- Department of Philosophy
The Ohio State University
350 University Hall
230 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1365
USA - 614-292-0352
Richard Samuels
Ohio State University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Ohio State University, Center for Cognitive Science, Faculty Memberadd
- I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1998 and held appointments at King's College London and the University... moreI received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1998 and held appointments at King's College London and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the OSU Philosophy Department in 2007. My research focuses primarily on topics in the philosophy of psychology and foundations of cognitive science.edit
Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and... more
Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.
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There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well... more
There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fundamental’ than the others. This paper addresses two related issues. First, we review some of these non-egalitarian arguments, lay out a laundry list of different, legitimate, notions of relative priority, and suggest that these arguments plausibly employ different such notions. Secondly, we argue that given a metaphysical-cum-epistemological gloss suggested by Frege's foundationalist epistemology, the ordinals are plausibly more basic than the cardinals. This is just one orientation to relative priority one could take, however. Ultimately, we subscribe to an egalitarian attitude towards these formal characterizations: they are, in some sense, equally ‘legitimate’.
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This paper explores the implications of Bayesian research in cognitive science for debates over the extent of human rationality. Work in the heuristics and biases tradition has led many philosophers to pessimistic conclusions about human... more
This paper explores the implications of Bayesian research in cognitive science for debates over the extent of human rationality. Work in the heuristics and biases tradition has led many philosophers to pessimistic conclusions about human rationality.
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This chapter examines the scope and limits of the tractability argument. It argues for two claims. First, that when explored with appropriate care and attention, it becomes clear that the argument provides no good reason to prefer massive... more
This chapter examines the scope and limits of the tractability argument. It argues for two claims. First, that when explored with appropriate care and attention, it becomes clear that the argument provides no good reason to prefer massive modularity to the more traditional rationalist alternative. Second, while it is denied that tractability considerations support massive modularity per se, this does not mean that they show nothing whatsoever. Careful analysis of tractability considerations suggests a range of characteristics that any plausible version of psychological rationalism is likely to possess. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 1 outlines and clarifies the general form of the tractability argument. Section 2 explains how massive modularity is supposed to resolve intractability worries. Sections 3 to 7 highlight the deficiencies of the main extant arguments for claiming that nonmodular mechanisms are intractable. Section 8 concludes by sketching some of the general characteristics that a plausible rationalist alternative to massive modularity — one capable of subserving tractable cognitive processes — is likely to possess.
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We intend to look at whether folk understanding of mathematical claims more closely approximate folk understanding of factual claims, fictional claims, metaphorical claims, or something else.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Rationality
This book addresses three areas of current and varied interest: common sense, reasoning, and rationality. While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this book offers... more
This book addresses three areas of current and varied interest: common sense, reasoning, and rationality. While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this book offers novel, even paradoxical, views of the relationship. The book considers what constitutes human rationality, behavior, and intelligence, while covering diverse areas of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science.
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2 Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture Richard Samuels In recent years evolutionary psychologists have defended a massively modular conception of cognitive architecture which views the mind as... more
2 Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture Richard Samuels In recent years evolutionary psychologists have defended a massively modular conception of cognitive architecture which views the mind as composed largely (or perhaps even ...
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This chapter considers the question of whether there is some general, distinctive, and plausible dual-process thesis about cognition. It argues that there is such an account, called the type version of dual-process theory. The first... more
This chapter considers the question of whether there is some general, distinctive, and plausible dual-process thesis about cognition. It argues that there is such an account, called the type version of dual-process theory. The first section identifies a substantive and interesting class of hypotheses worthy of the ‘dual-process’ label and contrasts them with some other, rather more banal claims. The second section distinguishes between two quite different versions of the hypothesis: one on which dual-process theory is construed as a thesis about cognitive tokens, the other on which it is a thesis about cognitive types. The third section sketches the reasons for rejecting the cognitive tokens version of dual-process theory. The fourth section highlights the virtues of the cognitive types version. The last section concludes that given a clear understanding of the cognitive types proposal, one can deflect the main general objections to dual-process theorizing.
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This chapter examines the core explanatory strategies of cognitive science and their application to the study of psychopathology. In addition to providing a taxonomy of different strategies, the chapter illustrates their application, with... more
This chapter examines the core explanatory strategies of cognitive science and their application to the study of psychopathology. In addition to providing a taxonomy of different strategies, the chapter illustrates their application, with special attention to autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder. It concludes by considering two challenges to the prospects of a developed cognitive science of psychopathology.
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Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to... more
Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appears to be incompatible with various familiar ways in which cognitions about one's own emotions can come apart from episodes of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Research Interests: Genetics, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Epistemology, Cognition, and 15 moreCognitive Neuroscience, Medicine, Learning, Humans, Child, Character, Instinct, Genetic determinism, Social Environment, Newborn Infant, Adult, Confusion, Appeal, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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ABSTRACT Do accounts of scientific theory formation and revision have implications for theories of everyday cognition? We maintain that failing to distinguish between importantly different types of theories of scientific inference has led... more
ABSTRACT Do accounts of scientific theory formation and revision have implications for theories of everyday cognition? We maintain that failing to distinguish between importantly different types of theories of scientific inference has led to fundamental misunderstandings of the relationship between science and everyday cognition. In this article, we focus on one influential manifestation of this phenomenon which is found in Fodor's well-known critique of theories of cognitive architecture. We argue that in developing his critique, Fodor confounds a variety of distinct claims about the holistic nature of scientific inference. Having done so, we outline more promising relations that hold between theories of scientific inference and ordinary cognition.
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The objective of the article is to discuss the evolution, hypothesis, and some the more prominent arguments for massive modularity (MM). MM is the hypothesis that the human mind is largely or entirely composed from a great many modules.... more
The objective of the article is to discuss the evolution, hypothesis, and some the more prominent arguments for massive modularity (MM). MM is the hypothesis that the human mind is largely or entirely composed from a great many modules. Modules are functionally characterizable cognitive mechanisms that tend to possess several features, which include domain-specificity, informationally encapsulation, innateness, inaccessibility, shallow outputs, and mandatory operation. The final thesis that comprises MM mentions that modules are found not merely at the periphery of the mind but also in the central regions responsible for such higher cognitive capacities as reasoning and decision-making. The central cognition depends on a great many functional modules that are not themselves composable into larger more inclusive systems. One of the families of arguments for MM focuses on a range of problems that are familiar from the history of cognitive science such as problems that concern the computational tractability of cognitive processes. The arguments may vary considerably in detail but they share a common format. First, they proceed from the assumption that cognitive processes are classical computational ones. Second, given the assumption that cognitive processes are computational ones, intractability arguments seek to undermine non-modular accounts of cognition by establishing the intractability thesis.
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Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This... more
Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting.
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Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated... more
Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated with the Heuristics and Biases tradition, on which much of our reasoning and decision making is normatively problematic because it relies on heuristics and biases rather than rational principles. In this article we describe briefly some of the evidence that has been invoked in support of this contention and consider some of the more prominent critical responses, especially from evolutionary psychology and dual-process theorists.
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Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated... more
Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated with the Heuristics and Biases tradition, on which much of our reasoning and decision making is normatively problematic because it relies on heuristics and biases rather than rational principles. In this article we describe briefly some of the evidence that has been invoked in support of this contention and consider some of the more prominent critical responses, especially from evolutionary psychology and dual-process theorists.
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Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common... more
Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the notations acceptable for computation, the usual idealizations involved in theories of computability, flowing from Alan Turing’s monumental work, and de re propositional attitudes toward numbers and other mathematical objects.
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Among the most pervasive and fundamental assumptions in cognitive science is that the human mind (or mind-brain) is a mechanism of some sort: a physical device com-posed of functionally specifiable subsystems. On this view, functional... more
Among the most pervasive and fundamental assumptions in cognitive science is that the human mind (or mind-brain) is a mechanism of some sort: a physical device com-posed of functionally specifiable subsystems. On this view, functional decomposition – the analysis of the overall system into functionally specifiable parts – becomes a