Talk:Cognitive ontology

A Cognitive Ontology provides a roadmap to a cognition.

Motivation for this ontology
Cognition confers a competitive advantage. Therefore entities which cognize will increase in number until resistance occurs. See ontological warfare.

Patterns for investigating this ontology
One obvious pattern to map onto cognition is the scientific method, a well-known mechanism for producing knowledge.
 * The term 'mechanism' was chosen deliberately. Isaac Newton counted himself a 'mechanic' at a time when this was a radical notion.

Reasonable questions about an entity E
Now the tough part is structuring the ontology. We posit entities, 'E's as the primitive concept.

If we take E from the collection in the table above, our choices for E include (Sense data, Percepts, Concepts, Test results, Actions). More choices are available; it would be risky to presume we have a complete list.

Our motivation is the computer programming agent which we think of as a task. From a programming viewpoint, it is no problem to think of the E's as hierarchical (outline-format). Naming the E's is also no problem; they are tagged with symbols which reside in some symbol table. Datatype-ing the E's is also no problem; they are at least triples (Object, Attribute, Value) The type for E is some choice from a Collection.

Our motivation for 'collection' is from Naive set theory, and we assume the machinery for First-order predicate calculus (but no stronger) to stay within the bounds of the scientific method, in order to stay decidable.


 * 1) What is E
 * 2) When did E occur
 * 3) Where is E
 * 4) If there were no E, what would happen
 * 5) Reasons to expect the observation of E

Cognition in an entity (embodied Cognition)
We get specific here to help out our reasoning: we assume the entities are embodied, so we can hope for answers to questions 1 through 5.

If we take the definitions from the article on Agents, the Agents (the Entities) have an Ontological commitment. By definition, the Agents have an Ontology. Ontological commitment is the base of the Attribute values of an Entity. The values could be under control by some set of sub-agents. Agents can form coalitions with each other.

Clearly, E can be natural or artificial.

Natural E's have solved the problem of survival. Part of the Ontology for such E's is to preserve E's attributes (properties). The values of those attributes would be determined by a natural process for natural E's.

Links for tracking Recent Related Changes
Cognition is also an international journal publishing theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind. External link to journal homepage.


 * Philosophy
 * Philosophy of mind linguistic ontology cognitive ontology qualia doubt attention interruption distraction cognitive specialization
 * the act of knowing or knowledge
 * mental processes: beliefs,desires,intentions


 * Linguistics especially psycholinguistics
 * Biology and brain ( neurocognitive) function: neuroscience
 * Mathematics and probability
 * Computer science and information theory

1950s 1980s Other observations of self-organizing behavior:
 * Psychology (particularly cognitive psychology), cognitive science and psychophysics; cognitivism usurps behaviorism.
 * Cognitive neuroscience, neurology and neuropsychology
 * memory, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery emotion
 * information processing
 * scientific and quantitative
 * Artificial intelligence and cybernetics
 * Ergonomics and user interface design
 * University of Leeds, UK: 'Cognition is a form of compression', i.e., cognition was an economic, not just a philosophical or a psychological process.
 * Economics especially experimental economics: Groups and organisations, up to societies are coalitions  which can demonstrate emergent behavior. Price simultaneously (an example of dispersed knowledge) drives preferences of large numbers of consumers.   Insurance pools minimize risk for individuals and groups.
 * language acquisition is 'emergent behavior', which in fact requires a coalition.
 * agents for unsupervised learning could use conceptual graphs for their ontology.

Other emergent behavior:
 * Empathy is a reflex emotion that has to be learned at a young age; its absence is psychopathy.
 * The image Earthrise gave rise to Earth Day. Other iconic images come from the space telescopes.
 * Human rights are sensed by the mass media as part of the human condition.