Paul Thagard, Date of Birth, Place of Birth

Paul Thagard

Canadian philosopher

Date of Birth: 28-Sep-1950

Place of Birth: Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada

Profession: computer scientist, philosopher

Nationality: Canada

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Paul Richard Thagard (; born 1950) is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine.
Thagard is distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo.
He is a prolific 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 enormously well cited for his work on the use of computational models in explaining conceptual revolutions.
Perhaps his most distinctive contribution to the field is the concept of explanatory coherence, which he has applied to many historical cases.
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.In the philosophy of mind, he is known for his attempts to apply connectionist models of coherence to theories of human thought and action.
He is also known for HOTCO (short for "hot coherence"), which was his attempt to create a computer model of cognition that incorporated emotions at a fundamental level.In his general approach to philosophy, Thagard is sharply critical of analytic philosophy for being overly dependent upon intuitions as a source of evidence.