Volume 20 (2007), Issue 2
Brain Functions, Localization, and Neuroimaging:
Michael L. Anderson
The Massive Redeployment Hypothesis and the Functional Topography of the Brain
This essay introduces the massive redeployment hypothesis, an account of the functional organization of the brain that centrally features the fact that brain areas are typically employed to support numerous functions. The central contribution of the essay is to outline a middle course between strict localization on the one hand, and holism on the other, in such a way as to account for the supporting data on both sides of the argument. The massive redeployment hypothesis is supported by case studies of redeployment, and compared and contrasted with other theories of the localization of function.
Vincent Bergeron
Anatomical and Functional Modularity in Cognitive Science: Shifting the Focus
Much of cognitive science is committed to the modular approach to the study of cognition. The core of this approach consists of a pair of assumptions—the anatomical and the functional modularity assumptions—which motivate two kinds of inference: the anatomical and the functional modularity inferences. The legitimacy of both of these inferences has been strongly challenged, a situation which has had surprisingly little impact on most theorizing in the field. Following the introduction of an important, yet rarely made, distinction between two functional concepts—the distinction between cognitive working and cognitive role—this paper analyses these kinds of inference, and refocuses the attention on new aspects of their main limitations. It is argued that both the anatomical and functional modularity inferences can, and do, operate in three distinct modes in contemporary cognitive science, and that seeing this is essential to understanding both the power and the limitations of these methodological tools.
Christopher Mole, Corey Kubatzky, Jan Plate,
Rawdon Waller, Marilee Dobbs, and Marc Nardone
Faces and Brains: The Limitations of Brain Scanning in Cognitive Science
The use of brain scanning now dominates the cognitive sciences, but important questions remain to be answered about what, exactly, scanning can tell us. One corner of cognitive science that has been transformed by the use of neuroimaging, and that a scanning enthusiast might point to as proof of scanning’s importance, is the study of face perception. Against this view, we argue that the use of scanning has, in fact, told us rather little about the information processing underlying face perception and that it is not likely to tell us much more.
Regular Articles:
Simon Wigley
Automaticity, Consciousness and Moral Responsibility
Cognitive scientists have long noted that automated behavior is the rule, while conscious acts of self-regulation are the exception to the rule. On the face of it, automated actions appear to be immune to moral appraisal because they are not subject to conscious control. Conventional wisdom suggests that sleepwalking exculpates, while the mere fact that a person is performing a well-versed task unthinkingly does not. However, our apparent lack of conscious control while we are undergoing automaticity challenges the idea that there is a relevant moral difference between these two forms of unconscious behavior. In both cases the agent lacks access to information that might help them guide their actions so as to avoid harms. In response it is argued that the crucial distinction between the automatic agent and the agent undergoing an automatism, such as somnambulism or petit mal epilepsy, lies in the fact that the former can preprogram the activation and interruption of automatic behavior. Given that, it is argued that there is elbowroom for attributing responsibility to automated agents based on the quality of their will.
Reza Lahroodi
Evaluating Need for Cognition: A Case Study in Naturalistic Epistemic Virtue Theory
The recent literature on epistemic virtues advances two general projects. The first is virtue epistemology, an attempt to explicate key epistemic notions in terms of epistemic virtue. The second is epistemic virtue theory, the conceptual and normative investigation of cognitive traits of character. While a great deal of work has been done in virtue epistemology, epistemic virtue theory still languishes in a state of neglect. Furthermore, the existing work is non-naturalistic. The present paper contributes to the development of a naturalistic epistemic virtue theory by presenting a virtue-theoretic evaluation of need for cognition as informed by the relevant psychological studies.
Review Essay:
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian
Review of Michael Wheeler (2005) Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step
Book Reviews:
Anand Jayprakash Vaidya
Review of Ruth M. J. Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality
Richard de Blacquière-Clarkson
Review of Jerry A. Fodor, Hume Variations
Robert Hanna & David Ivy
Review of Teed W. Rockwell, Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory