Approaches to the Interdisciplinary Integration of Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Abstract

Within the context of broadly construed embodied cognitive theory, an examination of several focal issues across the three most representative and currently active approaches in cognitive science—cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence—can reveal the theoretical dilemmas these approaches confront and their potential resolutions. For the representation problem in cognitive psychology, beyond propositional representation, body-based perceptual representations can be acknowledged as primary representations, offering a causal account of cognition and action at the foundational level; for neuroscience, the viable approach to solving the hard problem of consciousness is a synthetic study combining first-person and third-person perspectives; and for artificial intelligence, advocating a method that integrates top-down and bottom-up methods to construct a cognitive architecture of mind suggests that reliable moral agent—both upholding human values and considering machine interests—should be human-machine integrated extended cognitive systems. These examinations reveal that, under certain conditions, philosophy and cutting-edge cognitive science not only present a mutual challenge but also exert a reciprocal effect in advancing both scientific and philosophical development, offering significant insights for achieving their interdisciplinary integration.

Keywords

philosophy / cognitive science / psychology / neuroscience / artificial intelligence

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Higher Education Press