Since the publication of The Embodied Mind (1991), the cognitive sciences have been turning away from the mind-as-program analogy that dominated early cognitivism towards a conception of cognitive functioning as embodied in a living organism and embedded in an environment. In the past few years, important contributions to embodied-embedded cognitive science can be found in Noe (Action in Perception), Chemero (Radical Embodied Cognitive Scie Rnce), Thompson (Mind in Life), Clark (Being There and Surfing Uncertainty), and Wheeler (Reconstructing the Cognitive World).
[A note on terminology: the new cognitive science was initially called “enactivism” because of how the cognitive functions of an organism enact or call forth its world-for-it. This lead to the rise of “4E cognitive science — cognition as extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted. At present the debate hinges on whether embodied-embedded cognitive science should dispense with the concept of representation in explaining cognitive function. Wheeler and Clark drop “enaction” because they retain an explanatory role for representation, even though representations are action-oriented and context-sensitive.]
The deeper philosophical background to “the new cognitive sciences” includes Hubert Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and J. J. Gibson (who was taught by one of William James’s students). It is a striking fact that embodied-embedded cognitive science promises to put an anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian critique of intellectualism on an scientific (empirical and naturalistic) basis. Embodied-embedded cognitive science is a fruitful place where contemporary cognitive science meets with the best (in my view) of 19th- and 20th-century Eurocentric philosophy.
That’s important for anyone who thinks, with Peirce, that science has some uniquely epistemic position because scientific practices allow the world to get a vote in what we say about it (Peirce contra Rorty).
The philosophical implications of embodied-embedded cognitive science are quite fascinating and complicated. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about the past few days: embodied-embedded cognitive science can strengthen Kant’s critique of both rationalist metaphysics and empiricist epistemology.
Kant argues that objectively valid judgments (statements that can have a truth-value in some but not all possible worlds) require that concepts (rules of possible judgment) be combined with items in a spatio-temporal framework. But Kant was never able to explain how this “combination” happened; and as a result subsequent philosophers were tempted to either reduce concepts to intuitions (as in Mill’s psychologistic treatment of logic) or reduce intuitions to concepts (as in the absolute idealism of Fichte and Hegel). As C. I. Lewis and Sellars rightly saw, however, neither Mill nor Hegel could be right. Somehow, receptivity and spontaneity are both required and they must somehow be combined (at least some degree). But how?
Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” model of cognition (in Surfing Uncertainty) offers a promising option. According to Clark, we should not think of the senses as passively transmitting information to the brain; rather, the brain is constantly signaling to the senses what to expect from the play of energies across receptors (including not only exteroceptive but also interoceptive and proprioceptive receptors). The task of the senses is to convey prediction errors — to indicate how off the predictions were so that the predictions can be updated.
And this bidirectional flow of information takes place between any different levels of neuronal organization — there’s top-down and sideways propagation from the ‘higher’ neuronal levels and also bottom-up propagation from the ‘lower’ neuronal levels (including, most distally, the receptors themselves).
Now, here’s the key move: the bidirectional multilevel hierarchy of neuronal assemblies matches (but also replaces) the Kantian distinction between the understanding (concepts) and the sensibility (intuitions). And it explains the one major thing that Kant couldn’t explain: how concepts and intuitions can be combined in judgment. They are combinable in judgment (at the personal level) because they have as their neurocomputational correlates different directions of signal propagation (at the subpersonal level).
But if embodied-embedded cognitive science allows to see what was right in Kant’s high-altitude sketch of our cognitive capacities, and also allows us to vindicate that sketch in terms of empirical, naturalistic science, it also thereby strengthens both Kant’s critique of empiricism (because top-down signal propagation is necessary for sense receptors to extract any usable information about causal structure from energetic flux), and his critique of rationalism (because the proper functioning of top-down signal propagation is geared towards successful actions, and our only source of information about whether our predictions are correct are not is the bottom-up prediction errors).
And because we can understand, now, both spontaneity and receptivity in neurocomputational terms as two directions of information flow across a multilevel hierarchy, we can see that Kant, C. I. Lewis, and Sellars were correct to insist on a distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, but wrong about how to understand that distinction — and we can also see that Hegel and neo-Hegelians like Brandom and McDowell are wrong to deny that distinction.
Frankly, I suspect not nearly enough! I could be overlooking stuff. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Well, some are better than others, and some try to offer good reason why their inquiry can proceed with little accounting for science.
Then there’s work like McGinn’s work in his book The Meaning of Disgust which the NDPR review politely skewers, eg:
I don;t see much evolutionary thinking in the discussion. I still see a lot of discussion of human language as if it were a formal language.
That is not surprising, since academic and scientific writing are highly formalized, but I don’t see that as typical of human communication.
LOL! Philosophy as an honourable, ancient and modern field and livelihood fades without the depressing, disenchanted atheist ‘light’ coming from KN?! HAHAHA. That’s Franco-English homo(u)r by a ‘skeptic’ Admin at TAMSZ. 🙂
Alan Fox is obviously ignorant of so many contemporary philosophers who are inspiring, interesting, provocative, explorative (not merely regurgurating), cutting edge. KN’s analytic (trained) wanna-be continental myopic USAmerican philosophistry Sell-ars-out-ism is bound to ignominy, at best. But that’s a TAMSZ hero philosopher, to Alan Fox. (Any derogative by atheist comrades is allowed except ‘moron’ is allowed) LOL!
Perhaps language is not acquired, but natural.
BruceS,
Yeah, McGinn is a joke, and no one I know is sad that his career ended in disgrace. His book on the metaphysics of physics was also skewered mercilessly. McGinn, like Nagel and Plantinga, belongs to an older generation of philosophers who could come up with a clever argument and didn’t need to bother themselves with facts about reality. Fortunately, their day has largely passed.
The philosophers I mention in the OP are good examples of contemporary philosophers who are making responsible use of empirical research: Andy Clark, Tony Chemero, Alva Noe.
I don’t work in social and political philosophy, but I do know that many socio-political philosophers are drawing heavily on sociology and psychology (for example, in the study of implicit biases). Ladyman and Ross use a lot of physics in their philosophy of physics, and so do Nancy Cartwright and David Albert. Philosophers of biology like Peter Godfrey-Smith and John Dupre know a lot of biology. Philosophers of science like Heather Douglas and Helen Longino use sociology and history of science in their work. Even the supposedly “pure” logicians like Greg Restall and Graham Priest interact with mathematicians and computer scientists.
The fact is, armchair philosophizing is over. The present and future of Anglophone academic philosophy is interdisciplinary.
There’s a lot of work on non-human animal communication and what it suggests about the evolution of language. The only theorist I’m familiar with is Tomasello, though I’ve long wanted to read Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals. Maybe I’ll read it next, now that I finally unpacked it!
There’s oblivious sophistry. And then there’s ‘KN’.
Yeah, that anti-theist is really an asshole (it’s a word allowed on TAMSZ, because it isn’t ‘moron’, as decided by the ‘authorities’).
A central concept for Clark’s PP (predictive processing) model of neural computation is that of a bidirectional multilevel hierarchy, in which signals are propagating both “bottom-up” and “top-down (and laterally)”. The “bottom-up” signals convey exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive information to cortical and subcortical structures for processing; the “top-down” signals run in the other direction and terminate in the musculoskeletal system.
According to Clark, the PP model applies at least to all mammals, and perhaps (he is willing to suggest) to insects. (I think it would be a fascinating question if the PP model could be applied to octopi!) But humans are a special case.
Clark suggests that language makes possible “top-top” information exchange. He describes a contrast between an experimenter simply telling a human subject what to do (in a cognitive psychological task) and training a monkey to do the same thing. Researchers found that anatomically similar brain areas were active in human and monkey during the test, which means that the monkeys and humans were doing the same thing cognitively — but it took monkeys a year to learn the test, whereas humans could be told how to do it in a few minutes. In the monkeys, the experimenter’s top-down understanding of the task had to be arduously re-created through bottom-up learning process; in the humans, the experimenter’s top-down understanding could be directly conveyed to the top-down understanding of the human subjects. In other words, language enables (limited) brain-to-brain coupling.
This approach suggests to me a slightly new way of thinking about the biological function of linguistic norms: they facilitate brain-brain coupling, at the top-to-top level, by minimizing divergences or differences between the information encoded in different brains. Differences in information (or if you prefer semantic content) are treated as “noise” to be filtered out during linguistic interaction in order to promote collective behavior.
But since each cognitive system is constantly being fed its own unique bottom-up information, and the top-down information is constantly modulated in response to the incoming bottom-up information, the top-to-top information exchange conduit can’t be airtight. It’s constantly “leaky”, so to speak. That’s why I can tell you how I feel (because we can encode very high-level neural representations in language) but I can’t make you feel what I feel (because our propioceptive and interoceptive bottom-up systems are physically isolated, and so are our subcortical structures*).
I think that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up signal propagation, and the idea that language enables brain-brain coupling but only at the top-top level, will give us some new perspectives for thinking about the publicity and privacy of sense and reference.
* However, there are hormonal interactions, mostly mediated through olfaction — a fact nicely exploited by the perfume industry
I’m definitely investing in some different furniture then. I understand Descartes did most of his best work in bed. {And I mean philosophical work, you teenagers.}
Ah, yes — the story of how he was inspired to create analytic geometry while lying in bed and watching a spider weave a web above him.
Descartes is an interesting case here, because he was not only a philosopher but also a hugely accomplished physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to optics, mechanics, invented analytic geometry, etc. He would have been interdisciplinary if there had been disciplines in the 17th century.
Despite my objections to almost every single aspect of Cartesianism, we need more philosophers like Descartes!
The PP paradigm does seem a fruitful source for speculation about an underlying common mechanism for many aspects of the mind/brain (maybe too fruitful, as in Popper characterization of Freudianism? — that is addressed in the BBS paper).
The programmability paper that Clark cites (found here first category) makes some interesting points besides detailing the idea of how public language molds private concepts.
First, it quotes research showing that our private concepts, and our understanding of language, are grounding in sensorimotor representations, not abstract, amodal representations a la Foderian LOT. These modal representations can be interpreted as the higher level models of PP. So the claim is similar to the PP claim that imagination re-uses the models developed for perception; in this case it is language comprehension that reuses those perception models.
The paper also speaks to the earlier exchange in this thread about the role of language in human thought and capabilities. It says that acquiring language enables many human skills besides naming:
Verbal instructions can also be turned inward, guiding one’s own behavior—an idea most closely associated with Vygotsky (1962)—but one that has since received support using more rigorous testing methodologies. For example, labeling one’s actions supports the integration of event representations (Karbach, Kray, & Hommel, 2011), overt self-directed speech can improve performance on such tasks as visual search by helping to activating visual properties of the targets (Lupyan & Swingley, 2012). Conversely, interfering with (covert) verbalization impairs the ability to flexibly switch from one task to another (Baddeley, Chincotta, & Adlam, 2001; Emerson & Miyake, 2003) hinting that normal task-switching performance is aided by such covert instruction.
Finally, although I don’t think Neil would agree, I have always understood his ideas about concepts having essentially private components as being a characterization of your leaky characterization of the public versus private view.
Dennett, Clark, and Hohwy go further than this in speculating about qualia.
Why do qualia seem ineffable and simple? Dennett posits two sources. First, part of making the results of PP perceptual processing available to consciousness in the global workspace involves neural common coding which loses some aspects of the represented properties*. Second, our public language has simplified what we can talk about for ease of communication. Dennett (in the paper linked earlier) notes psychologist Frith supports this general idea:
Chris Frith, for instance, has recently taken up the theme (in conversation) that consciousness has some features because everything in consciousness has to be couched in terms that can be communicated to other people readily.
Clark uses PP (without mentioning it) in his paper Knowing What We Can Do linked above to explain why different sense modalities have a different feel: he says it is because we only have limited conscious access to the represented properties in each modality.
And, finally, Hohwy speculates in his book that evolution encourages perception to have private components because that implies they are independent to some extent and independence of individual inputs increases the reliability of conclusions drawn socially from many individuals.
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* Dennett and Clark’s ideas can be interpreted in a sense versus reference model, I think. If the reference is to the represented property in the PP perceptual model, then the sense is the limited access we have to that model for conscious reporting.
FWIW, Rebecca Goldstein does give a positive review to his recent book on reading some classic papers in philosopher of language.
Although her review is trashed by a philosopher for daring to propose some practical applications of philosophy of language.
(Shout out to Alan F and Petrushka who I think will enjoy that review of a review).
I do find philosophy of language a fun intellectual exercise, like British-style cryptic crosswords, but I also think that all the productive work is now in cognitive science with the scientific investigation of mental representation, how language is learned, and how we are able to use it.
Kantian Naturalist,
re Tomasello,
I’m looking at The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition to download and the extract looks promising. Would you recomment it or any of his other popular books? I think I mentioned Frans de Waal before. I’m just starting to read The Ape and the Sushi Master and there seem similarities in their style and outlook.
From the review:
I see what you mean, Bruce.
Thanks to Denyse O’Leary for pointing me to this new paper studying similarities between humans and macaque monkeys in parts of the brain involved in audio-processing. Suggests the roots of brain development for language processing are deep, the common ancestor living around 25 million years ago.
I might say that philosophy deals with the analysis of unsolvable problems.
That wouldn’t surprise me. I have always been suspicious of claims that language capability is recent or the result of a saltation event.
Clark is blogging about his book in Brains blog. Interesting for some of the references he provides, even if you have read the book.
BruceS,
Thanks for the link, Bruce. I wasn’t aware of it till now. Looks an interesting site.
I had a hard drive failure, so I’m a bit slow. I did have a preliminary glance at that blog post, and it looks to me as if Clark is on a wrong track (or a wild goose chase).
Why am I not surprised?