[Cristian989]

Originally Posted by coberst

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science.

I'm glad you have a personal opinion about this, but this sounds way too generalized. I would like to see some examples atleast.

Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

Empirical evidence? I love how you just throw those terms around. How about some studies that have come to this conclusion. NO, not what someone interpreterted the research as, but what the findings are actually were.

Even if they are supposedly "empirical" findings, they are not perfect because studies have flaws, etc, and I take it that if you read enough about any emperical finding, you would find that there is usually contraditions that are found in other research in other fields of psychology that have a different point of view that is also supported empirically.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Again, please gimme an example of a study (which I take it would probably have to me a meta-analysis since you said "findings").

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

That's not good enough to support your point.

There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Different synapses? Do do realize that a synapse is not actually "connected", but instead it's a gap between (usually) the dentrites and the terminal button. Neurotransmitters are released which travel across the gap to receptors who continue the signal (ie. action potential). P.S. that's not cognitive, that's neuroscience.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

What about abstract thoughts? Those don't exist, yet we still have a category for "freedom" and for "hatred". By the way, that's one way to look at it, but a social psychologist/cognitive even would argue that humans have "schemas" and that these schemas can be easily altered using priming.

Again, that'ts just one way different areas of psychology have their own way to explain behavior. And just like cognitive, other areas also have emperical evidence to back them up.