The Development of Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Information—From Anthropocentrism to Naturalism

Abstract

The emergence of Floridi’s philosophy of information has been directly pushed by the emergence of classical cognitive science and it attempts to provide us with a computational and representational epistemology and ontology. They share some common points: 1. anthropocentrism on cognition; 2. Cartesianism on knowledge; 3. nativism on semantics; 4. methodology on computationalism–representationalism. However, the development of cognitive science is deviating from Floridi’s philosophy of information, as the core concept of representation has been gradually abandoned in more and more cognitive studies, corresponding to the movement of situated, embodied, embedded and dynamic study in cognitive science. Thus, a new philosophy of information should emerge to accommodate the new development in cognitive science. Moreover, Wu’s PI satisfies the demand of this trend, which I will defend in this article.

Keywords

• cognitive science
• philosophy of information
• naturalism