Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and the Embodied Mind
The approach to the view of mind, meaning, thought, and language that I develop in this book draws on cognitive science research over the past three decades, placed within a perspective on experience, nature, cognition, and values that I find most comprehensively and powerfully articulated in the pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey. I begin, therefore, with an account of why I find pragmatism to be the most compelling philosophical framework within which to explore the bodily sources of meaning, understanding, and reasoning. There are similar insights on these important topics in the phenomenological investigations of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but in my own philosophical education I have felt the deepest resonances with James and Dewey, who paid considerable attention to the best science of their day as they addressed key problems about mind and thought.
Pragmatism and cognitive science have long had a rocky relationship, but recently it has improved dramatically. Early on, they were like two characters in the standard plotline of so many romantic comedies, who start off intensely disliking each other, noticing each other's faults and disagreeable traits. Eventually, however, fate brings them together, the sparks begin to fly, and they realize that they had a deep connection all along, though they were both blind to it. The early days of their relationship were fraught with suspicion, misunderstanding, and even hostility. The cognitive scientists ignored pragmatist philosophy, and the pragmatists either ignored or actively criticized the sciences of mind as they understood them. The chief reason for this was that, in its early adolescent stages of development, cognitive science was grounded on assumptions that were mostly incompatible with classical pragmatism. The situation was made even worse by the fact that many pragmatist philosophers accused the cognitive sciences of scientism, fearing that scientific theories of mind were bound to be overly reductionist in spirit and would fail to plumb the depths of mind, thought, and language. Consequently, until recently there has been very little recognition — from either party — of the great potential for a mutually beneficial working relationship between pragmatists and cognitive scientists. Or, to put it in today's somewhat pathetic romantic vernacular, it has only been in the last few years that the two have been able to "hook up."
Such a suspicion of cognitive science among pragmatists is ironic, given that Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey each championed the integration and co-evolution of philosophy and the sciences. These classical pragmatists made extensive use of the best available biological and cognitive science of their day in developing their views of mind, knowledge, and value. If they were alive today, I have no doubt that they would appreciate the importance of cognitive science research for the philosophy of mind and language, and they would see the importance of a pragmatist framework within which to understand the contributions of the sciences of mind. I propose to explore some of the shared ideas and perspectives that underlie the promise for a creative relationship between pragmatism and contemporary cognitive science.
Two Different Conceptions of Cognitive Science
So, what was it that kept the future partners feuding for so long? Why couldn't pragmatists and cognitive scientists get along together? The key to the answer is that earlier incarnations of cognitive science — which George Lakoff and I (1999) have dubbed "first-generation cognitive science"— rested on a somewhat disembodied conception of mind that was completely at odds with the embodied and action-oriented pragmatist understanding of mind, thought, and language. First-generation cognitive science was a blending of analytic philosophy of mind, information-processing psychology, generative linguistics, model theory, computer science, and artificial intelligence research. Its orientation was functionalist in the narrow sense that it took mental thought processes to be formal algorithmic operations on abstract meaningless symbols that could supposedly be run on any of a number of suitable hardwares (machines) or wetwares (biological organisms). Many functionalists are materialists who do not think "mind" and "body" are two separate ontological realities, but their view can still be labeled "disembodied," insofar as they think that an account of mental operations does not depend on the particular makeup of the body or other material that instantiates the functional program they call mind (Fodor 1975). Consequently, they do not think that the very structures of our thought and reasoning are determined by the nature of our bodies and brains — at least, not in any deep way. Furthermore, most functionalists assume that sentence-like propositions are the core of meaning and thought, and so they employ formal logic, propositional attitude theory, and speech act theory to represent the range of possible mental states and operations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that many pragmatists tended to dismiss first-generation cognitive science as being reductionist and disembodied in character, while cognitive scientists of this persuasion returned the insult by either ignoring or rejecting what they perceived to be just one more speculative and scientifically unsupported philosophical worldview unconnected to their empirical research. In my romantic comedy analogy, we would say that, in their mutual ignorance, arrogance, and disdain, the two partners were all too ready to point out each other's manifold faults, while remaining blind to their own faults and unappreciative of each other's respective virtues.
Fortunately, by the mid-1970s, the plot took an unexpected turn. One of the characters began to grow and change. Cognitive science underwent a makeover of substantial proportions. This new "second-generation," or "embodied," cognitive science was naturalistic, antidualist, emergentist, nonreductionist, and aware of the need for multilevel explanatory frameworks — just like pragmatism! A number of scientific research programs began to discover the importance of the body in the constitution of mind and thought. For example, research in cognitive psychology was revealing how human conceptual systems depend both on the nature of our bodies and brains, and also on the nature of our environments (Lakoff 1987; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Barsalou 1999). The new orientation known as cognitive linguistics began to explore how meaning is grounded in our sensory, motor, and affective processes and how most of our abstract concepts are metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2006; Feldman 2006). Cognitive neuroscience began to provide at least somewhat psychologically realistic neurocomputational models of embodied cognitive operations, including cross-domain neural connections whereby sensory-motor processes are recruited for so-called "higher" cognitive functions (Feldman 2006; Lakoff and Narayanan, forthcoming). But the growth and change was not just one-sided. Some pragmatist philosophers have grown over the last decade to appreciate the need to base our accounts of mind, thought, and language on the best empirical scientific work available (Solymosi and Shook 2014; Schulkin 2012). Although most of the people doing the scientific research and modeling today are still largely ignorant of pragmatist philosophy, the convergences between second-generation cognitive science and pragmatism are quite striking.
In this chapter I want to briefly explore some of the more important shared perspectives that speak to the possibility of a rich and very constructive ongoing collaboration between embodied cognitive science and pragmatist philosophy.
Areas of Convergence between Second-Generation Cognitive Sciences and Classical Pragmatism
Naturalistic, Multilevel Methods for the Study of Mind
By a naturalistic perspective on mind, I mean the view that what we commonly call "mental" phenomena, as well as all cultural phenomena, are part of nature. Naturalistic approaches typically share a materialist ontology, and so they deny the existence of supernatural and transcendent entities, agencies, and causes. Consequently, the empirical methods of inquiry utilized by the natural and social sciences are deemed appropriate and necessary for the study of all aspects of human cognition and symbolic interaction.
However, all naturalisms are not the same. There are differences concerning which methods of explanation are believed to be able to provide an adequately rich account of mind, thought, and language. For example, strong reductionist naturalism claims that in a suitably mature science of mind (which does not yet exist) all the relevant phenomena will be explained using only assumptions and methods employed in a single discipline, such as biochemistry or, perhaps ultimately, physics. Eventually, so the story goes, all our "higher-level" functions and processes (consciousness, perception, thinking, reasoning, willing, etc.) will be reduced to events and causes of the sort investigated in the physical sciences.
There is an alternative, less reductionist, conception of naturalism according to which a fully satisfactory theory will ultimately employ multiple levels of explanation, where each form of explanation is appropriate for a particular emergent level of functional organization within a creature in ongoing interaction with its environments. This second version might be called a pluralistic naturalism. For example, William Bechtel (2008) observes that since mechanisms consist of parts working together to produce whole functional units, reduction to the operations of the parts will be a key element for explaining the behavior of those wholes. However, these various functional wholes are sometimes part of larger, more extensive systems, and therefore each of those wholes will be caught up in broader causal patterns of interaction that may not be operative at the lower level of the individual parts. Consequently, although there will be some inter- and intralevel reduction possible, an adequate explanation of complex cognitive and affective phenomena will involve multiple levels of organization and will require different explanatory models and methods to capture the fullness of the phenomena being explained. Bechtel summarizes:
A final feature of mechanistic explanation that should be noted is that, insofar as it emphasizes the contributions made by parts of a mechanism to its operation, a mechanistic analysis is, in an important sense, reductionist. However, insofar as it also recognizes the importance of the organization in which the parts are embedded and the context in which the whole mechanism is functioning, it not only sanctions looking to lower levels but also upward to higher levels. ... Thus, far from sanctioning only a focus downward on the components, a mechanistic perspective as well requires an account of engagements with other systems at the same level and, potentially, of the constraints imposed by being incorporated into a higher-level mechanism. In fact, therefore the mechanistic perspective is inherently multilevel. (2008, 21–22)
Bechtel's focus is primarily on the nature and operations of mechanistic models, and the methods he countenances are mostly those of various sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, molecular biology, dynamical systems theory, etc.). Pragmatists would insist that the natural sciences are not the only appropriate methods of inquiry, because other critical and interpretive methods may also prove necessary to explain the full range of cognitive phenomena at different levels of organization and complex interaction. Consequently, we would expect some methods to be appropriate at the cellular level, others required for an adequate explanation of the autonomic nervous system, others fitting for the wholebody organization of its various subsystems, and still other methods necessary for a complete explanation of social and cultural phenomena.
This broader pluralistic conception of naturalism is shared by many cognitive scientists and nearly all pragmatists. It is naturalistic in the sense that it understands humans to be complex, highly evolved, embodied dynamical systems in ongoing interaction with their environments. It is pluralistic insofar as it sees increased complexity of organism-environment interactions as giving rise to emergent qualities and functions, and thus requiring multiple explanatory models that are appropriate for each of the emerging levels of organization.
The Primacy of Continuous Organism-Environment Interactions
The view I am developing here is fundamentally dependent on the idea that the locus of all experience, meaning, thought, communication, value, and action is the ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment. You can only think what your brain, body, and environment (physical and cultural) allow you to think. You can only mean and communicate what your brain, body, and environment (with its physical and cultural aspects) allow you to mean and communicate. You can only know what your brain, body, and environment allow you to know. Consequently, any view that assumes a fundamental ontological dualism that locates the mind, thought, meaning, or value as merely within the subject and places "the world" (or any subset thereof) as outside the mind is already misguided from the start.
It is very tempting to regard mind as consisting of a set of pre-given capacities whose structures and formal operations are not determined by the environment in which they operate. According to this view, the environment might supply the content, but not the structures, of cognitive operations. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James presciently warned against this temptation as follows:
Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, reasoning, willing, etc. were explained, almost without reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer insight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst. (1900, 3)
Those scientists and philosophers who began to realize that organisms are clusters of interrelated habits of perception, movement, feeling, and action soon also saw that habits incorporate aspects of our environments. This means that habits are not just structures or dispositions internal to organisms, but instead stretch out into the world and incorporate dimensions of our environments. Dewey regarded this fact as the key to developing a genuinely nondualistic philosophy. He observed that habits are internal and external all at once: "Habits are arts. They involve skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or craft, and objective materials. They assimilate objective energies and eventuate in command of environment" (Dewey [1922] 1988, 15–16). He illustrated this fundamental ontological fact (i.e., that habits embody and project into aspects of their environment) by observing that
habits are like functions in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of air as truly as of the lungs; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of stomach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs. ... Natural operations like breathing and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done by the environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions. (Dewey [1922] 1988, 15)
The primacy of ongoing organism-environment interactions means that all the discriminations we make within our experience are just that — namely, recurring patterns of that interactive process that we notice and respond to, given our particular bodily capacities, needs, values, and social relations. The vast majority of these "noticings" are not conscious acts; rather, they are the result of what our brains and bodies, through nonconscious neural processes, allow us to experience and to focus on, given our physical makeup and our interests at the present moment. Dewey ([1925] 1981, [1938] 1991) emphasized that our conscious reflective processes of thought depend on, and are rooted in, these mostly nonconscious selections of qualities, patterns, and relations that organize experience. There is no inner homunculus or executive center doing the selecting, either at the nonconscious or conscious levels of processing. We are simply tuned up — through the evolutionary history of our species, and through our individual development — to attend only to certain kinds of affordances in our environment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
