Lorenzo Magnani & Ping Li 
Philosophy and Cognitive Science 
Western & Eastern Studies

The book addresses a number of recent topics at the crossroad of philosophy and cognitive science, taking advantage of both the western and the eastern perspectives and conceptions that emerged and were discussed at the PCS2011 Conference recently held in Guangzhou. The ever growing cultural exchange between academics and intellectual belonging to different cultures is reverberated by the juxtaposition of papers, which aim at investigating new facets of crucial problems in philosophy: the role of models in science and the fictional approach; chance seeking dynamics and how affordances work; abductive cognition; visualization in science; the cognitive structure of scientific theories; scientific representation; mathematical representation in science; model-based reasoning; analogical reasoning; moral cognition; cognitive niches and evolution.

Table of Content

Scientific Models Are Not Fictions. Model-Based Science as Epistemic Warfare.- An Examination of the Thesis of Models as Representations.- On Animal Cognition: Before and After the Beast-Machine Controversy.- From Mindless Modeling to Scientific Models. The Case of Emerging Models.- The Greenhouse Metaphor and the Greenhouse Effect: A Case Study of a Flawed Analogous Model.- A Study of Model and Representation Based on a Duhemian Thesis.- From The Received View to the Model-Theoretic Approach.- Cognitive Chance Discovery. From Abduction to Affordance.- A Proposal on Belief, Abduction and Interpretation.- Not by Luck Alone. The Importance of Chance-Seeking and Silent Knowledge in Abductive Cognition.- Cognitive Abduction and the Study of Visual Culture.- Understanding Scientific Inference in the Natural Sciences Based on Abductive Inference Strategies.- Moral, intuitions vs. Moral Reasoning. A Philosophical Analysis of the Explanatory Models Intuitionism Relies on.- Evolutionary Tolerance.