Paul Thagard

Paul Thagard
FRSC
Born
Paul Richard Thagard

(1950-09-28) 28 September 1950 (age 74)
Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada
Education
SpouseZiva Kunda (died 2004)
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolNaturalism[1]
Epistemic coherentism[2]
ThesisExplanation and Scientific Inference[3] (1977)
Doctoral advisor
Main interests
Philosophy of mind
Cognitive science
Philosophy of science
Notable ideas
Explanatory coherence
Preview warning: Page using Template:Infobox philosopher with unknown parameter "influences"
Preview warning: Page using Template:Infobox philosopher with unknown parameter "influenced"

Paul Richard Thagard FRSC (/ˈθeɪɡɑːrd/; born 1950) is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition.

In the philosophy of science, Thagard is cited for his work on the use of computational models in explaining conceptual revolutions;[4] his most distinctive contribution to the field is the concept of explanatory coherence, which he has applied to historical cases.[5][6][7] He is heavily influenced by pragmatists like C. S. Peirce, and has contributed to the refinement of the idea of inference to the best explanation.[8]

In the philosophy of mind, he is known for his attempts to apply connectionist models of coherence to theories of human thought and action.[9] He is also known for HOTCO ("hot coherence"), which was his attempt to create a computer model of cognition that incorporated emotions at a fundamental level.[10]

In his general approach to philosophy, Thagard is sharply critical of analytic philosophy for being overly dependent upon intuitions as a source of evidence.[1]

  1. ^ a b Paul Thagard, "Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy", 4 December 2012.
  2. ^ Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  3. ^ a b c "Doctoral Dissertations, 1977". The Review of Metaphysics. 31 (1): 174. 1977. ISSN 2154-1302. JSTOR 20127042.
  4. ^ Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=paul%20thagard&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws
  5. ^ Explanatory Coherence. http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/1989.explanatory.pdf
  6. ^ Thagard, Paul (1990). "The Conceptual Structure of the Chemical Revolution". Philosophy of Science. 57 (2): 183–209. doi:10.1086/289543. JSTOR 187831. S2CID 170587318.
  7. ^ EXPLANATORY COHERENCE AND BELIEF REVISION IN NAIVE PHYSICS. [1][dead link‍]
  8. ^ The Best Explanation. https://web.archive.org/web/20120330081201/http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/tennant9/thagard_JP1978.pdf
  9. ^ Paul Thagard, Coherence in Thought and Action (Bradford Book, 2000, ISBN 0-262-20131-3)
  10. ^ Paul Thagard, Hot thought: Mechanisms and applications of emotional cognition, 2006.