After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science*

Abstract

We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal-environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some recommendations that we hope will help philosophers interested in the cognitive and neural sciences to avoid dead ends. _____________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction. The philosophy of mind is over. The two main debates in the philosophy of mind over the last few decades about the essence of mental states (are they physical, functional, phenomenal, etc.) and over mental content have run their course. Positions have hardened; objections are repeated; theoretical filigrees are attached. These relatively armchair discussions are being replaced by empirically oriented debates in philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. We applaud this, and agree with Quine that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough" (1966). The purpose of this paper is first to provide a guide to philosophy of mind's successor debates in philosophy of cognitive science, and second to suggest resolutions for some obvious potential conflicts so as to avoid the scholastic pitfalls that plagued philosophy of mind. We will discuss two not quite distinct debates: the first over the spatial and temporal extent of the object of the psychological sciences; the second over the explanatory style of the cognitive and neural sciences. After describing the two debates and setting out the possible positions on them, we will discuss some interconnections between positions and then point to what we take to be some important issues for the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences in the next few years. 2. Debate #1: On Methodological Individualism. Ever since Putnam's declaration that meanings ain't in the head, there has been a vigorous debate over content externalism: is it possible to specify the content of mental states based purely on facts about the brain of the thinker, or must one also take into account features of the thinker's current or past environment? More recently, however this debate has shifted to one over whether the vehicle or content-bearer is confined to the brain of the thinker. The modern incarnation of this debate stemmed from work in connectionist networks by Rumelhart et al 1986. The suggestion there was that the pattern-completing brain was only a proper part of the cognitive system, the rest of which was external to the thinker's body. Rumelhart et al's example was solving mathematical problems on a chalkboard. In such a case, it was argued that the cognitive system included the brain, the chalkboard and the act of writing on the ...

A property cluster theory of cognition

“…Granted, the increasingly toothless definitions opened up space for an explanatory pluralism in which different research methodologies could be explored (Chemero & Silberstein 2008). However, this methodological pluralism suggests a corollary taxonomic pluralism: that different sub-areas of cognitive science now presume distinct notions of 'cognition', and participants in these debates are talking past one another.…”

Intentional Models as Essential Scientific Tools

“…The question of whether phenomenological models can be explanatory in the behavioural sciences is still in debate. Some, for instance, have proposed that we need a more pluralistic understanding of explanation in order to better account for actual scientific practice in the behavioural sciences (Longino 2006;Chemero & Silberstein 2008). What is important to note for the purposes of this paper, however, is the fact that we use phenomenological models for different scientific purposes than those we use mechanistic models for, irrespective of whether each can be explanatory under the appropriate conditions.…”

“…While it is true that we often do not use statistical models to generate explanations in the behavioural sciences, this does not mean that we do not use phenomenological models of any sort to provide explanations in these domains. It has been argued that, depending on the question being asked, and the particular phenomenon under investigation, phenomenological models often do provide us with scientific explanations (Chemero & Silberstein 2008). Similarly, Batterman argues that since some phenomena can only be seen and characterized using phenomenological models, that we ought to consider such models to be explanatory despite their mischaracterizations, or agnosticism, regarding the underlying implementation of the system (Batterman 2000(Batterman , 2002.…”

Explaining features of fine-grained phenomena using abstract analyses of phenomena and mechanisms: two examples from chronobiology

“…At least in these cases, computational models seem to be critical to mechanistic explanation. Other mathematical models, such as those discussed by Chemero and Silberstein (2008), are models of phenomena, not mechanisms. The example from Winfree discussed below suggest a relatively clear way in which these models are explanatory as long as one is clear about what is being explained.…”