intro

What is cognitive science?
Definition

Cognitive science is a new field that brings together what is known about the mind from many academic disciplines: psychology, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and computer science. It seeks detailed answers to such questions as: What is reason? How do we make sense of our experience? What is a conceptual system and how is it organized? Do all people use the same conceptual system?

The old and the new views

On the traditional view, reason is abstract and disembodied. The traditional view sees reason as literal, as primarily about propositions that can be objectively either true or false. On the new view, reason has a bodily basis. It takes imaginative aspects of reason, metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery as central to reason, rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential adjunct to the literal. [|George Lakoff] and his collaborators have developed several lines evidence that suggest that people use their understanding of familiar physical objects, actions and situations (such as containers, spaces, trajectories) to understand other more complex domains (such as mathematics, relationships or death). Lakoff argues that //all// cognition is based on knowledge that comes from the body and that other domains are mapped onto our embodied knowledge using a combination of [|conceptual metaphor], [|image schema] and [|prototypes].

The traditional account

The traditional account claims that the capacity for meaningful thought and for reason is abstract and not necessarily embodied in any organism. Thus, meaningful concepts and rationality are transcendental, in the sense that they transcend, or go beyond, the physical limitations of any organism. Meaningful concepts and abstract reason may happen to be embodied in human beings, or in machines, or in other organisms-but they exist abstractly, independent of any particular embodiment.

The new account

According to the new view meaning is a matter of what is meaningful to thinking, functioning beings. The nature of the thinking organism and the way it functions in its environment are of central concern to the study of reason.

Categorization

Both views take categorization as the main way that we make sense of experience. Categories on the traditional view are characterized solely by the properties shared by their members. They are categorized: (a) independently of the bodily nature of the beings doing the categorizing and; (b) literally, with no imaginative mechanisms (metaphor, metonymy, and imagery) entering into the nature of categories.

Categorization, cont’d

In the new view, our bodily experience and the way we use imaginative mechanisms are central to how we construct categories to make sense of experience.

More on categorization

Categorization is a central issue. The traditional view is tied to the classical theory that categories are defined in terms of common properties of their members. But a wealth of new data on categorization appears to contradict the traditional view of categories. In its place there is a new view of categories, what Eleanor Rosch has termed the theory of prototypes and basic level categories.

Why the traditional view?

The traditional view is a philosophical one. It has come out of two thousand years of philosophizing about the nature of reason. It is still widely believed despite overwhelming empirical evidence against it. There are two reasons. The first is simply that it is traditional. The accumulated weight of two thousand years of philosophy does not go away overnight. We have all been educated to think in those terms.

Traditional view: objectivism

We will be calling the traditional view objectivism for the following reason: Modern attempts to make it work assume that rational thought consists of the manipulation of abstract symbols and that these symbols get their meaning via a correspondence with the world, objectively construed, that is, independent of the understanding of any organism. A collection of symbols placed in correspondence with an objectively structured world is viewed as a representation of reality.

Objectivism

On the objectivist view, all rational thought involves the manipulation of abstract symbols which are given meaning only via conventional correspondences with things in the external world.

Specifics of Objectivism

- Thought is the mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols. - The mind is an abstract machine, manipulating symbols essentially in the way a computer does, that is, by algorithmic computation. - Symbols (e.g., words and mental representations) get their meaning via correspondences to things in the external world. All meaning is of this character.

More specifics

- Symbols that correspond to the external world are internal representations of external reality. - Abstract symbols may stand in correspondence to things in the world independent of the peculiar properties of any organisms. - Since the human mind makes use of internal representations of external reality, the mind is a mirror of nature, and correct reason mirrors the logic of the external world.

More specfics

- It is thus incidental to the nature of meaningful concepts and reason that human beings have the bodies they have and function in their environment in the way they do. Human bodies may play a role in choosing which concepts and which modes of transcendental reason human beings actually employ, but they play no essential role in characterizing what constitutes a concept and what constitutes reason.

More…

- Thought is abstract and disembodied, since it is independent of any limitations of the human body, the human perceptual system, and the human nervous system. - Thought is atomistic, in that it can be completely broken down into simple "building blocks“ - the symbols used in thought-which are combined into complexes and manipulated by rule.

Sometimes Objectivism is a priori true

Though such views are by no means shared by all cognitive scientists, they are nevertheless widespread, and in fact so common that many of them are often assumed to be true without question or comment.

More on Objectivism

On the objectivist view of meaning, the symbols used in thought get their meaning via their correspondence with things - particular things or categories of things - in the world. Since categories, rather than individuals, matter most in thought and reason, a category must be the sort of thing that can fit the objectivist view of mind in general. All conceptual categories must be symbols (or symbolic structures) that can designate categories in the real world, or in some possible world. And the world must come divided up into categories of the right kind so that symbols and symbolic structures can refer to them.

The New View is Different

The evidence that has accumulated is in conflict with the objectivist view of mind. Conceptual categories are, on the whole, very different from what the objectivist view requires of them. That evidence suggests a very different view, not only of categories, but of human reason in general…

The New View Claims that…

- Thought is embodied, that is, the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it; moreover, the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character.

More…

- Thought is imaginative, in that those concepts which are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery - all of which go beyond the literal mirroring, or representation, of external reality. It is this imaginative capacity that allows for "abstract" thought and takes the mind beyond what we can see and feel.

The New View, more…

The imaginative capacity is also embodied-indirectly - since the metaphors, metonymies, and images are based on experience, often bodily experience. Thought is also imaginative in a less obvious way: every time we categorize something in a way that does not mirror nature, we are using general human imaginative capacities.

The New, Cognitive View, more…

Thought has gestalt properties and is thus not atomistic; concepts have an overall structure that goes beyond merely putting together conceptual "building blocks" by general rules. Thought is thus more than just the mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols.

Some examples:

Fauconnier presents some simple examples of conceptual blending:

The ritual of a new-born baby The boat race / the one-mile race In France the Watergate wouldn’t have hurt Nixon The fence runs all the way to the river Space-Time Compression (Blending)