Prinz, Jesse. "Culture and Cognitive Science." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 2, 2011.

Within Western analytic philosophy, culture has not been a major topic of discussion. It sometimes appears as a topic in the philosophy of social science, and in continental philosophy, there is a long tradition of “Philosophical Anthropology,” which deals with culture to some degree. Within core areas of analytic philosophy, culture has most frequently appeared in discussions of moral relativism, radical translation, and discussions of perceptual plasticity, though little effort has been made to seriously investigate the impact of culture on these domains. Cognitive science has also neglected culture, but in recent years, that has started to change. There has been a sizable intensification of efforts to empirically test the impact of culture on mental processes. This entry surveys ways in which the emerging cognitive science of culture has been informing philosophical debates.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/culture-cogsci/

Cfp: Meeting (in Conjunction with 2011 Annual Meeting of Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), International Association for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (IAPCS), Philadelphia, October 19, 2011.

We invite abstracts for papers that explore issues at the intersection of phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. This includes, but is not limited to, developing approaches to naturalized phenomenology, neurophenomenology, and the treatment of various issues (e.g., embodied cognition, perception, intersubjectivity and social cognition, etc.) that foster communication between the continental phenomenological tradition, analytic philosophy of mind, and empirical cognitive science. Phenomenology is here understood as a philosophical discipline and method in the tradition started by Edmund Husserl, and including the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and numerous others.

Abstracts (maximum 500 words) should be sent as email attachments no later than May 16 to:
joelk@hum.ku.dk.

Gopnik, Alison. "How Weird is Consciousness?" SLATE November 29, 2010.

Consciousness used to be the crazy aunt in psychology's attic. Behaviorists and cognitive scientists alike practiced denial, but the squeaking floorboards troubled our dreams of a truly scientific discipline. Now, the old lady has been given pride of place in the parlor, with all the respectable scientific furnishing of societies and journals. But let's face it—she's still weird.

In some ways, the scientific study of consciousness has been a great success. We know more than ever about the relationship between specific types of conscious experiences and specific mind and brain states. Discouragingly, though, we are still no closer to solving the Problem of Big-C Consciousness. How is consciousness possible at all? How could the few pounds of gray goo in my skull give rise to my experience of the particular blue tint of the sky? Scientists and philosophers have suggested everything from quantum effects to information integration to brain-wave patterns. Some deny that consciousness exists at all; others argue that consciousness couldn't possibly be the result of just the brain. The scientific organizers of one of the principal consciousness conferences, in fact, deliberately let in woo-woo stuff about altered states and past lives on the principle that we have no idea where the answer might come from.

This may be less dispiriting when you realize we've been here before. The philosopher Patricia Churchland has pointed out that the problem of "Life" in the 19th century was much like the problem of "Consciousness" in the 21st. How could a few molecules ever give rise to breathing, moving, living creatures? The answer turned out to be that it was the wrong question. We now understand a great deal about the many different ways in which complex organisms with a multitude of different properties arise from much simpler chemistry. The Problem of Big-L Life has simply faded away. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2275645/pagenum/all/. . . .

Lehrer, Jonah. "Picturing Our Thoughts." BOSTON GLOBE August 17, 2008.

In May 1991, Dr. Kenneth Kwong, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, became one of the first scientists to enjoy a new vision of the human brain. The experiment was simple: Kwong would show a subject some visual stimuli - such as a sequence of flashing red lights - and then monitor the brain to see how it reacted. To Kwong's surprise, even a brief light show triggered a telltale pattern of activity in the visual cortex, as the brain processed the sensory information. "It took a few months before I believed what I was seeing," Kwong remembers. "I was actually watching the brain at work." This ability to peer inside the mind was made possible by a new technology known as fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. The technology quickly became one of the most popular tools of neuroscience. Last year, an average of eight peer-reviewed papers using fMRI were published per day, and more than 19,000 fMRI papers have been published in the last 15 years. The past few months have brought articles on everything from the neural substrate of sarcasm to the patterns of brain activation triggered by pornography. The technique is invading other fields as well, as psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and even economists increasingly rely on these powerful machines. The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves. For the first time in human history, the black box of the mind has been flung wide open, allowing researchers to search for the cortical source for every flickering thought. The expensive scanners can even decode the hidden urges of the unconscious, revealing those secret feelings that we hide from ourselves. The machine, in other words, knows more about you than you do: It's like a high-tech window into the soul. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/17/picturing_our_thoughts/.

Weisberg, Deena Skolnick: Two Essays on the Allure of Neuroscience.

• Weisberg, Deena Skolnick, et al. "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations" (http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/People/Lab_Members/Frank/aarticles/The%20Seductive%20Allure.pdf)
• Weisberg, Deena Skolnick. "Caveat Lector the Presentation of Neuroscience Information in the Popular Media." (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~deenasw/Assets/Weisberg%20SRMHP%202008.pdf)

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. "A Cognitive Revolution? Naturalism, Otherwise." THE IMMANENT FRAME June 23, 2008.

The past fifteen years or so have been a period of extraordinary activity in pursuit of what are called “cognitive” and/or “evolutionary” explanations of religion. These include, in addition to Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (the focus of my previous post), a number of other self-consciously innovative books with titles like How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. What unites these works and distinguishes them from the broader naturalistic tradition in religious studies is, first, the centrality for their approach of methods and theories drawn from evolutionary psychology and the rather sprawling field of “cognitive science” and, second, the more or less strenuous identification of their efforts with “science,” itself rather monolithically and sometimes triumphalistically conceived. In these two respects, these and related works constitute what could be called the New Naturalism in religious studies. The New Naturalist program requires, in my view, careful review and discriminating assessment. The intellectual interest of the general program and the promise of its cognitive-evolutionary approaches for affording better understandings of important features of human behavior and culture should, I think, be recognized. But I also think that critical attention should be given to the intellectual confinements represented by some of the program’s characteristic theoretical assumptions and methodological commitments, especially when viewed in relation to existing methods in the naturalistic study of religion and alternative theories of human behavior, culture, and cognition. Indeed, in spite of the disdain New Naturalists commonly exhibit for prior achievements and alternative methods (as illustrated by Boyer’s wholesale brush-offs), their characteristic cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion are likely to become more substantial, persuasive, and illuminating when joined to studies by researchers and scholars working with other naturalistic approaches to religion, both social-scientific and humanistic. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/23/naturalism-otherwise/.