Nicolas Navarre, Tadeg Quillien, Johannes Mahr, Jay Richardson, Ariel Gonçalves and Kevin O'Neill
Affiliation: University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, York University, Université Grenoble-Alpes, Université Grenoble-Alpes, University College London
Category: Symposia
Keywords: counterfactuals, modal cognition, simulation, episodic simulation, causal judgement, imagination
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 14:30
Location: Maria Skłodowska-Curie Hall (123)
The human ability to consider hypothetical scenarios is a subject of active research across cognitive science, encompassing philosophy, semantics, psychology, and neuroscience. One dominant theory suggests that people engage with counterfactuals by imagining or simulating them. Since the mid-2000s, the notion of simulational thought has gained traction in cognitive neuroscience, due to the discovery of a neurocognitive network involved in episodic (roughly, self-involving) simulations. As a result, cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers have explored the structure, implementation, and cognitive role of these simulations. Despite progress, a major gap remains: key neurocognitive theories of episodic simulation lack explicit and falsifiable models. Philosophers have considered the representational components of episodic simulation, but no formal semantics has been developed. Similarly, competing computational models exist, but none have been precisely formulated to clarify their predictive differences. This symposium aims to bridge these gaps and foster interdisciplinary discussions on how humans engage with hypothetical scenarios. It consists of two contributions on episodic thought and two on modal cognition. Each one aims to clarify theoretical and empirical issues regarding simulational thought. The contributions on modal cognition have the fortune of drawing on computational models where they must make explicit commitments about the representational and informational structure of simulational thought. The other two projects provide an abstract but targeted analysis about the specific commitments that can be made in the formal and computational models. They aim to investigate how these models relate to current theories of simulational thought at the functional and neurocognitive levels. These projects, altogether, benefit from a bridge between philosophical, cognitive neuroscientific and computational theories of episodic simulation. Johannes Mahr explores the representational constituents and compositional structure of episodic thought. His discussion intersects with Tadeg Quillien’s work on causal judgment, which treats it as a form of modal cognition. Quillien’s approach to the content of simulations suggests that it computes alternatives and their probabilities. Meanwhile, another critical component is metacognition—the ability to monitor and regulate thought processes. Kevin O’Neill’s contribution focuses on the role of metacognition in modal thought. Like Quillien, O’Neill views modal cognition as involving the comparison of alternative possibilities, and further tests these forms of modal cognition in psychologically measurable judgement tasks. These are different perspectives on the structure of representational content in simulational thought that have yet to be compared in the literature. One possible starting point for doing so is apparent in the projects: their respective explananda, i.e. memory and causal judgement, turn out to overlap in that they involve cognition that involves representations of the actual. The final contribution by Ariel Gonçalves and Jay Richardson examines the functional architecture of episodic simulation, focusing on its key components and neural effectors; providing complementary perspectives with Mahr’s, Quillien’s and O’Neill’s, as views of the functional architecture of simulational thought must, in the end, be related with the representational structures that are therefrom produced. Ultimately, then, the bridge-building this symposium shall attempt also depends on investigating mental simulation in an integrative way across different levels of explanation.