About the Project

The objective of the project “Cognitive Science in Search of Unity” is to develop an account of unification and integration in cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research field, in which methods, tools, and concepts from other disciplines are used. One can ask a fundamental question whether anything unifies the field; or whether it is not just a hotchpotch of heterogeneous research. This kind of doubt can be articulated with regard to any interdisciplinary research field. However, the existence of interdisciplinary collaboration means that there are real connections between disciplines and that their problems are related. But to really dispel the doubt against interdisciplinary research, one needs to answer the question what makes such conglomerates as cognitive science actually unified.

The hypothesis is that despite diversity – or rather thanks to diversity – interdisciplinary research fields can be unified, even if there is some proclivity towards disintegration or some disciplines absorb others. The unity in question does rely on using one fundamental notion (such as “cognition” or “mental representation”) or one methodology but on assuming a common set of hypotheses about cognitive mechanisms, described on multiple levels of organization by multiple disciplines. The primary tool of unification is developing multi-level models of mental mechanisms. The full description of the research project is available in the PDF format here: Integration and unification.

Publications of the project

• Bielecka, K., & Marcinów, M.. (2017). Mental Misrepresentation in Non-Human Psychopathology. Biosemiotics (Online First). doi:10.1007/s12304-017-9299-2.
• Gładziejewski, P., & Miłkowski, M. (2017). Structural representations: causally relevant and different from detectors. Biology & Philosophy, 32, 337–355. doi:10.1007/s10539-017-9562-6
• Matyja, J. R. (2016). Embodied Music Cognition: Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01891
• Matyja, J. R., & Dolega, K. (2015). Commentary: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00669
• Miłkowski, M. (2016a). Integrating cognitive (neuro)science using mechanisms. Avant: Journal of Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, VI(2), 45–67.
• Miłkowski, M. (2016b). Sztuczna inteligencja. In J. Hołówka & B. Dziobkowski (Eds.), Panorama współczesnej filozofii (pp. 309–328). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
• Miłkowski, M. (2016c). Unification Strategies in Cognitive Science. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 48(1), 13–33. doi:10.1515/slgr-2016-0053
• Miłkowski, M. (2016d, January). Kognitywistyka i modele umysłu. dwutygodnik.com. Warszawa. http://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/6322-kognitywistyka-i-modele-umyslu.html. Accessed 26 February 2017
• Miłkowski, M. (2017a). Situatedness and Embodiment of Computational Systems. Entropy, 19(4), 162. doi:10.3390/e19040162
• Miłkowski, M. (2017b). Why think that the brain is not a computer? APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, 16(2), 22–28.
• Miłkowski, M. (2017c). Is Empiricism Empirically False? Lessons from Early Nervous Systems. Biosemiotics, June 27, 2017, 1–17. doi:10.1007/s12304-017-9294-7.
• Miłkowski, M. (2017d) Objections to Computationalism. A Survey. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Computational Foundations of Cognition, 2723–28. London: Cognitive Science Society, 2017. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2017/papers/0515/index.html.
• Miłkowski, M. (2017e). Mechanisms and the Mental. In The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy, edited by Stuart S Glennan and Phyllis Illari, 74–88. New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2017.
• Wołoszyn, K., & Hohol, M. (2017). Commentary: The poverty of embodied cognition. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00845

The project has been funded by National Science Center under the decision DEC-2014/14/E/HS1/00803 in May 2015 for 1548000.00 PLN. The duration of the project is 5 years. The Principal Investigator is Marcin Miłkowski.