Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction
By Paul Thagard, Karsten A. Verbeurgt. Cognitive Sciences, 2019
296 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper provides a computational characterization of coherence that applies to a wide range of philosophical problems and psychological phenomena. Maximizing coherence is a matter of maximizing satisfaction of a set of positive and negative constraints. After comparing five algorithms for maximizing coherence, we show how our characterization of coherence overcomes traditional philosophical objections about circularity and truth.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce69591715fe45253f7c425a854d7b2249508727
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Jeffery S. McMullen
- Dean A. Shepherd
- A. Sora
- Marc D. Lewis
- David M. Hammer
- G. Colombetti
- Tom Hollenstein
- Matthew S. Wood
In History and Philosophy of Science
In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- On the Emergence of Rules in Neural Networks (2002, unknown): “Most neural networks that have been used for analogical processing are embedded in a symbol processing system that has complex predefined architectures and typically do simple constraint satisfaction between the source and target domains ( Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998; Burns, Hummel, & Holyoak, 1993).”
- Explanation and understanding (2015, background): “Coherence has been defined in terms of constraint satisfaction (Thagard 2000, Thagard & Verbeurgt 1998).”
- The Formation of Opportunity Beliefs: Overcoming Ignorance and Reducing Doubt (2007, background): “…and entrepreneurial ambiguity refers to investment of resources in which the decision maker does not know all possible outcomes of entrepreneurial action, does not know the probability 1 Thagard and Verbeurgt (1998) also integrated the psychological and philosophical aspects of coherence theory.”
- Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling (2005, background): “The possibility of several alternative resolutions is consistent with the principle of multistability in dynamic systems, but the consolidation of a particular “solution” from competing ensembles is rapid and nonlinear (cf. Thagard & Verbeurgt 1998; Tononi & Edelman 1998).”
- Multiple Epistemological Coherences in an Eighth-Grade Discussion of the Rock Cycle (2006, result): “The sketches we have provided here are similar in several respects to the program of research in “explanatory coherence” (Ranney & Schank, 1998; Thagard, 1989; Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998) in which programmers build computational models of coherence among ideas and information.”