Related papers: Jacob's Ladder and Scientific Ontologies
This book presents our case in defense of a constructivist epistemological framework and the use of compatible statistical theory and inference tools. The basic metaphor of decision theory is the maximization of a gambler's expected…
Constructivist epistemology posits that all truths are knowable. One might ask to what extent constructivism is compatible with naturalized epistemology and knowledge obtained from inference-making using successful scientific theories. If…
We begin by surveying the historical positions in different attempts to understand the material world since the rise of modern science, with specific focus on the role of Cartesian primary qualities in explanatory conceptualisation.…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
This review presents recent and older results on elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness and cognition and tackles the question "What is consciousness?" conjointly from biological, neuroscience-cognitive, physical…
This paper explores the hard problem of consciousness from a different perspective. Instead of drawing distinctions between the physical and the mental, an exploration of a more foundational relationship is examined: the relationship…
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…
This article explores the metaphor of Science as provider of sharp images of our environment, using the epistemological framework of Objective Cognitive Constructivism. These sharp images are conveyed by precise scientific hypotheses that,…
We provide an overview of the results we have attained in the last decade on the identification of quantum structures in cognition and, more specifically, in the formalization and representation of natural concepts. We firstly discuss the…
The article has as its main objective the identification of fundamental epistemological obstacles in the study of information related to unnecessary methodological assumptions and the demystification of popular beliefs in the fundamental…
Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…
The emergence of large language models offers new possibilities for structured exploration of scientific knowledge. Rather than viewing scientific discovery as isolated ideas or content, we propose a structured approach that emphasizes the…
This article addresses an open problem in the area of cognitive systems and architectures: namely the problem of handling (in terms of processing and reasoning capabilities) complex knowledge structures that can be at least plausibly…
This thesis contributes to ongoing research related to the categorical compositional model for natural language of Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark in three ways: Firstly, I propose a concrete instantiation of the abstract framework based on…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
Cognition is a core part of and a common topic among philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, AI, and cognitive science. Through a mechanistic lens, I propose a framework of defining, modeling, and analyzing cognition mechanisms.…
Semantic data and knowledge infrastructures must reconcile two fundamentally different forms of representation: natural language, in which most knowledge is created and communicated, and formal semantic models, which enable…
Belief systems are often treated as globally consistent sets of propositions or as scalar-valued probability distributions. Such representations tend to obscure the internal structure of belief, conflate external credibility with internal…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…