Cognitive Ontology

The search for the 'furniture of the mind' has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali Khalidi present a naturalistic account of 'real kinds' to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories.

• Closely examines case studies of theoretical constructs in the cognitive sciences, such as concepts, episodic memory, innateness, and cognitive bias
• Proposes a new understanding of the nature of cognitive categories, and a novel account of the ways in which cognitive constructs relate to neural constructs
• Situates our knowledge of the cognitive domain in a broader non-reductionist metaphysical picture, including a causal account of natural (or real) kinds