Abstract
The present century has seen renewed interest in characterizing cognition, the object of inquiry of the cognitive sciences. In this paper, I describe the problem of cognition—the absence of a positive characterization of cognition despite a felt need for one. It is widely recognized that the problem is motivated by decades of controversy among cognitive scientists over foundational questions, such as whether non-neural parts of the body or environment can realize cognitive processes, or whether plants and microbes have cognitive processes. The dominant strategy for addressing the problem of cognition is to seek a dichotomous criterion that vindicates some set of controversial claims. However, I argue that the problem of cognition is also motivated by ongoing conceptual development in cognitive science, and I describe four benefits that a characterization of cognition could confer. Given these benefits, I recommend an alternative criterion of success, ecumenical extensional adequacy, on which the aim is to describe the variation in expert judgments rather than to correct this variation by taking sides in sectarian disputes. I argue that if we had an ecumenical solution to the problem of cognition, we would have achieved much of what we should want from a “mark of the cognitive”.
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Notes
Throughout, I employ the convention of small capitalization to indicate reference to concepts. Cognition is a natural phenomenon, “cognition” is a word, and cognition is a concept.
It seems that, excepting some enactivists, there is a consensus that cognition is not in general to be identified with a kind of behavior (op. cit.), at least when speaking carefully. Given the significant minority status of the view that cognition is behavior, its failure to be taken up in careful theoretical discussion outside of philosophy, and its failure to have a discernible effect on empirical research independently of other enactivist claims, I will not consider it in this paper. I thank an anonymous reviewer for vigorously pressing me on this point.
I adopt the term “explication” or “conceptual explication” in place of “conceptual analysis” because it seems to have fewer controversial Kantian connotations regarding analyticity.
The history is of course complicated. Some border war controversies have predecessors. The characterization by scientists of “unconscious” processes by analogy to highfalutin cognitive processes like inference goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century, e.g. Helmholtz’ (1867) “unconscious inference.” Scientific consideration of microbe cognition goes back at least as far as early enactivism among Chilean biologists in the 1970s (Maturana and Varela 1980, originally published in 1970). However, the mainstreaming (or re-adoption) of these perspectives has accelerated since the 1980s, when the border wars began.
Ramsey (2015) also claims that cognitive science should be understood as the study of cognition, whatever cognition is, but denies that any speculative “mark of the cognitive” should limit our inquiry. I am inclined to agree that it should not, as will become clearer, but disagree with Ramsey that there is therefore no important end served by trying to resolve the problem of cognition. However, cf. Rupert (2013) for a dissenting view, that cognitive science is not aptly characterized as the study of cognition; his dissent is based on the premises that in order for that description to be a happy one cognition must be a well-behaved natural kind, and that cognition is not a natural kind.
Even Buckner, whose goal is to demarcate cognition from association rather than to take a side in the border wars per se, takes his account to have alarming revisionary consequences, e.g. that cases of associative learning, such as taste aversion, are not cognitive phenomena (2015, p. 315). This consequence may be appropriate for highfalutin cognition, but is alarming for inclusive cognition.
As Adam Marushak says regarding contextualist approaches in philosophy of language (and echoing Lewis): “If the house is going to shake, you want the foundations to sway, too” (Marushak, personal communication; cf. Lewis 1973, p. 92).
A scholar of journalism or political science might be reminded here of Daniel C. Hallin’s characterization of objectivity in media coverage (1986). Hallin suggests that a journalist’s claim may fall into either of the “sphere of consensus,” the “sphere of legitimate controversy,” or the “sphere of deviance.” These spheres describe the boundaries between claims that may be taken for granted by journalists, those that call for epistemic distancing or “balancing” evidence, and those that are generally considered unworthy of serious attention. My suggestion is that, in ecumenically characterizing cognition, we make similar distinctions regarding membership in the extension of cognition.
I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for putting this objection to me insistently.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for generous feedback on these ideas from many people, including Joseph McCaffrey, Robert Brandom, Edouard Machery, Mark Sprevak, Zoe Drayson, William Bechtel, three anonymous reviewers, and colleagues at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Glasgow. An earlier version of this paper appears as Chapter 2 of my PhD dissertation, “Cognition in Practice: Conceptual Development and Disagreement in Cognitive Science” (2016, University of Pittsburgh). I received financial support from University of Pittsburgh Department of Philosophy, the University of Pittsburgh Office of the Provost, and the Wesley C. Salmon Fund.
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Akagi, M. Rethinking the problem of cognition. Synthese 195, 3547–3570 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1383-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1383-2