Acknowledgments

I am first and foremost grateful to my father, Cumhur Şahin and my mother, Selma Şahin. For they always supported me in pretty much every decision I took and never criticized me for not pursuing anything financially profitable, which was the common practice in our community, thereby enabling a free intellectual journey for me. I am sincerely thankful to my sister, Sümeyye, my partner in crime in life and laughter for standing by me through the highs and lows of this journey, and your quiet faith when I could not find mine.

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I am thankful to my past teachers, especially to Alirıza Çakır, Yaşar Durmaz, Sinan Can Yücel and Ekrem Ayyıldız for they have been more than a teacher and more of a role-model, broadening a teenager’s horizon and showing him what is in the world out there.

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I am sincerely thankful to my advisor Esra Mungan, for she always believed in me, always encouraged me to express my radical and speculative views even when they were quite opposite of hers, and created a free and comfortable experience for me. She has been always there, ready to listen, validate and support even when in my quite grumpy times. I am aware that the experience I have been through is unique in today’s academy and I am pretty sure, if it was not for her, this study could not come true. She is not only a great mentor but also a great human being, exemplifying with her personality what I should strive for in being a ‘person’.

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I express my heartfelt gratitude to H. Oğuz Erdin, my co-advisor, for presenting me new horizons in philosophy, supporting me in the academic organizations that we organize together, and encouraging me to think radically and take philosophy and science seriously. As himself being a case, he also showed me frivolous decisions are not that bad at all and not every academic is boring.

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I want to express my special gratitude to Boğaziçi University as a community, as an institution, as home and to all my friends there who welcomed and helped me build my home with them. To the risk of forgetting someone, I want to thank Ateş Metin, Nevzat Ersoy, Gülfem Sarı, Halit Özsoy, Zehra Erkoç, Alihan Koçak, Sarp Kargı, Mehmet Ali Karataş, Hesna Yılmaz, Begüm Güven, Seyit Ünalan, Elif Canseza Kaplan and many more for they showed me, to my surprise, it is possible to find your home even as a grown up adult. I want to thank my friends from CogIST, especially to Maharrem Ayar, Mehmet Tekin Soyer, Furkan Avcı, Yunus Emre Karaman, İbrahim Ethem Deveci, Neslihan Turan, Mert Can, Helin Erden, Ongun Kılıç, Miray Morova, İlknur Eliş and more for they kept me believing in the value of science communication and creating a common good together. Without their companionship, I could not stay motivated to pursue such a research and without our endless discussions, my opinions would not mature in this way. 

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Lastly, I thank cognitive science program at Boğaziçi University, especially İnci Ayhan, Lucas Thorpe, Yağmur Denizhan and Emre Uğur for their invaluable contributions to my intellectual development. They became life-long role-models as academics. I am very glad we have met and I had the opportunity to learn from them.