Author
Vakarelov, OrlinIssue Date
2011Keywords
Information (Pragmatic)Philosophy of Information
Philosophy of Information Agents
Situated Cognition
Philosophy
Cognitive Architecture
Information Media Networks
Advisor
Ismael, Jenann
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The University of Arizona.Rights
Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.Abstract
The dissertation is based on four papers that together offer a theory of General Situated Cognition. The project has two overarching goals: (1) to unify existing foundational approaches to cognition by investigating cognition within the framework of the philosophy of information; (2) to characterize the function of cognition and suggest a general (meta-)framework for cognitive architecture. Two of the papers, "Pre-cognitive Semantic Information" and "The Information Medium", deal primarily with the concept of information. They offer a pragmatic and structural account of information, as well as a novel and more general theory of meaning appropriate for simple, non-linguistic organisms - the interface theory of meaning. The papers lay the theoretical and conceptual machinery needed for the other two papers, "The Cognitive Agent: Overcoming Informational Limitations" and "Information Networks: A Meta-architecture for Situated Cognition", which investigate cognition as a general natural phenomenon. They specify the function of cognition as the mechanism in an organism that overcomes informational deficits. They also offer a broad architecture of cognitive systems based on networks of information media, which encompasses, and thus unifies existing approaches to cognition, such as the computational/symbolic approach, the connectionist approach, the dynamicist approach and the ecological embodied approach.Type
textElectronic Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.Degree Level
doctoralDegree Program
Graduate CollegePhilosophy