See also BEHAVIORISM; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION; EXPLANATION (2009)
William Bechtel, G. Graham, A Companion
Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Plenum, pp. 205–267. Unsupervised Learning Unsupervised learning studies how systems can learn to represent particular input patterns in a way that reflects the...
William Bechtel, Andrew Hamilton
The notion that science is unified in one way or another dates back at least to Aristotle, though unity claims since then have been diverse and variously motivated. By way of introduction to the...
MECHANISMS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION (2008)
What is it to explain a psychological phenomenon (e.g., a person remembering a name, navigating through campus, understanding humor)? In philosophy, a traditional answer is that to explain a...
Aligning Multiple Research Techniques in Cognitive Neuroscience: Why Is It Important? (2008)
The need to align multiple experimental procedures and produce converging results so as to demonstrate that the phenomenon under investigation is real and not an artifact is a commonplace both in...
Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations...
Mechanisms and Psychological Explanation (2008)
As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of...
William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen
Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among...
Explanation: Mechanism, Modularity, and Situated Cognition 1 (2008)
The situated cognition movement has emerged in recent decades (although it has roots in psychologists working earlier in the 20 th century including Vygotsky, Bartlett, and Dewey) largely in reaction...
William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen
Both in biology and psychology there has been a tendency on the part of many investigators to focus solely on the mature organism and ignore development. There are many reasons for this, but an...
What Should a Connectionist Philosophy of Science Look Like? (2007)
this paper will be with whether it is wise to by-pass the sentential paradigm so completely. While I am no fan of the sentential paradigm as an approach to explaining human cognitive activity and...
Jennifer Mundale, William Bechtel
The idea of integrating evolutionary biology and psychology has great promise, but one that will be compromised if psychological functions are conceived too abstractly and neuroscience is not allowed...
Draft: Please do not circulate or quote without permission. Embodied Connectionism (2007)
Among the characteristics of the cognitive revolution, there are two that require careful consideration. The first is a tendency to think of cognitive activities as activities occurring exclusively...
Points of View from the Brain's Eye View: Subjectivity and Neural Representation (2007)
William Bechtel, Pete M, Jennifer Mundale, Robert Stufflebeam, Oxford Basil Blackwell, Pete Mandik
Conscious experiences are supposed by many to be subjective in the sense of being perspectival or from a point-of-view (see, for example Nagel 1974, 1986 and Tye 1995). Allegedly, the subjectivity of...
Neurobiological modeling: squeezing top down to meet bottom up (1998)
P Read Montague, Peter Dayan, William Bechtel, George Graham
A cartoon description of the goals of cognitive science and neuroscience might read respectively “how the mind works ” and “how the brain works”. In this caricature, there would seem to be...
Consciousness: Perspectives from Symbolic and Connectionist AI (1994)
this paper I will take Searle's arguments to pose a serious challenge for anyone seeking to provide a computational account of consciousness and sketch ways in which computationalist might...
Natural Deduction in Connectionist Systems (1994)
The relation between logic and thought has long been controversial, but has recently influenced theorizing about the nature of mental processes in cognitive science. One prominent tradition argues...
Consciousness: Perspectives from Symbolic and Connectionist AI (1994)
For many people, consciousness is one of the defining characteristics of mental states. Thus, it is quite surprising that consciousness has, until quite recently, had very little role to play in the...
Natural deduction in connectionist systems. Synthese (1994)
The relation between logic and thought has long been controversial, but has recently influenced theorizing about the nature of mental processes in cognitive science. One prominent tradition argues...
What Knowledge Must Be In The Head In Order To Acquire Language? (1993)
this paper I want to raise a worry about the conceptualization of these projects and advance a different perspective from which to think about human linguistic ability. The worry can be focused by...
The Challenge of Characterizing Operations in the Mechanisms Underlying Behavior
Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations...
The Challenge of Characterizing Operations in the Mechanisms Underlying Behavior
Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations...