Cognitive Science, Foundations, and Philosophy of Mind

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts in cognitive science foundations, evolutionary psychology, philosophy of mind, learning models, and David Marr's levels of analysis.

Theory

An explanatory idea or framework behind a concept.

Science

Using evidence to make causal claims, provoking experiments to test them.

Psychology

The scientific study of mind and behavior, encompassing both research and clinical branches.

Cognitive science

An interdisciplinary field uniting psychology, computer science, neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics that studies the mind as information processing.

Representation

How information is encoded or stood in for inside a system.

Rogers’ Paradox

The paradox where cheap social learning spreads by free-riding on individual learners who perform costly exploration, resulting in social learning failing to raise the population's average payoff and potentially corrupting knowledge when the environment changes.

Society of Mind

Minsky's proposal that intelligence is not a single unified entity, but emerges from the interaction of many simple, mindless agents, none of which understand anything on their own.

Backpropagation

A supervised learning algorithm extending the delta rule to multi-layer networks, using the chain rule to calculate how much each weight contributed to the error.

Asymmetric updating

A bias identified by Sharot where individuals update beliefs more in response to good news than bad news, distorting the prediction error signal.

Proper domain

In evolutionary psychology, what a particular system evolved to handle.

Actual domain

In evolutionary psychology, everything else that happens to trigger a system beyond what it originally evolved to handle.

Instinct blindness

The assumption that automatic, effortless faculties like vision and walking require no explanation, obscuring the fact that they are complex computational systems.

Epicycle

An ad hoc patch added to a failing theory to save it, originating from Ptolemy’s astronomy.

Hume's association of ideas

The philosophical principle that ideas are connected to one another through resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.

Problem of induction

The philosophical problem that although we infer future occurrences from past experience, nothing logically guarantees the future will resemble the past.

Indeterminacy of translation

Quine’s thesis, illustrated by the 'gavagai' example, that evidence underdetermines meaning such that multiple incompatible translations can fit the exact same observed behavior.

Functional role semantics

The theory that the meaning of a representation is determined by its role—namely, its relations to inputs, outputs, and other representations.

Behaviorism

An approach explaining behavior solely via stimulus-response associations without inner mental states, which declined after failing to account for language and internal processing (highlighted by Chomsky’s critique of Skinner).

Computational level

The level in Marr’s framework that specifies what the goal or function of the system is.

Algorithmic/representational level

The level in Marr’s framework that specifies how a process is executed, including the specific representations and procedures used.

Implementation level

The level in Marr’s framework focusing on the physical hardware (such as neurons and wiring) rather than designer intentions.