The epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as epistemic tolerance and authoritarianism, play important roles in the discourse about rivaling theories. Epistemic tolerance stands for the mental attitude of an epistemic agent, e.g., a scientist, who is open to opposing views, while epistemic authoritarianism represents the tendency to uncritically accept views of authorities. Another relevant epistemic factor when it comes to the epistemic decisions of scientists is the skepticism towards the scientific method. However, the question is whether these epistemic attitudes are influenced by their sociopolitical counterparts, such as the researcher's degree of conservatism. To empirically investigate the interplay between epistemic and sociopolitical attitudes of scientists, we conducted a survey with researchers (N = 655) across different disciplines. We propose scales for measuring epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism, as well as a scale for detecting the participants' readiness to question the scientific method. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism on the one hand, and career stage and sociopolitical views on the other hand. Interestingly, our study found only small correlations between the participants' degree of conservatism and their epistemic attitudes. This suggests that political views, against common argumentation, actually do not play an important role in one's scientific decisions. Moreover, social scientists scored higher on the epistemic tolerance and lower on the epistemic authoritarianism scale than natural scientists. Finally, the results indicate that natural scientists question the scientific method less than social scientists.
Three decades ago, William Ramsey, Steven Stich & Joseph Garon put forward an argument in favor of the following conditional: if connectionist models that implement parallelly distributed processing represent faithfully human cognitive processing, eliminativism about propositional attitudes is true. The corollary of their argument (if it proves to be sound) is that there is no place for folk psychology in contemporary cognitive science. This understanding of connectionism as a hypothesis about cognitive architecture compatible with eliminativism is also endorsed by Paul Churchland, a radical opponent of folk psychology and a prominent supporter of eliminative materialism. I aim to examine whether current connectionist models based on long-short term memory (LSTM) neural networks can back up these arguments in favor of eliminativism. Nonetheless, I will rather put my faith in the eliminativism of the limited domain. This position amount to the following claim: even though that connectionist cognitive science has no need whatsoever for folk psychology qua theory, this does not entail illegitimacy of folk psychology per se in other scientific domains, most notably in humanities, but only if one sees folk psychology as mere heuristics.
U kognitivnoj znanosti logičko zaključivanje promatra se ili kao viši kognitivni proces koji se temelji na manipulaciji apstraktnih pravila ili kao viši kognitivni proces koji ne uključuje apstraktna pravila, već je stohastičke naravi. Pokazat ću da se te dvije perspektive mogu povezati s teorijskim i metodološkim obvezivanjem na jednu od dvije suprotstavljene paradigme u kognitivnoj znanosti – bilo na kognitivizam, bilo na konekcionizam. U radu nastojim istaknuti prednosti konekcionističkog modeliranja entimemskog zaključivanja u odnosu na klasične kompjutacijske modele na sljedeći način: (1) preko fenomena kreativnog entimema, tj. slučaja entimemskog zaključivanja kada nije moguće artikulirati nedostajuću premisu, uvodim konekcionistički mehanizam u pozadinu ekspertize koji podrazumijeva prepoznavanje obrazaca, (2) preko termina geštalt obrat obrazlažem da se razlike u obrascima eksperta i početnika ne iscrpljuju u bržem rezoniranju, već da su i kvalitativno drugačiji.
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