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On central cognition

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Notes

  1. Fodor (2000) is led to this conclusion because he thinks that cognitive science must traffic in processes that are local in character, whereas isotropic processes are, in an important way, holistic.

  2. Compare Peacocke’s (1986, 1992) claim that concept possession requires an appreciation of certain inferential moves as being primitively compelling. This makes grasp of inferential norms into a condition of genuine concept possession.

  3. The notion of consciousness in play here is some or other form of access-consciousness (Block 1995). But it matters little for our purposes whether the access in question is characterized in terms of first-order accessibility to processes of belief-formation and decision-making, or instead in terms of higher-order accessibility for immediate self-attribution. This is because in the case of humans, at least, mental states that are “globally broadcast” and hence first-order accessible will at the same time be higher-order accessible, and vice versa.

  4. Notice that I do not say that valence is bound into the contents of perception. This is because the evidence suggests that it is not. On the contrary, valence that is a product of many different sources (one’s background mood, irrelevant features of the stimulus or its surroundings, and so on) is by default taken to be directed at whatever is the current object of attention (Schwarz and Clore 1983, 2003; Forgas 1995; Higgins 1997; Gasper and Clore 2000; Winkielman et al. 2005; Li et al. 2007; Schnall et al. 2008). But the result is a motivational state that functions somewhat like an active desire as philosophers traditionally conceive of it, except that the relationship between one’s experienced affect and one’s stable values is highly labile and context dependent.

  5. The qualifications are needed because of the well-known constructive nature of memory. This means that any memory image will consist at least partly in elements that have been added later, or that have been added during the process of activating and recovering the memory itself. See Schacter (2001).

  6. Colom et al. (2010) reason that if general intelligence is a direct function of the efficiency of sensory-based working memory, then training in the latter should improve the former. However, they failed to find such effects. But this may be because they did not separately analyze those who benefited from the working-memory training and those who did not. For Jaeggi et al. (2011) find robust improvements in fluid general intelligence over a 3 month interval among children who show the greatest benefit from training in working memory tasks.

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Acknowledgments

Some of the material used in this article is drawn from Carruthers (2011). I am grateful to Lizzie Schechter and Wayne Wu for their comments on an earlier draft.

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    Peter Carruthers

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Carruthers, P. On central cognition. Philos Stud 170, 143–162 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0171-1

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