Warsaw, June 23-26, 2016

The aim of the workshop is to discuss the recent work on mechanistic explanation, with special stress on particular problems of integration of multiple mechanistic models, robustness, and unification of partial explanations, theories and fields.

There is a growing consensus that cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience explain their phenomena of interest mechanistically. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research field, in which methods, tools, and concepts from other disciplines are used. One can ask a fundamental question whether anything unifies the field; or whether it is not just a hodgepodge of heterogeneous research. This kind of doubt can be articulated with regard to any interdisciplinary research field. However, the existence of interdisciplinary collaboration means that there are real connections between disciplines and that their problems are related. But to really dispel the doubt against interdisciplinary research, one needs to answer the question of what makes such conglomerates as cognitive science actually unified.

Invited Keynote Speakers

William Bechtel (California, San Diego)

Carl F. Craver (Washington University in St. Louis)

David Kaplan (Macquarie)

Registration

To register, click here.

More info

The workshop is organized by Marcin Miłkowski and Mateusz Hohol, and financed from National Science Center grant under the decision DEC-2014/14/E/HS1/00803, with support from Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Center for Philosophical Research, Warsaw.

The post Mechanistic Integration and Unification in Cognitive Science first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

1:00 pm           Bus leaves Warsaw airport

4:30 pm                      Bus arrives at workshop hotel in Kazimierz Dolny

6:30 pm           Dinner at hotel

Sunday, November 8th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30                 Key Speaker Ellen Dissanayake, Evolution and the Arts

11:00 am         Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am         Jerzy Luty – Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological approach to art and its critics

12:10 pm         John Collier – Disputes over the evolutionary origins of music and dance

12:50 pm         Piotr Podlipniak – Tonal qualia and the evolution of music

1:30 pm           Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm           Eveline Seghers and Stefaan Blancke – Metacognition and the origins of art

3:10 pm           Marcin Miłkowski – Brain on Art Meets Honest Signals

3:50 pm           TBA

4:30 pm           End of sessions

Monday, November 9th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am           Key Speaker Piotr Przybysz – Aesthetic Emotions: Toward a Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Processing of Art Stimuli

11:00 am         Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am         Mateusz Migut – Need for functional psychology of music – conceptual struggles with empirical investigation of functions of music

12:10 pm         Alejandra Wah – Processes underlying the artistic experience

12:50 pm         Larissa Mendoza Straffon – The Aesthetic Experience as Social Emotion: Towards an Affective Art History

1:30 pm           Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm           Guided tour of Kazimierz Dolny

4:30 pm           End of tour

Tuesday, November 10th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am           Key Speaker Ellen Dissanayake – From Ritualization to Ritual and its Arts: Sources of Upper Pleistocene Ritual Practices in Ritualized and Play Behaviours in Ancestral Hominins

11:00 am         Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am         Jakub Matyja – From brains to bodies: recomposing musical simulations

12:10 pm         Witold Wachowski – Contradictory acoustic affordances

12:50 pm         Mateusz Hohol – TBA

1:30 pm           Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm           Piotr Kozak – Art, Formalism, and the Limits of Naturalism

3:10 pm           TBA

3:50 pm           TBA

4:30 pm           End of sessions

6:30 pm           Workshop dinner at restaurant in town (cost not covered by fees)

Wednesday, November 11th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9 am                Round-table discussion of workshop theme

11:30 am         Bus leaves hotel

2:30 pm           Bus arrives at Warsaw airport

The post Preliminary schedule first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland – November, 7th to 11th, 2015 August,  10th to 14th, 2015

Recent scientific research concerning art and music has thrown up a plethora of new aspects to be integrated into our understanding of these phenomena. Individual studies, such as attempts to explain aesthetic responses in terms of some aspect of human neurology, have at times been deemed reductionist. Quite apart from such ‘accusations’ often being wholehearted accepted by researchers, the overall picture of art that science is revealing is anything from simplistic. Instead, research coming out of a variety of disciplines is presenting philosophy with ever new challenges if it is to provide anything like an integrated understanding of art and music. Thus, among others, ecological approaches provide a novel perspective upon meaning in music, embodied approaches explore the role of the specific played by the body in experiencing music and evolutionary approaches examine the significance of human evolutionary history for art and music. Far from being simplified, the view that tended to focus upon cultural factors has been enriched by consideration of cognitive and evolutionary factors as well as novel tools and ways of thinking about the interplay between art and music and the broader cultures in which they exist. In effect, it is philosophy that is forced to extend its perspective in order to seek a synthesis that reflects the new research. In our workshop we will seek to further this process by engaging philosophers and scientists in a dialogue concerning the multifaceted place that art and music hold in nature.

Invited Key-speakers

Ian Cross (University of Cambridge)

Ellen Dissanayake (University of Washington) 

Piotr Przybysz (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Sample Questions

• To what extent recent neuroscientific findings explain the nature of our interactions with art and music?
• How can we relate empirical data from empirical musicology to evolutionary theories of music?
• What is the role of computational modelling of music cognition in our understanding of music (in evolutionary context)?
• To what degree can current neuroaesthetics explain the meaning of art and aesthetic pleasure?
• In what ways current naturalistic philosophy of science can inform recent debates on art and music?

Call for Papers

300 word abstracts are invited no later than August, 30th (extended deadline). Accepted speakers will have 40 minutes for their presentations, including discussion time. Preference will be given to presentations directly connected to the work carried out by the key speakers. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair.

Registration and accommodation

Applications will be accepted till September, 10th, with late applications being accepted till October, 15th. Early registration fee is 150 Euro (reduced rate – 75 Euro), while late registration fee is 200 Euro. Fees are payable upon acceptance of application. They cover the workshop sessions, conference materials, lunches, coffee breaks and the minibus to and from Warsaw. Accommodation is available at the hotel at which the workshop will take place (or a hotel nearby) and costs an additional 100 Euro in total for the whole workshop (including breakfasts) in twin en-suite rooms (limited single rooms available at higher price). Availability of accommodation cannot be guaranteed for late registrants.

KNEW’15 is being organised by Marcin Miłkowski (PAN, CPR), Konrad Talmont-Kaminski (UF&M, CPR) and Jakub Ryszard Matyja (PAN, CPR) with the financial assistance from the Centre for Philosophical Research.

The post Placing Art and Music in Nature: KNEW 2015 first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

Yuichi Amitani – Species without definitions: Applying psychology to resolve the species problem

John Collier – The strange case of female hormone replacement therapy and cognitive salience

Corinne L. Bloch-Mullins – Concepts as tools of discovery

Miles MacLeod and Nancy Nersessian – Cognitive constraints, complexity and model-building

Matteo Colombo and Rogier De Langhe – Bayesian cognitive science, inference to the best explanatory framework, and the value of specialization

Mark Addis, Fernand Gobet, Peter C. R. Lane and Peter Sozou – Computational scientific discovery and cognitive science theories

Paul Thagard – How scientific creativity results from three brain mechanisms

Piotr Giza – Automated discovery systems and the inductivist controversy

Witold Hensel – On Thagard’s argument for the approximate truth of deepened scientific theories

Krystyna Bielecka – Ludwik Fleck’s account of science and the cognitive science of science

Hugo Mercier – The argumentative theory of reasoning and scientific progress

Renne Pesonen – Intuitive rationality and cognitive expertise

Maarten Boudry and Stefaan Blancke – The epidemiology of pseudoscience

Konrad Talmont-Kaminski – Epistemic vigilance in scientific and religious cognition

Lucas Afeltowicz and Radosław Sojek– Machines, duels and a beauty contest: Cognitive synergy of ‘Aristocratic’ and ‘Craftsmanship’ styles

Adam Toon – Reason, relativism and situated cognition

Additionally, in The Reasoner 8 (10), you can find a report from the workshop.

The post Talks from KNEW 2014 first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland – August 19th to 23rd, 2013

Invited key-speakers

Steve Butterfill (Warwick)

Joel Krueger (Durham / Exeter)

Miriam Kyselo (San Sebastian)

Tad Zawidzki (George Washington)

Call for papers

The theme of the workshop is the significance of wide cognition – which is embodied, enacted, extended, embodied, and distributed cognition – for social intelligence.

Wide cognition has, over the last couple of decades, become more and more widespread in all areas of cognitive science – from neuroscience to cognitive psychology to cognitive linguistics to philosophy to computer science and robotics. Unlike traditional frameworks for cognitive science, these approaches do not explain cognitive phenomena solely in terms of the manipulation of (language-like) internal representations but stress that (1) minds can extend into the environment; (2) agents are cognitive insofar as they are embodied; (3) their cognitive scaffolding is enacted, or constructed, in an active fashion; (4) cognitive phenomena are always interactions with the environment; (5) and cognitive acts are often paradigmatically distributed among multiple agents. The workshop’s aim is to explore the relevance of this body of research for understanding social intelligence. In particular, its reliance on environmental design, bodily interaction, shared cognitive and symbolic tools, and complex schemas of collaboration.

The workshop will also feature discussion of a white paper of the topic  that is being prepared in collaboration with the SINTELNET coordination network (sintelnet.eu).

The workshop is supported by a grant from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Abstracts

Abstracts of less than 500 words will be accepted till June, 15th. All submissions should be made through the easychair website. Abstracts will be evaluated on a first come basis so early submission is strongly encouraged in order to avoid missing out on available spots.

Registration and accommodation

Early registration ends June 30th. The early registration fee is 150 Euro (reduced rate – 75 Euro), while the late registration fee is 200 Euro. Fees cover the workshop sessions, conference materials, lunches, coffee breaks and the minibus to and from Warsaw airport.

Accommodation is available at the conference hotel. The cost is 100 Euro in total for four nights (August 19th to 23rd) in shared twin en suite rooms and includes breakfasts (limited single rooms available at higher price). Availability of accommodation cannot be guaranteed for late registrants.

Registration and accommodation fees might change in the event of significant movement in the exchange rate of the Polish currency.

The post Wide cognition and social intelligence first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland – August, 18th to 22nd, 2014

Invited key-speakers

Paul Thagard (Waterloo)

Cristine Legare (Texas at Austin)

Hugo Mercier (Neuchâtel)

Call for papers

Science is usually considered the paradigm of knowledge. Naturally, it has long been the subject of philosophical inquiry. Having moved away from abstract consideration of the epistemic conditions necessary for knowledge, naturalistic philosophical inquiry into science focuses more on the interplay of cognitive and cultural processes that generate scientific knowledge. Indeed, the sophisticated cognition that science involves requires the underpinning of rich social, cultural and material environments – as Nancy Nersessian observes. Science is studied therefore as both a social and cultural phenomenon, not just an individual psychological achievement. Owing to the complex nature of processes that underpin scientific knowledge production, their study has to be interdisciplinary – with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches being made use of – and integration of various perspectives remains an open problem.

During our workshop we will bring together relevant work from a number of these perspectives, including developmental cognitive psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour, cognitive science, philosophy of science and history of science.

Abstracts

Abstracts of less than 500 words will be accepted till June, 15th. All submissions should be made through the easychair website. Abstracts will be evaluated on a first come basis so early submission is strongly encouraged in order to avoid missing out on available spots.

Registration and accommodation

Early registrations will be till July, 20th. The early registration fee is 150 Euro (reduced rate – 75 Euro), while the late registration fee is 200 Euro. Fees cover the workshop sessions, conference materials, lunches, coffee breaks and the minibus to and from Warsaw airport.

Accommodation is available at the conference hotel. The cost is 100 Euro in total for four nights (August 18th to 22nd) in shared twin en suite rooms and includes breakfasts (limited single rooms available at a higher price). The single rooms cost 165 Euro in total. Availability of accommodation cannot be guaranteed for late registrants.

Registration and accommodation fees might change in the event of significant movement in the exchange rate of the Polish currency.

Publications

Following the meeting, an effort will be made to publish selected papers from the workshop as an issue of Avant.

KNEW’14 is being organised by Łukasz Afeltowicz (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń), Marcin Milkowski (PAN, CPR) and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski (UFAM, CPR) with financial assistance from the Centre for Philosophical Research.

The workshop is supported financially by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

The post Cognitive Science of Science: Kazimierz Naturalist Workshop 2014 first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

• Paco Calvo – Systematic behavior and  the varieties of (representational) vehicles
• Wayne Christensen and John Michael – The representational demands of mind reading
• Andrzej Kapusta – Representation and engaged epistemology
• Paweł Gładziejewski – On the relation between folk psychological and scientific concepts of mental representation
• Christopher Martin – A process-oriented definition of teamwork with consequences for team cognition and performance (here is the full paper)
• Huw Price – Representationalism: My journey from nihilism to dualism 
• Jonathan Knowles – Anti-representationalism and perception
• Timo Vuorio – On the very problem of representation
• Robert Clowes – Virtualist representation and the heterogeneous vehicles of thought
• Edouard Machery – Doing without Concepts
• Fredrik Stjernberg – Kinds of representations, kinds of cognition
• Piotr Wilkin – Do representations need to represent?
• Krystyna Bielecka – Social coordination as an important component of mental representation
• Marcin Miłkowski – The role of representation in computational explanations
• Konrad Talmont-Kaminski – Reference and religious representations

And in The Reasoner (vol. 5, no. 10, 2011), there is a short summary of the workshop.

The post Varieties of Representation: KNEW 2011 Presentations first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

September 6^th – 10^th 2008

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland

Invited key speakers

Susan Stuart (University of Glasgow, UK)

David Papineau (King’s College London, UK)

Susan Haack (University of Miami, USA)

Peter Gärdenfors (Lund University, Sweden)

Ingo Brigandt (University of Alberta, Canada)

Naturalism is currently the most vibrantly developing approach to philosophy, with naturalised methodologies being applied across all the philosophical disciplines. While discussions over the appropriateness of naturalist assumptions are ongoing, many philosophers are simply forging ahead with a range of interdisciplinary projects that show how philosophy and various sciences such as biology, psychology and cognitive science can work hand in hand. The workshop aims to further the development of naturalism through focussed, friendly discussion in the relaxed atmosphere of a picturesque historical town.

Call for Papers

300 word abstracts are invited no later than April 30^th and should be accompanied by application forms (doc/pdf) – people whose talks are not accepted will have the opportunity to withdraw their applications. Submissions should be sent to ktalmont@bacon.umcs.lublin.pl or, by mail, to: Konrad Talmont-Kaminski, Philosophy Institute, Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Plac MCS 4, 20-031 Lublin, POLAND. Accepted speakers will have 40 minutes for their presentations, including discussion time. Preference will be given to presentations directly connected to the work done by the key speakers.

Registration and accommodation

Those not wanting to present may send in their applications (doc/pdf) till May 30^th, with late applications being accepted till July 10^th. Early registration fee is 150 Euro (reduced rate – 75 Euro), while late registration fee is 200 Euro. Fees are payable upon acceptance of application. They cover the workshop sessions, conference materials, lunches, coffee breaks and the minibus to and from Warsaw. Accommodation is available at the hotel at which the workshop will take place and costs an additional 100 Euro (including breakfasts). Availability of accommodation can not be guaranteed for late registrants.

KNEW’08 is being organised by Marcin Milkowski (PAN, CPR) and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski (KLI, UMCS, CPR) with financial assistance from the Philosophy and Sociology Faculty of Marie Curie-Sklodowska University as well as the Centre for Philosophical Research.

The post Kazimierz Naturalism Workshop 08 first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

Monday, August 18th

2:30 pm               Bus leaves Warsaw airport

6 pm               Bus arrives at workshop hotel in Kazimierz Dolny

6:30 pm         Dinner at hotel

Tuesday, August 19th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30                 Key Speaker Cristine Legare – Ontogeny of cultural learning

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Yuichi Amitani – Species without definitions: Applying psychology to resolve the species problem

12:10 pm       John Collier – The strange case of female hormone replacement therapy and cognitive salience

12:50 pm       Corinne L. Bloch-Mullins – Concepts as tools of discovery

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Miles MacLeod and Nancy Nersessian – Cognitive constraints, complexity and model-building

3:10 pm         Matteo Colombo and Rogier De Langhe – Bayesian cognitive science, inference to the best explanatory framework, and the value of specialization

3:50 pm         Mark Addis, Fernand Gobet, Peter C R Lane and Peter Sozou – Computational scientific discovery and cognitive science theories

4:30 pm         End of sessions

Wednesday, August 20th

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am          Key Speaker Paul Thagard – How scientific creativity results from three brain mechanisms

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Piotr Giza – Automated discovery systems and the inductivist controversy

12:10 pm       Witold Hensel – On Thagard’s argument for the approximate truth of deepened scientific theories

12:50 pm       Krystyna Bielecka – Ludwik Fleck’s account of science and the cognitive science of science

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Guided tour of Kazimierz Dolny

4:30 pm         End of tour

Thursday, August 21st

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am          Key Speaker Hugo Mercier – The argumentative theory of reasoning and scientific progress

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Renne Pesonen – Intuitive rationality and cognitive expertise

12:10 pm       Maarten Boudry and Stefaan Blancke – The epidemiology of pseudoscience

12:50 pm       Konrad Talmont-Kaminski – Epistemic vigilance in scientific and religious cognition

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Lucas Afeltowicz and Radosław Sojek– Machines, duels and a beauty contest: Cognitive synergy of ‘Aristocratic’ and ‘Craftsmanship’ styles

3:10 pm         Adam Toon – Reason, relativism and situated cognition

3:50 pm         TBA

4:30 pm         End of sessions

6:30 pm         Workshop dinner at restaurant in town (cost not covered by fees)

Friday, August 22nd

8 am                Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9 am                Round-table discussion of workshop theme

11:30 am       Bus leaves hotel

2:30 pm         Bus arrives at Warsaw airport

The post Tentative Schedule first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.

3 pm               Bus leaves Warsaw airport

6 pm               Bus arrives at workshop hotel in Kazimierz Dolny

6:30 pm         Dinner at hotel

Tuesday, August 20th

8 am               Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9 am               Introduction by Marcin Miłkowski

9:30                Key Speaker Steve Butterfill – Not Just Wide but Shared: Joint Action Is a Core Form of Social Intelligence

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Leandro De Brasi – Knowledge-relevant responsibility and socially distributed cognition

12:10 pm       Fredrik Stjernberg – Social memory strategies

12:50 pm       Robert Clowes – Does The Cloud signify a new kind of wide mind?

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Key Speaker Joel Krueger – Extended emotions and the roots of social intelligence

4:00 pm         End of sessions

Wednesday, August 21st

8 am               Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am         Key Speaker Miriam Kyselo – Distinction and participation – An Enactive Approach to self

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Anita Pacholik-Żuromska & Daniel Żuromski – Chasing self

12:10 pm       Philipp Bartels & Patrizia Pecl – The social intelligence of socially distributed agents

12:50 pm       Self-organisation and emergence in distributed cognition

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Guided tour of Kazimierz Dolny

4:30 pm         End of tour

Thursday, August 22nd

8 am               Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9:30 am         Key Speaker Tad Zawidzki – Why do we mindread?

11:00 am       Coffee break for all workshop participants

11:30 am       Adam Gies – Early human social cognition & intersubjectivity

12:10 pm       Zuzanna Rucinska – Towards non-representational pretence

12:50 pm       Aleksandra Przegalinska & Zofia Rosinska – Avatars and embodied experience

1:30 pm         Lunch for all workshop participants

2:30 pm         Joanna Malinowska – Cultural neuroscience and cognition

3:10 pm         Leon Ciechanowski – Are there any unconscious emotions? An enactive approach

3:50 pm         Victor Fernandez – The embodied aspects of inner speech

4:30 pm         End of sessions

6:30 pm         Workshop dinner at restaurant in town (cost not covered by fees)

Friday, August 23rd

8 am               Breakfast for all staying at the hotel

9 am               Round-table discussion of workshop theme

11:30 am       Bus leaves hotel

2:30 pm         Bus arrives at Warsaw airport

The post Tentative schedule first appeared on Centre for Philosophical Research.