John Vervaeke - What is Cognitive Science?

Neuroscience, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are some of the most directly relevant fields to choose from; however, trying to summarize their findings would result in an account similar to the descriptions the blind men gave of the elephant: each different, and each unrelated to the other

... See more

Cognition, in this view, is a dynamical process that happens not only within and between brains, but across a variety of biological, behavioural and social levels of organisation.

To act in a dynamically changing world, we need some way of limiting the scope of our reasoning and perception, some way of zeroing in on what is relevant without having to consider all that isn’t. This turns out to be a deep and difficult problem. The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has gone so far as to argue that this capacity for “relevance r... See more