Beyond Anthropocentric Psychology

This symposium will explore and critically assess foundational issues in cognition (/psychology) from a non-anthropocentric perspective. A non-anthropocentric psychology is an understanding of psychological phenomena in general (and not just perceptual capacities) in a way that does not take the human case as the criterion for possession of a real or full-blooded capacity. It is also a way of explaining psychological phenomena using methods that are neutral regarding the nature of the target explananda, such as mathematical modeling. The symposium brings together philosophical consideration of discrete research areas that have individually raised questions about the anthropocentric tradition. These include (inter alia) developments in machine learning, the increasing use of cognitive frameworks to explain the behavior of plants, bacteria, and other far-from-human species, and the mathematical modeling of human social interactions and collective action. When Turing asked "Do computers think?", he began his answer by making the question more specific and then proposing a human-language-based criterion for thinking. Seventy-odd years later, we are able to revisit the question of what it is to think from the broader perspective provided by significant advances in neuroscience, biology, psychology, comparative ethology, computer science, and network science.