Paul R. Thagard
   HOME
*





Paul R. Thagard
Paul Richard Thagard (; born 1950) is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition. In the philosophy of science, Thagard is cited for his work on the use of computational models in explaining conceptual revolutions;Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=paul%20thagard&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws his most distinctive contribution to the field is the concept of explanatory coherence, which he has applied to historical cases.Explanatory Coherence. http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/1989.explanatory.pdfEXPLANATORY COHERENCE AND BELIEF REVISION IN NAIVE PHYSICS/ref> He is heavily influenced by pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, C. S. Peirce, and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Western Philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" grc, φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία '' sophía'', "wisdom"). History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Bas Van Fraassen
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen (; born 1941) is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. Biography and career Van Fraassen was born in the German-occupied Netherlands on 5 April 1941. His father, a steam fitter, was forced by the Nazis to work in a factory in Hamburg. After the war, the family reunited and, in 1956, emigrated to Edmonton, in western Canada. Van Fraassen earned his B.A. (1963) from the University of Alberta and his M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1966, under the direction of Adolf Grünbaum) from the University of Pittsburgh. He previously taught at Yale University, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto and, from 1982 to 2008, at Princeton University, where he is now emeritus. Since 2008, van Fraassen has taught at San ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cognitive
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, musicology, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied cognition) ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Royal Society Of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguished Canadian scholars, humanists, scientists and artists. The primary objective of the RSC is to promote learning and research in the arts, the humanities and the sciences. The RSC is Canada's National Academy and exists to promote Canadian research and scholarly accomplishment in both official languages, to recognize academic and artistic excellence, and to advise governments, non-governmental organizations and Canadians on matters of public interest. History In the late 1870s, the Governor General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne, determined that Canada required a cultural institution to promote national scientific research and development. Since that time, succeeding Governor Generals have remained involved w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Killam Prize
The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize was established according to the will of Dorothy J. Killam to honour the memory of her husband Izaak Walton Killam. Five Killam Prizes, each having a value of $100,000, are annually awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts to eminent Canadian researchers who distinguish themselves in the fields of social, human, natural, or health sciences. In August 2021, the Canada Council announced it would transition the administration of the Killam program to the National Research Council Canada (NRC) by March 2022. The restructured Killam Program was launched under the administration of the NRC in April 2022. It is now called the National Killam Program and consists of the Killam Prizes and the Dorothy Killam Fellowships. Recipients See also * List of medicine awards * List of social sciences awards This list of social sciences awards is an index to articles about notable awards given for contributions to social sciences in general. It exclu ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Canada Council
The Canada Council for the Arts (french: Conseil des arts du Canada), commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It acts as the federal government's principal instrument for funding public arts, as well as for fostering and promoting the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. The Canada Council fulfills its mandate primarily through providing grants and services to professional Canadian artists and arts organizations in dance, interdisciplinary art, media arts, music, opera, theatre, writing, publishing, and the visual arts. In addition, the Canada Council administers the Art Bank, which operates art rental programs and an exhibitions and outreach program. The Canada Council Art Bank holds the largest collection of contemporary Canadian art in the world. The Canada Council is also responsible for the secretariat for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and the Public L ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Cognitive Science Society
The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society promotes scientific interchange among researchers in disciplines comprising the field of cognitive science, including artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and education. The Society is a member of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences. Meetings The group sponsors the annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, a meeting which hosts the latest theories and data from cognitive science researchers, for which it also publishes proceedings. The first meeting of the conference was held in 1979 at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California. The society was incorporated in 1979 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusett ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today. Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods prominent in Europe. Central figures in this historical development of analytic philosophy are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history include the logical positivists (particularly Rudolf Carnap), W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics. Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny and others brought analytic approach to Thomism. Analytic philosophy is characterized by an empha ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Connectionist
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mind, mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial intelligence to build more intelligent machines. Connectionism presents a cognitive theory based on simultaneously occurring, distributed signal activity via connections that can be represented numerically, where learning occurs by modifying connection strengths based on experience. Some advantages of the connectionist approach include its applicability to a broad array of functions, structural approximation to biological neurons, low requirements for innate structure, and capacity for graceful degradation. Some disadvantages include the difficulty in deciphering how ANNs process information, or account for the compositionality of mental representations, and a resultant difficulty explaining phenomena at a higher level. The success of de ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Philosophy Of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.Siegel, S.: ''The Contents of Visual Experience''. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.Macpherson, F. & Haddock, A., editors, ''Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental property, mental properties, consciousness and neural correlates of consciousness, its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body. Dualism (philosophy of mind), Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced vie ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Inference To The Best Explanation
Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,For example: abductive inference, or retroduction) is a form of logical inference formulated and advanced by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce beginning in the last third of the 19th century. It starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it. Abductive conclusions are thus qualified as having a remnant of uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as "best available" or "most likely". One can understand abductive reasoning as inference to the best explanation, although not all usages of the terms ''abduction'' and ''inference to the best explanation'' are exactly equivalent. In the 1990s, as computing power grew, the fields of law, computer science, and artificial intelligence researchFor examples, seeAbductive Inferenc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Explanatory Coherence
Paul Richard Thagard (; born 1950) is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition. In the philosophy of science, Thagard is cited for his work on the use of computational models in explaining conceptual revolutions;Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=paul%20thagard&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws his most distinctive contribution to the field is the concept of explanatory coherence, which he has applied to historical cases.Explanatory Coherence. http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/1989.explanatory.pdfEXPLANATORY COHERENCE AND BELIEF REVISION IN NAIVE PHYSICS/ref> He is heavily influenced by pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, C. S. Peirce, and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]