The Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Mark J. Cain

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745646572, 9780745646565
• eBook ISBN: 9781509502059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

In recent decades cognitive science has revolutionised our understanding of the workings of the human mind. Philosophy has made a major contribution to cognitive science and has itself been hugely influenced by its development. This dynamic book explores the philosophical significance of cognitive science and examines the central debates that have enlivened its history.

In a wide-ranging and comprehensive account of the topic, philosopher M.J. Cain discusses the historical origins of cognitive science and its philosophical underpinnings; the nature and role of representations in cognition; the architecture of the mind and the modularity thesis; the nature of concepts; knowledge of language and its acquisition; perception; and the relationship between the brain and cognition.

Cain draws upon an extensive knowledge of empirical developments and their philosophical interpretation. He argues that although the field has generated some challenging new views in recent years, many of the core ideas that initiated its birth are still to be taken seriously.

Clearly written and incisively argued, The Philosophy of Cognitive Science will appeal to any student or researcher interested in the workings of the mind.

1 Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Cognitive Science

1 Introduction

This is a book about the philosophy of cognitive science. That topic immediately raises two questions: what is cognitive science and what is the philosophy of cognitive science? In one respect the answers to these questions are obvious: cognitive science is the scientific study of cognition, and the philosophy of cognitive science is that branch of philosophy that addresses philosophical questions generated by the scientific study of cognition. But these answers are hardly illuminating as they raise a number of subsidiary questions. What is cognition? What are the key assumptions and methods adopted by those who attempt to study cognition scientifically? How does cognitive science relate both to other sciences and to our commonsense understanding of ourselves as minded agents? When and how did cognitive science emerge as a distinct discipline? How does the philosophy of cognitive science relate to other branches of philosophy such as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science? In this chapter I will address these general questions and so provide the foundations for the more specific discussions of the later chapters.

2 Cognition

What exactly is cognition? In order to answer this question it is helpful to begin from a commonsense perspective. According to commonsense – or at least the commonsense perspective of most twenty-first-century Westerners – human beings can be distinguished from inanimate physical objects in having a mind. What, according to commonsense, is involved in our having minds? Here is a by no means exhaustive list: we think; we perceive the external world by means of our senses; we experience pain and other sensations when our bodies are appropriately stimulated; we experience moods such as depression and light-heartedness; we experience emotions such as anger, joy and jealousy; we are conscious both that we think and feel and how we specifically think and feel; we act on the basis of our decisions and intentions, which in turn often reflect how we perceive the world to be, what we think and what we want; when we act we are conscious of what we do without having to rely on our external sense organs; we recollect our past thoughts, actions and experiences; we imagine particular scenarios; and so on.

In so describing the activities that are central to human mentality from the commonsense perspective I did not use the term ‘cognition’. But if one were to ask which of the above activities were best described as involving cognition, most people would answer ‘thinking’. So one might say that, to a first approximation, cognition is thinking. But what exactly is thinking? Thinking is a mental process or activity that results in having a thought. Such thought processes range from the intellectually demanding and abstruse (as when one thinks when doing philosophy) to the banal and everyday (as when I address the question of whether I have enough time before my next lecture to buy a coffee). Some concern matters of great importance, others not. Some issue in thoughts that have an immediate impact on action and others don’t. Some issue in thoughts that become deeply entrenched and influence many subsequent thought processes, while others issue in thoughts that are fleeting and inconsequential. Some concern counterfactual or hypothetical matters (would I have been late for my lecture had I queued for a coffee?) whereas others are straightforwardly factual.

If thinking is a mental process that issues in a thought, then what exactly is a thought? In everyday talk the term ‘thought’ is most commonly used to refer to the mental state of considering a particular hypothesis or answer to a question or that of committing oneself to a particular hypothesis or answer. Such mental states are, or are closely related to, beliefs. For when one considers a particular answer to a given question one is paving the way to holding a particular belief, and when one commits oneself to a particular answer one has thereby acquired a belief. Beliefs are examples of what philosophers call propositional attitudes, as believing that p involves adopting the belief attitude to the proposition p. But there are propositional attitudes that are not beliefs, for, just as one can believe that p, one can desire that p, intend (to make it the case) that p, hope that p, fear that p, expect that p, and so on. Consequently, although it slightly strains everyday usage, one might say that thoughts are propositional attitudes, so that thinking is the mental process that results in the acquisition of a propositional attitude, be it a belief, a desire, an intention, or whatever.

In virtue of being relations to propositions, propositional attitudes have meaning or semantic properties. They are therefore akin to declarative sentences of a natural language. Just as such sentences are about particular things (or types of thing) or states of affairs and represent them as being a particular way, so do propositional attitudes. For example, my belief that aardvarks eat termites is about aardvarks and represents them as being termite eaters. What a propositional attitude is about and how it represents its object are elements of its meaning, but philosophers tend to use the term ‘content’ when talking about the meaning of propositional attitudes. So, for example, the sentence ‘aardvarks eat termites’ has a particular meaning, and the belief that aardvarks eat termites has a particular (corresponding) content. There is a further commonality between declarative sentences and propositional attitudes. Sentences are made up of simpler components, namely words, and the meaning of a sentence is a product of the meaning of the words that belong to it and the way they are put together (the syntactic structure of the sentence).¹ It is natural to think that something similar is true of propositional attitudes. The simpler components of propositional attitudes are concepts, and the content of a propositional attitude is a product of its constituent concepts and the way they are put together. Hence, one cannot form the belief that aardvarks eat termites without employing each of its constituent concepts.

I have suggested that, to a first approximation, cognition is thinking. Allied with the idea that thinking is a mental process that results in the formation of propositional attitudes, the implication might seem to be that much of what goes on in the mind falls outside of the domain of cognition. This is because philosophers standardly distinguish between propositional attitudes and other mental states such as sensations, emotions and perceptual experiences. However, even if we want to uphold such a distinction (say, on the grounds that such mental states differ from propositional attitudes in that they have an essential phenomenal, qualitative or ‘what it is like’ aspect), it would perhaps be a little rash, for several reasons, to conclude that only propositional attitudes and the processes that generate them count as cognitive. First, consider perception. Perception is a process where the external world stimulates an individual’s sensory organs, resulting in a perceptual experience. In the case of vision, light reflected off external objects is focused onto the retina, a light-sensitive surface at the back of the eye that sets off a mental process which results in a visual experience. Even if, as many philosophers have thought, perceptual experiences are very different from propositional attitudes in not involving the deployment of concepts and in having an intrinsic qualitative character, they are like them in a key respect. For perceptual experiences are representational in the respect that they are typically about objects located in the external world and represent them as being a particular way. For example, my current visual experience was not only caused by the computer directly in front of me but is also about that computer and represents the outer world immediately before me as containing a grey, rectangular object. In virtue of their being representational, it seems reasonable to think of perceptual states as belonging to the domain of cognition if propositional attitudes are paradigmatic cognitive states.

A second point relates to the nature of the mental process of thinking. Typically, when one acquires a propositional attitude by means of thinking, a process takes place in one’s mind that is extended in time. This process has stages each of which involves moving from one or more propositional attitudes to another, where the earlier propositional attitude(s) in each stage justify the later. Here is an example. Feeling a little de-energized, I wonder if I have enough time to buy a coffee before my next lecture. I start from the beliefs that it will take me ten minutes to walk from the café to the lecture hall and that, given the current length of the queue, it will take me five minutes to purchase a coffee. Given that my lecture starts at 1.00 p.m., I infer that I must leave the café by 12.45 p.m. at the latest to be on time. I look at my watch and come to believe that it is 12.50 p.m. and draw the implication that I cannot buy a coffee and arrive at my lecture on time. Given my strong desire not to be late, I decide to give coffee a miss.

When we think, we are often aware of the stages we go through to reach the propositional attitude that is the end product of the thinking process. Or, if the thought process is so quick and routine that we don’t have such awareness, we can retrace our steps by deliberately seeking to justify our conclusion and so gain awareness of our thought process retrospectively. But, with respect to perception, things don’t seem to be like that. I open my eyes, orient them to the world and have a perceptual experience without having any awareness of executing an extended process the earlier elements of which justify the later elements. So there would appear to be a substantial contrast between thinking and perception once again. But on second thoughts the contrast might not be so great. Just because we are not aware or conscious of any stages of inference in the process of perception, it does not follow that there are no such stages once we countenance the possibility that much might go on in the mind that is unconscious. Indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, in the 1950s and 1960s psychologists began to hypothesize that perception does involve unconscious inference.² If one takes this idea seriously, then one has grounds for including perception in the domain of cognition. Moreover, similar points can be made concerning other mental states and processes. Suppose I am in a café having a cappuccino. I reach out to grasp the cup, raise it to my lips and take a sip. This is a routine everyday event, and when it takes place I am not aware of my having done much in the way of thinking. But if we try to make sense of how we carry out such actions it is clear that an awful lot of complex internal processing must be involved. Once again, in the 1950s and 1960s the idea developed that our actions are driven by thought-like inferential processing that draws upon and coordinates constantly changing information about the state of the external world and one’s own body coming from a range of distinct sources. So we might have grounds for regarding action and motor control as belonging to the domain of cognition.

A third point is that, even if there is a significant difference between thinking and other aspects of the mind such as perception and action, the latter must interface with the former. Consider perception first. Perceptual experiences might not be propositional attitudes or the upshot of thought processes, but they do play a key role in determining our propositional attitudes. For we routinely form beliefs and update our stock of beliefs on the basis of our perceptual experiences. Were this not the case, then perception would be of little use to us, as its value resides in its ability to provide us with knowledge about the world that we can utilize in deciding how to act so as to satisfy our needs and desires. For example, suppose you are in the supermarket looking for a tomato and while in the fruit and veg section looking at a tomato you have a visual experience as of a spherical, red object. If this experience is going to help you to satisfy your desire for a tomato, you must take it at face value and come to believe that there is a spherical, red thing before you, and you must further infer the belief that that spherical red thing is a tomato. All this clearly requires the output of perception to be taken up by thought processes. A parallel point can be made about motor control and action. Even if the movements that we make when we act are not directly driven by thought processes, those movements must be routinely and systematically motivated by our propositional attitudes. Were this not the case then our propositional attitudes would be robbed of their central function of enabling us to act so as to satisfy our desires. For example, there wouldn’t be much benefit in desiring an elderflower pressé and (correctly) believing that there was a bottle of elderflower pressé in the fridge if that belief and desire pair were incapable of making an impact upon how one acted. In short, then, it is a fundamental property of thinking that it interfaces with both perception and action. This suggests that one should resist drawing a fundamental divide between perception and action, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, and view only the latter as belonging to the domain of cognition.

I began this section by asking what cognition is and put forward the suggestion that cognition is thinking understood in commonsense terms as a process involving inferring propositional attitudes from other propositional attitudes. However, I argued that, although such thought processes are clear-cut cases of cognition, there are other processes that take place in the mind, namely those involved in perception and action and motor control, whose similarities and relationship to thinking are such as to imply that they count as cognitive processes. Thus, if cognitive science is the scientific study of cognition, it should be concerned as much with perception and action as it is with central cases of thinking.

3 Science and cognition

In the previous section I gave a preliminary account of cognition. That account implies that cognitive science is the scientific study of such phenomena as thinking, perception and action. Thus, the concern of the cognitive scientist is to explain how we humans are able to think, perceive and act, to uncover precisely what goes on within our minds when we exercise such cognitive capacities. If successful, cognitive science will reveal the core properties of humans that enable us to cognize and thus differentiate us from all the inhabitants of the universe that are not capable of cognition. Put this way, it is clear that cognitive science rests on the assumptions both that cognition is the kind of phenomenon that is amenable to scientific investigation and that we humans are cut out to execute such a scientific investigation. However, such assumptions are not universally held within the philosophical community. In this section I will describe some of the most prominent reasons for scepticism about the viability of cognitive science.

A first reason for scepticism relates to a metaphysical view about the mind most associated with Descartes (1985) and is generally known as substance dualism. According to Descartes, the human individual is a two-component system consisting of a body and a mind. The body is an inhabitant of the physical world and so, reflecting the nature of the physical world in general, is a mechanical system whose behaviour is governed by laws of nature that can be stated in mathematical terms. Moreover, the body is essentially spatially extended; that is, it has a spatial location and takes up physical space. In virtue of all this, the human body is precisely the kind of system whose nature and workings can be investigated from the scientific perspective. The mind, on the other hand, is essentially a thinking thing. It does not inhabit the physical world and, in virtue of having free will, it is not a mechanical system governed by laws of nature. Nevertheless, the mind is harnessed to the physical body and engages in a systematic two-way process of causal interaction with it. For example, the body can affect the mind, as when the physical stimulation of the sense organs ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• 2 Representation and Computation
• 3 Modularity
• 4 Concepts
• 5 Language
• 6 The Brain and Cognition
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement