Cognitive Science Quotes

• Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

  E. O. Wilson

  Spiritual, Nature, Keys

  "The Origins of Creativity review - stick to the ants, professor" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2017.

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• Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

  Garry Kasparov

  Art, Science, Unique

  Garry Kasparov (2010). “How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

  Steven Pinker

  Believe, Psychology, Magic

  "Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2008.

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• Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.

  Louis Menand

  Doe, Lines, Trends

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.

  Paola Antonelli

  Badass, Attitude, Technology

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• One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change-for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.

  George Lakoff

  Simple, People, Brain

  George Lakoff (2008). “The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics”, p.45, Penguin

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• The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

  Francisco Varela

  Long, Phases, Cybernetics

  Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela (1992). “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience”, p.38, MIT Press

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• Epistemology now flourishes with various complementary approaches. This includes formal epistemology, experimental philosophy, cognitive science and psychology, including relevant brain science, and other philosophical subfields, such as metaphysics, action theory, language, and mind. It is not as though all questions of armchair, traditional epistemology are already settled conclusively, with unanimity or even consensus. We still need to reason our way together to a better view of those issues.

  Ernest Sosa

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have quite a bit of sympathy for the idea that psychology and cognitive science have much to offer philosophy, and that the reverse is true as well.

  L.A. Paul

  Philosophy, Ideas, Psychology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines tech, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something.

  Paola Antonelli

  Attitude, Design, Needs

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• Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.

  Daniel Levitin

  Thinking, Decisions We Make, Taught Us

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• Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.

  Paul Bloom

  Powerful, Taught Us, Pay

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• I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

  David Chalmers

  Philosophy, Thinking, Years

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• There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, White, People

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• Regarding social order, [Francis] Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century.

  Douglass North

  Fashion, Writing, Order

  "Orders of the Day" by Douglass North, reason.com. November 1999.

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• Work on causal theories of knowledge - early work by Armstrong, and Dretske, and Goldman - seemed far more satisfying. As I started to see the ways in which work in the cognitive sciences could inform our understanding of central epistemological issues, my whole idea of what the philosophical enterprise is all about began to change. Quine certainly played a role here, as did Putnam's (pre-1975) work in philosophy of science, and the exciting developments that went on in that time in philosophy of mind.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Ideas

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I do think that an understanding of contemporary work in the cognitive sciences has a profound effect on how one views the workings of the mind. It doesn't work the way we pretheoretically think it does. Such an understanding, of course, should have a large effect on one's views in philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Psychology, Disrespect, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think, in fact, that the connections between philosophy and cognitive science haven't gone far enough, metaphysicians should be working closely with cognitive scientists when they try to understand the sources of our experience of parts of the world such as its causal and temporal parts.

  L.A. Paul

  Philosophy, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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