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.
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] Thagard was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan on September 28, 1950.
Thagard was married to the psychologist Ziva Kunda.
Thagard has proposed that many cognitive functions, including perception, analogy, explanation, decision-making, planning etc., can be understood as a form of (maximum) coherence computation.
Thagard (together with Karsten Verbeurgt) put forth a particular formalization of the concept of coherence as a constraint satisfaction problem.
[11][12] The model posits that coherence operates over a set of representational elements (e.g., propositions, images, etc.)
According to Thagard, coherence maximization involves the partitioning of elements into accepted (
Thagard worked on the demarcation problem in philosophy of science.
Faced with the failure of verifiability and falsifiability, what he called "post positivist depression",[13]: 114 he proposed in 1978 a criterion to define pseudoscience, with the broader goal being rescuing science from the relativism of Feyerabend and Rorty.
Firstly it was hopeless to attempt to find necessary and sufficient conditions for pseudoscience in general, and secondly, the criterion was too soft on astrology which it was specifically meant to brand as pseudoscience.
[13]: 168 Nonetheless, Thagard, didn't completely abandon his criterion, but instead incorporated it into his new solution to the demarcation problem, which he called "Profile of Science and Pseudoscience", a collection of psychological, historical and logical characteristics, against which a discipline could be compared and categorized as either science or pseudoscience.
This process, though not "strict necessary or sufficient", could fulfill the normative goals of science, or what Thagard prefers to call "Natural philosophy", by relying "on descriptions of how everyday and scientific reasoning actually works.