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What are cognitive processes? An example-based approach

  • S.I.: Cognition
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Abstract

The question “What are cognitive processes?” can be understood variously as meaning “What is the nature of cognitive processes?”, “Can we distinguish epistemically cognitive processes from physical and biochemical processes on the one hand, and from mental or conscious processes on the other?”, and “Can we establish a fruitful notion of cognitive process?” The present aim is to deliver a positive answer to the last question by developing criteria for what would count as a paradigmatic exemplar of a cognitive process, and then to offer the comparator (or feedforward) mechanism as a convincing paradigmatic example. Thus, the paper argues, given the current state of science, we can indeed establish a fruitful scientific notion of a cognitive process. Nevertheless, it is left open whether the example-based characterization ends up as merely highlighting a fruitful convention within the early-twentyfirst century interdisciplinary investigation of intelligent behaviour in humans, animals, and robots, or whether the examples determine a natural kind or a property cluster.

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Notes

  1. Language documentation is an important endeavour in times in which dialects and whole languages are rapidly dying out. An example is the Berkeley documentation: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/research/field/index.

  2. A description of this moving house can be found at: http://www.drehhaus.de/de/zweite-generation.php.

  3. This illustrates Wittgenstein’s thoughts about concept expressed by the word “game”: “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. [...] Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-aring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (Wittgenstein 1967, PU § 66).

  4. This implies that if we have a mechanism which only explains very rigid behavior without playing any role in producing more complex flexible behaviour, then it is not fruitful to count it as a cognitive mechanism.

  5. This claim is defended together with the background theory that social cognition is mainly mental simulation as described in simulation theory (Goldman 2006); but it is criticized by alternative accounts such as theory-theory (Baron-Cohen 1995; Gopnik 1993), interaction theory (Gallagher 2001; Gallagher and Hutto 2008), and person model theory (Newen and Schlicht 2009; Newen 2015).

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Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, I would like to thank Francesco Marchi, Pascale Willemsen, and two anonymous referees.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150a, 44780, Bochum, Germany

    Albert Newen

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Newen, A. What are cognitive processes? An example-based approach. Synthese 194, 4251–4268 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0812-3

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