Oh, come on! Even psychology and sociology try to draw inferences from all their experiments! What sort of experiments do cognitive scientists perform? If there are no experiments then CS is just balloon-juice and no better than philosophy.

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

There is a large bibliography in "Philosophy in the Flesh"

Metaphors

Throughout our life we constantly make judgments about such abstract matters as difference, importance, difficulty, and morality, and we have subjective experiences such as affection, desire, love, intimacy and achievement. Cognitive science claims that the manner in which we conceptualize and reason about these matters are determined, to one extinct or another, by sensorimotor domains of experience. CS claims that, in many cases, early experiences of normal mundane manipulations of objects become the prototypes from which these later concrete and abstract judgments are made.

“When we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads” we are using a sensorimotor experience as the metaphor for the subjective experience. The metaphor ‘understand is grasp’ results from our conflating a sensorimotor happening with a later subjective experience.

Metaphor is a standard means we have of understanding an unknown by association with a known. When we analyze the metaphor ‘bad is stinky’ we will find: we are making a subjective judgment wherein the olfactory sensation becomes the source of the judgment. ‘This movie stinks’ is a subjective judgment and it is made in this manner because a sensorimotor experience is the structure for making this judgment.

Why is the premise “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points” self-evident. It is because this is one of the first things an infant learns and it is verified and reinforced constantly throughout life by our sensorimotor experiences. The metaphor ‘more is up’ is not so pervasive in our experience but its rationale is similar.

If we recognize metaphor as a means to associate something new with something old, something known with something unknown, we can begin to understand what CS is proposing in this revolutionary theory. CS is presenting a theory based upon empirical evidence gathered by the combined effort of linguists, philosophers, and neural physicists that metaphor is a very necessary element of our ability to reason as we do.

We normally think of metaphor as a tool of language whereby one can enlighten another by making an association of an unknown with a known. CS is making a much more radical use of metaphor.

CS is claiming that the neural structure of sensorimotor experience is mapped onto the mental space for another experience that is not sensorimotor but subjective and that this neural mapping, which is unconscious and automatic, serves as part of the “DNA” of the subjective experience. The sensorimotor experience serves the role of an axiom for the subjective experience.

Can we have an example of CS getting better results than philosophy, that is a clear-cut direct example before we go to the next salad bar?

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Can you give, umm, I don't know, perhaps, an example of CS making a much more radical use of metaphor? I see a lot of claims and words, but I can't imagine something concrete that you mean by this.

EDIT: plus what Nicolas said!

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

CS is about Understanding

CS is not focused upon examples of knowing ‘how to’ but is focused upon understanding the relationship between what we know and how we know it. We will not find ready examples of knowing in the study of CS but if we try we can begin to grasp how we know and how this knowing becomes understanding, and how this understanding is grounded by our biological nature.

CS is not about knowing, CS is about understanding. “Where Mathematics Comes From” is one book in a series of books and research documents relating to cognition and the power of understanding.

We all learned how to ‘do math’ in our schooling. How to do math is about knowing; CS is about how to understand the nature of how it is possible for humans to create a domain of knowledge such as math.

I would give more detail except for the fact that I have not studied the matter enough to go beyond what I have already said.

So you claim CS is better than philosophy because CS describes how the mind functions, especially in relationship with the body.

Where is the functional principle of the mind of importance in philosophy? If the mind would work on steam engines and we would know exaclty when it evolved from say apes, what would it change to philosophy? Mind (pardon the pun) that the resulting mind (I mean our reasoning and things like that) is identical to the one we have know but of which we don't know the exact evolution and working principles. Philosophy looks at your software and no so much at the computer.

Or am I wrong here?

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Again, as this is no answer, my previous post:
Can you give, umm, I don't know, perhaps, an example of CS making a much more radical use of metaphor? I see a lot of claims and words, but I can't imagine something concrete that you mean by this.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

More is Up

Many years ago, before ‘self-service’, it was common to pull into a gas station and when the attendant came to the car the motorist would say “Fillerup”.

“More is up” is a common metaphor. I think of it every time I pour milk into a measuring cup when baking cornbread. The subjective judgment is quantity, the sensorimotor domain is vertical orientation, and the primary experience is the rise and fall of vertical levels as fluid is added or subtracted and objects are piled on top of or removed from a collection.

We can see (know is see) by this mechanism that we equate vertical motion in the spatial domain with quantity; we use the vertical domain to reason about quantity. We have a vast experience in vertical space domain reasoning and thus we derive this great experience to help us in reasoning about quantity; no doubt a very useful thing when first learning arithmetic. Teachers of mathematics, I suspect, depend upon this storehouse of knowledge to make abstract mathematical reasoning for children more comprehensible.

In a metaphor the source domain, ‘up’, is mapped onto the target domain ‘more’. The neural structure of the sensorimotor domain, the primary metaphor, is mapped onto the subjective domain ‘more’. Reasoning about the vertical motion in the spatial domain is mapped onto reasoning about the quantity domain. This is a one-way movement; reasoning about quantity is not mapped onto spatial domain reasoning. The direction of inference indicates which the source is and which the target domain is.

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language. It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.

Well, for a "soft science" it doesn't get much mushier than this. More touchy-feely New Age drivel.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

That isn't a metaphor - it's just a conclusion that arises from the usually correct assumption that the other dimensions of the liquid container are constrained.

mid

That might be a good definition of metaphor! I think you are getting the idea of CS already! Carry that thought forward and you begin to see what CS is all about. CS is not complex but it is difficult because the concepts are so strange to us.

So you can't give an example, and you can't see the difference between a metaphor and a generalisation?
But let's just, for the sake of argument, assume that "more is up" is a metaphor. So what? What have I learned now? What new insight have I reached? What can I do with this? Which mistake can be corrected by knowing this?

All this in addition to the standing questions about previous posts of yours, of course, as you still haven't given an answer.

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And I see no link with philosophy

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Waiting for answers that make sense? How about a little Samuel Beckett to pass the time!

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I don't know...

Third base!!


With apologies to A and C.

I did a quick google search on Cognitive Science and came up with this link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I get the impression that the description of CS in this thread is overly narrow. From the link,

"The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

This thread seems to concern what is more like a school of thought within CS (much in the same way there are different schools of thought in metaphysics or epistemology). The Stanford link explicitly talks about the the role of philosophy in CS. The hypothesis above isn't contrary to philosophy. I suspect even a Cartesian dualist could accept it.

Ok, I'll clear this up:

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Thanks, Roving Philosopher. And thanks to the other for some light entertainment!
For the sake of clarity (one thing we don't have in this thread), when I refer here to CS, I mean CS as explained by coberst.

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