Zenon Pylyshyn

Information about Zenon Pylyshyn

Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Name:Zenon Pylyshyn
Birth:
School/tradition:analytic philosophy, rationalism, cognitivism, functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Main interests:vision, cognitive science, information theory
Notable ideas:|
Influences:Jerry Fodor


Zenon Pylyshyn (born 1937) is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher.

He holds degrees in Engineering-Physics (B.Eng. 1959) from McGill University and in Control Systems (M.Sc. 1960) and Experimental Psychology (Ph.D. 1963), both from the University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. He was a Canada Council Senior fellow from 1963–1964.

Academic Career

He was Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario in London from 1964 until 1994, where he also held honorary positions in Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and was Director of the UWO Center for Cognitive Science. In 1994 he accepted positions as the Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and as the Director of the brand-new Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in New Brunswick, NJ.

Current Research

Pylyshyn's most recent research involves the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He has also continued to develop his Visual Indexing Theory (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes.

Awards and Honors

In 1990, the Canadian Psychological Association awarded him the Donald O. Hebb Award for "distinguished contributions to psychology as a science." He holds fellowships in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Canadian Psychological Association, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998. He was invited to give the Jean Nicod lectures in Paris in 2004. He has presided over both the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society. From 1985–1994 he directed the Program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Selected Publications

  • "What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain", Psychological Bulletin, 1973
  • Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1984)
  • Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (1986)
  • The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987)
  • Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1988);
  • Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1988)
  • The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (1996).
  • Seeing and Visualizing: It's not what you think (MIT Press, 2004) [Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards competition]

See also

External links

20th-century philosophy was set for a series of attempts variously to reform, preserve, alter, abolish, previously conceived limits.

New studies in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology furthered seemingly antagonistic tendencies in accounting
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Analytic philosophy (sometimes, analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century.
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rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" (Lacey 286). In more technical terms it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive" (Bourke 263).
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The word cognitivism is used in several ways:
  • In ethics, cognitivism is the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false. See Cognitivism (ethics).

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For other uses of the term, see .


Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
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In psychology, visual perception is the ability to interpret visible light information reaching the eyes which is then made available for planning and action. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight or vision.
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Cognitive science is most simply defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e.g. Luger 1994). It is an interdisciplinary study drawing from relevant fields including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science,
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Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and engineering involving the quantification of information to find fundamental limits on compressing and reliably communicating data.
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Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of
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Cognitive science is most simply defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e.g. Luger 1994). It is an interdisciplinary study drawing from relevant fields including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science,
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Philosophy is the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).
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Engineering is the applied science of acquiring and applying knowledge to design, analysis, and/or construction of works for practical purposes. The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development, also known as ECPD,[1] (later ABET [2]
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Physics is the science of matter[1] and its motion[2][3], as well as space and time[4][5] —the science that deals with concepts such as force, energy, mass, and charge.
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McGill University is a publicly funded, co-educational research university located in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. McGill's main campus is set upon 320,000 square metres (80 acres) at the foot of Mount Royal in Montreal's downtown district.
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In military aviation, a Control system is frequently used in place of a Ground Control Station when describing an Unmanned Aircraft System control element which may be located anywhere, not just on the ground.
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Experimental psychology approaches psychology as one of the natural sciences, and therefore assumes that it is susceptible to the experimental method. Many experimental psychologists have gone further, and have assumed that all methods of investigation other than
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University of Saskatchewan (U of S) is a coeducational public research university located on the east side of the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The University is celebrating its centennial year in 2007.
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Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and engineering involving the quantification of information to find fundamental limits on compressing and reliably communicating data.
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Short-term memory, sometimes referred to as "primary," "working," or "active" memory, is said to hold a small amount of information for about 20 seconds.

Estimates of short-term memory capacity vary - from about 3 or 4 elements (i.e.
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The Canada Council for the Arts, commonly called the Canada Council, is an arts council of the Government of Canada created to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. It was introduced by Parliament in 1957.
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Also Nintendo emulator: 1964 (emulator).

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Psychology (from Greek: Literally "talk about the soul" (from logos)) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior.
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Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.
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The University of Western Ontario (known as Western, as well as UWO or Western Ontario) is a research university located in London, Ontario, Canada. It is one of Canada's oldest universities, having been founded in 1878 by Bishop Isaac Hellmuth and the Anglican
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