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 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; his most distinctive contribution to the field is the concept of explanatory coherence, which he has applied to 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 ("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. Biography Thagard was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan on September 28, 1950. He is a graduate of the Universities of Saskatchewan (B.A. in philosophy, 1971), Cambridge (M.A. in philosophy, 1973), Toronto (Ph.D. in philosophy, 1977) and Michigan (M.S. in computer science, 1985). He was Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society , 1998–1999, and President of the Society for Machines and Mentality , 1997–1998. In 2013 he won a Canada Council Killam Prize, and in 1999 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2003, he received a University of Waterloo Award for Excellence in Research, and in 2005 he was named a University Research Chair. Thagard was married to the psychologist Ziva Kunda. Kunda died in 2004. Philosophical work Explanatory coherence 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. The model posits that coherence operates over a set of representational elements (e.g., propositions, images, etc.) which can either fit together (cohere) or resist fitting