Cognitive Philosophy

Investigating philosophical topics from the perspective of cognitive science

Cognitive philosophy strives to integrate models on different levels of analysis, from sciences such as cognitive neuroscience, cognitive ethology, and cognitive psychology, in order to apply their results to questions explored in, for example, metaphilosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind.

By analysing how agents interpret, represent, and conceptualize the world and themselves via their limited cognitive and neurological capacities, philosophical investigations can be seen to be constrained by cognitive limitations and evolutionarily directed interests and motivations.

Numerous central philosophical debates, such as those concerning, for example, intelligence, AGI, knowledge, reflection, and communication involve phenomena that are best investigated in relation to the minds and brains of cognitive agents.

Events

The writing-workshop will explore how Gibbs free energy, which relates to metabolism and thermodynamics, and variational free energy, which relates to information theory, may provide a way to shed light on issues concerning biases and motivation.

By acknowledging that beliefs have metabolic costs, and may be attractive if they confer energy savings but aversive if they entail costly model updates or emotional pain, it becomes clearer that minimising variational free energy in terms of optimal Bayesian inference may only happen if agents are sufficiently motivated, or in emotionally neutral contexts. Hence, if a belief really matters to a person, that belief may be protected from change by the powerful apparatus of the emotional system.

The writing-workshop will involve collaborations between researchers at Lund University, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain in the Institute of Philosophy at Humboldt University, the interdisciplinary DFG Excellence cluster Science of Intelligence at Technical University Berlin, and VU University Amsterdam.

What is intelligence and why is it needed? Current research in the cognitive and life sciences presents only fragmented views on this question. We examine the question focusing on the role of prediction. Moreover we will investigate issues tied to conspiracy theories,reasoning, and rationality.

Funding: Stiftelsen Erik och Gurli Hultengrens fond för filosofi vid Lunds Universitet

The workshop will involve a collaborations between researchers at Lund University, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Manchester, Charles University in Prague, and the University of Oslo.

Natural complex phenomena are explored by many different sciences using different perspectives, on different levels of analysis. But (how) can fruitful pluralistic triangulations enable a coherent picture of the world’s ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’?

Funding: Makarna Ingeniör Lars Henrik Fornanders fond

The two-day workshop will involve a collaborations between researchers at Lund University, the University of Tromsø (UiT), the Univeristy of Trento, and the University of Zurich (UZH).

How is philosophy being affected by advances in cognitive science, and what role should philosophy have in light of these advances? Could we develop frameworks that bring these fields together, or introduce new programme ideas which grapples with traditionally philosophical question in a cognitive scientific manner? This workshop is dedicated to discussing these metaphilosophical questions.

Funding: Stiftelsen Elisabeth Rausings minnesfond – forskning

The two-day workshop will strive to promote new writing collaborations between researchers at Lund University and the University of Zurich (UZH), as well as to inspire future cognitive philosophical events both in Lund and abroad. 

An overarching goal of the workshop is to provide the groundwork for cognitive and mind-centered explorations and explanations of natural phenomena, such as knowledge, perception, thought, and the mind itself, which predominantly have been discussed in philosophical contexts without the modern discoveries that have been made about how the brain operates and creates our experiences and concepts.

Funding: Makarna Ingeniör Lars Henrik Fornanders fond

Publications

2024

• Dentith, M., Duetz, J. & Tsapos, M. (2024). Investigating conspiracy theoires: Introduction to the special issue. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
  
  

• Dentith, M., & Tsapos, M. (2024). Why we should talk about generalism and particularism: A reply to Boudry and Napolitano. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 13(10), 47-60.
  
  

• Ekström, A. G., Madison, G., Olsson, E. J. & Tsapos, M. (2024). The search query filter bubble: Effect of user ideology on political leaning of search results through query selection. Information Communication and Society. 27(5), 878-894.
  
  

• Stedtler, S., Fantasia, V., Tjøstheim, T. A., Johansson, B., Brinck, I., & Balkenius, C. (2024). Is there really an effect of time delays on perceived fluency and social attributes between humans and social robots?: A pilot study. In Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 1013-1017). Boulder: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  
  

• Stephens, A. (2024). Cognitive epistemology: Knowledge as a natural phenomenon. Lund: Lund University, Media-Tryck. [Doctoral Thesis (compilation), Department of Philosophy].
  
  

• Tsapos, M. (2024). Should we worry about conspiracy theorists rejecting experts? Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
  
  

• Tsapos, M. (2024). Betting on conspiracy: A decision theoretic account of the rationality of conspiracy theory belief. Erkenntnis.
  
  
  

2023

• Balkenius, C., Johansson, B., & Tjøstheim, T. A. (2023). Elements of cognition for general intelligence. In P. Hammer, M. Alirezaie and C. Strannegård (Eds.), Artificial general intelligence: 16th international conference (Vol. 13921. pp. 11-20). AGI 2023, Stockholm, Sweden, June 16–19, 2023, Proceedings.  Cham: Springer.
  
  
• Olsson, E. J., Tjøstheim, T. A., Stephens, A., Schwaninger, A., & Roszko, M. (2023). The cognitive basis of the conditional probability solution to the value problem for reliabilism. Acta Analytica,38,417-438.
  
  

• Poth, N. (2023). Probabilistic learning and psychological similarity. Entropy, 25(10), 1407.
  
  

• Poth, N. (2023). Same but different: Providing a probabilistic foundation for the feature-matching approach to similarity and categorization. Erkenntnis. 
  
  

• Poth, N., & Dolega, K. (2023). Bayesian belief protection: A study of belief in conspiracy theories. Philosophical Psychology, 36(6), 1182-1207. 
  
  

• Tsapos, M. (2023). Who is a conspiracy theorist?. Social Epistemology, 37(4) 454-463.

2022

• Olsson, E. J. (2022). Explicationist epistemology and the explanatory role of knowledge. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 53, 41-60.
  
  
• Poth, N. (2022). Refining the Bayesian approach to unifying generalisation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 14, 877-907.
  
  
• Poth, N. (2022). Schema-centred unity and mechanistic pluralism of the predictive mind. Minds and Machines, 32, 433-459.
  
  

• Tjøstheim, T. A. (2022). Contours of cognition(1 ed.). [Doctoral Thesis (compilation), Department of Philosophy]. Lund University.
  

2021

• Stephens, A., Tjøstheim, T. A., Roszko, M., & Olsson, E. J. (2021). A dynamical perspective on the generality problem. Acta Analytica, 36(3), 409-422. 
  
  

• Tjøstheim, T. A., & Stephens, A. (2021). Intelligence as accurate prediction. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13, 475–499.

2020

• Felix, C. V. & Stephens, A. (2020). A naturalistic perspective on knowledge how: Grasping truths in a practical way. Philosophies, 5(1), 5. Reprinted in Philosophies Special Issue, M. J. Schroeder, & G. Dodig-Crnkovic (Eds.), Contemporary natural philosophy and philosophies—Part 2. Basel: MDPI.
  
  

• Pärnamets, P.,Tagesson, A., & Wallin, A.(2020). Inconsistencies in repeated refugee status decisions. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33(5), 569-578.
  
  

• Poth, N. & Brössel, P. (2020). Learning concepts: A learning-theoretic solution to the complex-first paradox. Philosophy of Science,87(1), 135-151. (Preprint)
  
  

• Stephens, A., & Felix, C. V. (2020). A cognitive perspective on knowledge how: Why intellectualism is neuro-psychologically implausible. Philosophies, 5(3), 21. Reprinted in Philosophies Special Issue, M. J. Schroeder, & G. Dodig-Crnkovic (Eds.), Contemporary natural philosophy and philosophies—Part 2. Basel: MDPI.
  
  
• Stephens, A. & Tjøstheim, T. A. (2020). The cognitive philosophy of reflection. Erkenntnis, 87, 2219-2242.
  
  
• Tjøstheim, T. A., Stephens, A., Anikin, A., & Schwaninger, A. (2020). The cognitive philosophy of communication. Philosophies, 5(4), 39. Included in Philosophies Special Issue, G. Dodig-Crnkovic, & M. J. Schroeder (Eds.), Contemporary natural philosophy and Philosophies—Part 3 Basel: MDPI.

2019

• Poth, N. (2019). Conceptual spaces, generalisation probabilities and perceptual categorisation. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual spaces: Elaborations and applications (Synthese library, Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 405, pp. 7-28).
  
  

• Stephens, A. (2019). Three levels of naturalistic knowledge. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual spaces: Elaborations and applications (Synthese library, Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 405, pp. 57-73). (Preprint)
  
  

• Tjøstheim, T. A. & Balkenius, C. (2019). Cumulative inhibition in neural networks Cognitive Processing. 20(1), 87-102.
  
  

• Tjøstheim, T. A., Roszko, M., & Stephens, A. (2019). From a cognitive philosophical point of view. EuroCogSci 2019, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany. (Paper, Poster)

2018

• Balkenius, C., Tjøstheim, T. A., Johansson, B., & Gärdenfors, P. (2018). From focused thought to reveries: A memory system for a conscious robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5(29), 1-13.

• Gärdenfors, P., & Stephens, A. (2018). Induction and knowledge-what. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 8(3), 471-491.

• Roszko, M., Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Pärnamets, P. (2018). The phenomenology of eye movement intentions and their disruption in goal-directed actions. In T. Rogers, T., M. Rau, J. Zhu, & C. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 973-978). Madison: Cognitive Science Society.

2017

• Olsson, E. J. (2017) Explicationist epistemology and epistemic pluralism. In A. Coliva, & N. Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (Eds.), Epistemic pluralism (pp. 23-46 ). Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. (LU Publications)

2016

• Bååth, R., Tjøstheim, T. A., & Lingonblad, M. (2016). The role of executive control in rhythmic timing at different tempi. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1954-1960.
  
  

• Kim, H.., Poth, N., Reuter, K., & Sytsma, J. (2016). Where is your pain?: A cross-cultural comparison of the concept of pain in Americans and South Koreans. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 9(1), 136-169.
  
  

• Olsson, E. J. (2016). A naturalistic approach to the generality problem. In B. P. McLaughlin, & H. Kornblith (Eds.), Goldman and his critics (pp. 178-196). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (LU Publications)
  
  

• Stephens, A. (2016). A pluralist account of knowledge as a natural kind. Philosophia, 44(3), 885-903. (Preprint)
  
  
  

About Us

The CogPhi Research Group consists of researchers at Lund University and Radboud University Nijmegen. We are dedicated to the study of philosophical topics from the perspective of cognitive science. An overarching goal is to provide a mind-centered explanation of any natural phenomenon, such as for example knowledge, intelligence, and the mind itself, as long as it can be lucidly conceptualized.

This is done by analysing how humans interpret and represent natural phenomena via the existing cognitive and neurological capacities that are available for us to understand the world and ourselves, which sheds light on the natural phenomena themselves as well as on our relation to the world.

By reviewing leading frameworks in cognitive science regarding their ability to explain concepts in philosophy, we strive to identify strengths, weaknesses, and underdeveloped areas in these frameworks. Moreover, we believe it fruitful to integrate models from different levels of analysis to further this goal.

We are thus interested in how sciences such as cognitive neuroscience, cognitive ethology, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence research, as well as the different frameworks that have been developed within these sciences, can be applied to questions explored in, for example, metaphilosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. 

Members

Erik J. Olsson, Full Professor and Chair, Theoretical Philosophy, Lund University, Sweden.

Nina Poth, Assistant Professor, AI, Philosophy of Mind and Language, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Maximilian Roszko, PhD student, Cognitive Science, Lund University, Sweden.

Arthur Schwaninger, AI Consultant and philosopher, Theoretical Philosophy, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Andreas Stephens, Researcher, Theoretical Philosophy, Lund University, Sweden.

Alexander Tagesson, PhD student, Cognitive Science, Lund University, Sweden.

Trond A. Tjøstheim, Researcher, Cognitive Science, Lund University, Sweden.

Melina Tsapos, PhD student, Theoretical Philosophy, Lund University, Sweden.

University Affiliations