Tag: philosophy

“The true beginnings of scientific activity…” (Freud, 1915)

“We have often heard the demand that a science be built on clear and precisely defined basic concepts. In reality, no science, not even the most basic, starts out with such definitions. The true beginnings of scientific activity consist, rather, in the description of phenomena, which are then grouped, classified, and brought into relation with each other. Even when simply describing the material, we cannot avoid applying to it certain abstract ideas, acquired from somewhere or other but certainly not just from the new observations alone.”

—Freud (1915), Drives and their Fates

The rational agent

“… the rational agent is not simply the one who follows the normative canons of logic and probability theory, and neither is she the one who follows adapted heuristics for action choice or ‘somatic markers’. Rather the rational agent is the critically self-aware agent; the one who is aware why she acts, and who modifies her own behaviour according to her self-knowledge. As Karl Popper (1990) wrote, ‘A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right’…”

Lambie, J. A. (2008). On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 946-971

Authority

“… In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

“I bow before the authority of special [people] because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. […] there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.”

—Mikhail Bakunin, What is Authority?

Kropotkin on philosophy

“… in what respect does the philosopher, who pursues science in order that he may pass life pleasantly to himself, differ from that drunkard there, who only seeks the immediate gratification that gin affords him? The philosopher has, past all question, chosen his enjoyment more wisely, since it affords him a pleasure far deeper and more lasting than that of the toper. But that is all! Both one and the other have the same selfish end in view, personal gratification.”

(From An Appeal to the Young by Pyotr Kropotkin)

Henri Frédéric Amiel’s journal—a couple of quotes

(Wikipedia entry over here; translation of journal here.)

Stimulus oriented versus stimulus independent thought?

“[…] respect in yourself the oscillations of feeling. They are your life and your nature […]. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your development be harmonious […]”

Society

“[…] what we call “society” proceeds for the moment on the flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. All vehemence, all natural expression, all real suffering, all careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion, are startling and distasteful in this delicate milieu; they at once destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical architectural whole, which has been raised by the general consent and effort.”

Death and furniture

Found this paper by Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter (1995) amusing as recently I tapped a table to make a point about different levels of analysis. From the intro:

“When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure, and so on, their realist opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as epistemologically constructed or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones, etc. — the reality that cannot be denied), and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, power — the reality that should not be denied). Our aim is to show how these “but surely not this” gestures and arguments work, how they trade off each other, and how unconvincing they are, on examination, as refutations of relativism.”

And the point about levels is made:

“It is surprisingly easy and even reasonable to question the table’s given reality. It does not take long, in looking closer, at wood grain and molecule, before you are no longer looking at a “table”. Indeed, physicists might wish to point out that, at a certain level of analysis, there is nothing at all “solid” there, down at the (most basic?) levels of particles, strings and the contested organization of sub-atomic space. Its solidity is then, ineluctably, a perceptual category, a matter of what tables seem to be like to us, in the scale of human perception and bodily action. Reality takes on an intrinsically human dimension, and the most that can be claimed for it is an ‘experiential realism'”

Reference

Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., & Potter, J. (1995). Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism, History of the Human Sciences, 8, 25-49.

Competence vs. performance

It’s all Chomsky’s fault (Chomsky 1965, p. 4):

“We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). […] A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that have been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.”

So the idea is that people are trying to do C but only manage to do P, because of various constraints. We (children, adults, theorists) see (imperfect) P, and want to infer C. We go to school and go through various rigmaroles to better approximate C. The same distinction is applied in reasoning. Various options: people are irrational (with respect to C); maybe C = P, if we look hard enough to see it. Or bright people have P = C. Or bright people want P = C.

What fascinates me in reasoning is the role played by small groups of experts who produce particular systems of reasoning – logical calculi, probabilistic machinery – along with proofs that they have properties which they argue are reasonable properties to have. Then others come along to use the systems. Hey, this looks like a good logic to know; maybe it’ll help make my arguments better if I use it. Maybe this probability calculus will make it easier to diagnose illness in my patients. And so on. Then somebody else comes along and decides whether or not we’re consistent with a competence theory’s judgements, or whether we’re interpreting things a different way; whether another competence theory (application thereof) might be more appropriate for a given situation or a different psychological model of the situation.

Easy to get tied up in knots.

References

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.

What is cognition?

People often talk about “cognition” as if it means “conscious thinking”. But that’s not how the term is used in cognitive science – at least not always! Here’s a little collection of quotations by folk attempting to define the concept:

1. Williamson (2006) – analytic philosophy:

“Cognition is usually defined as something like the process of acquiring, retaining and applying knowledge. To a first approximation, therefore, cognitive science is the science of knowing. Knowing is a relation between the knower and the known. Typically, although not always, what is known involves the environment external to the knower. Thus knowing typically involves a relation between the agent and the external environment. It is not internal to the agent, for the internal may be the same whether or not it is related to the external in a way that constitutes knowing.”

2. LeDoux (1995) – psychology:

“If cognition is defined broadly to include sensory information processing, such as that occurring in the sensory thalamus and/or sensory cortex, as well as the processing that occurs in complex association areas of cortex in the frontal lobes or hippocampus, then emotional processing by the amygdala is highly dependent on cognitive processing. If cognitive processing is defined narrowly to include only the higher mental functions most likely mediated by complex association cortex, then emotion is not necessarily dependent on prior cognitive processing.”

3. Clark and Grush (1999) – philosophy:

“Is not the notion of a truly cognitive agent, at root, the notion of something like a reflective agent? What is needed, we believe, is just a principled way to make this idea (of a reflective agent) precise and to purge it of its original (but probably superficial) associations with episodes of conscious reflection. […] Cognizers, on our account, must display the capacity for environmentally decoupled thought and the contemplation of options. The cognizer is thus the being who can think or reason about its world without directly engaging those aspects of the world that its thoughts concern.”

4. Neisser (1967) – cognitive psychology:

“… the term “cognition” refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations… Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary.”

References

Clark, A., & Grush, R. (1999). Towards a cognitive robotics. Adaptive Behavior, 7 (1), 5-16.

LeDoux, J. E. (1995). Emotion: Clues from the brain. Annual Reviews of Psychology, 46, 209-235.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Meredith Publishing Company.

Williamson, T. (2006). Can cognition be factorized into internal and external components? In R. J. Stainton (Ed.), Contemporary debates in cognitive science. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.