VISUAL IMAGES IN THE SERVICE OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2020-1-58-75
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge where the most significant scientific breakthroughs take place in the 21st century. They are significant both for the development of convergent technologies and for the dissemination of interdisciplinary and integrative trends in research that connect areas previously thought of as completely incompatible, including natural sciences and the humanities. The author shows that in cognitive science, despite the highly theorized and narrowly special focus of many its areas of research, visual images are quite often and productively used. Some of them, such as a cognitive map, cognitive niche, cognitive landscape, cognitive field that echoes the concept of a dynamic field in Gestalt psychology, the wandering around the field of meanings, a search tree are discussed in the article. A special role is also played by mental imagery, which forms a basis for the work of productive imagination and creative thinking, studied in cognitive psychology. It is substantiated in the article that such visualization tools are essential not only as initial “scaffolding” for the development of theoretical concepts, but also for clarifying the nuances of the meaning of complex scientific constructions. In addition, in today’s cognitive science, the phenomenological approach and the so-called “first-person methodology” are gaining popularity, taking into account that the meaning of theoretical constructions begins to live and work, being unpacked in the lifeworld of each particular personality. Thus, the inseparability of figurative visual knowledge and abstract verbal knowledge gets additional justification through the understanding of the inseparability of the ordinary and scientific knowledge.
Keywords: visual thinking, visual images, imagination, cognitive map, cognitive niche, cognitive landscape, meaning, phenomenal consciousness.
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Issue: 1, 2020
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 58 — 75
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