Horst - Cognitive Pluralism

Steven Horst

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-03423-4

eISBN: 978-0-262-33361-0

10987654321

For Doretta

To the best of my recollection, the idea of cognitive pluralism first occurred to me during an NEH Summer Institute on Meaning held at Rutgers University in 1993. Some initial explorations of the theory found their way into two previous books, Beyond Reduction (2007) and Laws, Mind, and Free Will (2011), where I presented cognitive pluralism as a way of explaining disunities of scientific understanding. Although the main arguments of those books did not depend on cognitive pluralist speculations, many readers made it clear that they found cognitive pluralism to be the books most interesting and engaging thesis; and I had intended, even before publishing them, to write a stand-alone work on cognitive pluralism once they were complete. Between the time it took to produce those books and the demands of academic life, it has taken quite a while to bring this book to completion. Looking back, I see that much of the early drafting was done during a sabbatical supported by an NEH Fellowship in 20062007. It was not until a subsequent sabbatical in the fall of 2014 that I was able to pull together an enormous amount of draft material written piecemeal over the years and compose the remaining chapters. The anonymous referees who read the prospectus confirmed my suspicion that what I had pulled together was too large for one book, and the volume you now have before you is the result of separating out the material on cognitive architecture, epistemology, and semantics found here from further discussions of metaphysics, which will be reframed into a separate volume.

During the writing process, the book went through a number of different visions of its scope and intended audience. Several chapters, particularly ones aimed at introducing material such as the history of globalist and localist views in neuroscience and the attempts of some historically important philosophers to deal with questions about unities of mind and understanding, did not make the final cut. These are not, for the most part, things that could be published as professional articles, but might be of interest to the educated public, as well as fellow academicians. I hope, as time permits, to make some of these orphans presentable and make them available to interested readers at my website at http://shorst.faculty.wesleyan.edu/ and eventually at an online noetic orphanage of their own.

Over the years, I have had many fruitful interchanges at talks and conferences, as well as in print, concerning some of the ideas that have found their way into this book. It is with no small fear of leaving out some who deserve greater credit that I mention any in particular, but I am especially mindful of the occasions afforded by visits to the Society for Mind-Matter Research, the University of Stirling, Universitt Mnster, the Shalem Center, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford, Mount Holyoke College, Elizabethtown College, the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, and the University of California campuses at Riverside, Santa Cruz, and San Diego. I would also like to thank Rob Cummins, Jay Garfield, Yoram Hazony, Nancy Cartwright, and Joseph Rouse, who have in various ways been supportive of this project over the years. Particular thanks go to David Danks, who read and commented on much of the manuscript; Michael Silberstein, who has on several occasions engaged issues about cognitive pluralism in print; and William Seager and Harald Atmanspacher, who commented, along with Silberstein, on a target article (Horst 2014) on cognitive pluralism while I was pulling the book together. Philip Laughlin at MIT Press has been the very model of an acquisitions editor throughout the publication process. Thanks also to a group of Wesleyan undergraduates who partook in a seminar on cognitive pluralism that included draft material for this book.

I should also like to extend my deep personal gratitude to Doretta Wildes, not only for being understanding on all the occasions when I absented myself when in the grip of an idea that had to be written down while the muse still sang, but also for all the other fine things she has brought into my life.

May 14, 2015 (Feast of the Ascension)

Middletown, Connecticut

When I was an undergraduate, one of the books that had the greatest impact on my thinking was J. L. Austins (1962) How to Do Things with Words. That book, based on his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard, was the seminal work in speech act theory, which became my first philosophical love as a student. I am not going to talk about speech act theory in this book. Rather, I mention Austin and his book as a kind of model for what I would like to accomplish here, which is not so much to engage one of the big contemporary debates in philosophyor even those of greater longevitynor to say that some such debate is all balderdash, but rather to draw attention to some things that have not received much philosophical notice, even though they are right under our noses.

Here is the opening text of Austins lectures:

What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts. The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically.

It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a statement can only be to describe some state of affairs, or to state some fact, which it must do either truly or falsely. Grammarians, indeed, have regularly pointed out that not all sentences are (used in making) statements: there are, traditionally, besides (grammarians) statements, also questions and exclamations, and sentences expressing commands or wishes or concessions. And doubtless philosophers have not intended to deny this, despite some loose use of sentence for statement. (Austin 1962, 1)

Austins main point here was that, in giving so much exclusive attention to statements, and even more narrowly to one fact about themthe fact that they can be true or falsephilosophers of his era had ended up largely ignoring all the other things that might potentially be of interest about language, some of which, in the end, might have important consequences even for our understanding of statements and their truth values.

My point is in a similar vein. Briefly, it might be put something like this:

Philosophers have placed particular emphasis on a number of topics about thoughts and language, each of which is in itself quite respectable: the semantic values of concepts and words, the truth conditions of judgments and sentences, the justification of beliefs, and the forms of inference that are truth preserving. Comparatively little attention has been given to a topic of equal importance, one that might in the end have important implications for theories of semantics, truth, epistemology, and reasoning as well. One name we might give this topic is