic Presuppositions
Schematic Models
The Gauntlet Revisited
Cognitive Science and the Landscape of Competing Research ProgramsPostscript: A Confession
Content, Supervenience, and Cognitive ScienceRamifications for Folk Psychology
An Argument for the Wideness of Contents
A Digression on Supervenience
What Twin-Earth Thought Experiments Demonstrate
Ahistorical Determinants of Content
Externalism without Twins
The Planning Model
The Problem of Causal Impotence
Recap
Dueling MetaphorsMetaphors and Mechanisms in Cognitive Science
The Logic Metaphor
The Scale-Model Metaphor
A Diagnosis for the Frame Problem
Thinking in Its EntiretyTraditional Philosophical Objections
Reasoning and RepresentationFrom Metaphor to MechanismFrom Logic Metaphor to Logic Mechanism
A Dilemma
Intrinsic Computational Representations
The Intrinsic-Cognitive-Models HypothesisModels of ExplanationCognitive Science and the Philosophy of Science
The Deductive-Nomological Model
Proposed Alternatives to the D-N Model
The Model ModelBasic Tenets of the Model Model
Solving the Difficult Problems
The D-N Model: A Parting Shot
Mind and WorldKant and Synthetic A Priori Knowledge of Geometry
A Return to Models?