The Past, Present, and Future of Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

In this paper I will identify the shared ancestry of two opposing paradigms in contemporary cognitive science, and argue that we can draw on this ancestry to help reconcile the two paradigms. The two paradigms are the computational and enactive approaches to cognitive science, and their shared ancestry is the cybernetics research program of the 1940s and 50s. I will first present the two paradigms and describe their contemporary opposition to one another, before exploring the cybernetic foundation that they both share. This, I will argue, contains much of the intellectual resources required in order to enable a fruitful reconciliation between the two paradigms. I will not attempt to fully articulate that reconciliation here, but I will conclude by suggesting a few promising avenues for future research. The computationalist paradigm that is currently dominant in the cognitive sciences, and especially in cognitive neuroscience, takes as its foundational assumption the idea that the primary function of the brain and nervous system is to perform computations (Piccinini 2012). Explanations of cognitive phenomena are given in terms of the performance of computations, and whilst there is some disagreement about the form that these computations take, it is agreed that the positing of computational mechanisms is a central feature of cognitive scientific explanation. Paradigmatic examples of this approach include Marr's theory of vision (1982), Fodor's language of thought hypothesis (1975), and more recently, connectionist and Bayesian interpretations of cognitive computation.