Representation, Bee Dances, and Daniel Hutto

Dan Hutto, who does great philosophy of psychology work, recently gave an ENSO seminar titled Beyond Content: Explications, Motivations and Implications. 

This is the ENactive Seminars Online (ENSO), put together by Merek McGann and Mathew Egbert. Dan gives a solid overview of the players working today on whether cognition necessarily entails representation - and what on earth that might mean. For those who don't know, after championing a Wittgensteinian view of folk-psychology theories in the beginning of his career,  Dan has spent the last decade or so as one of the heavy hitters in philosophy arguing that cognition need not entail mental representation. Though he thinks representation has a place in the conversation - post language - he does not think "basic cognition" requires it at all.

Bead Theory and the Problem of Consciousness - Highlights for Holt's writing

E.B. Holt 1915 book continues to be central to my scholarship. Appended to the book are two articles Holt had published the prior year, on "Response and Cognition." There is much overlap between the works, but in a few places I think the articles add significantly. One is in discussion of explanations that Holt disparagingly calls "Bead Theories", characterized by description of a series of events with no reference to the fact that a larger thing is happening. He begins by describing the how other sciences used to be in the same "unstable" state as psychology, and 100 years later, psychology seems to me not to have improved. Remember that a book published in 1915 must have been started quite a bit before Watson's Manifesto, and that this book was influential in the professional development of J.J. Gibson, B.F. Skinner, and J. Jastrow, along with most others who trained at Harvard in the teens or Princeton in the '30s. Indeed many core aspects of Gibson's Ecological Psychology, and Skinner's attempt to separate of "Psychological" questions from "Neurological" questions can be seen here decades earlier:

Before proceeding … we shall probably find useful an illustration from another science, which was once in the same unstable state of transition as psychology is now. In physics a theory of causation once prevailed, which tried to describe causal process in terms of successive ‘states,’ the ‘state’ of a body at one moment being the cause of its ‘state’ and position at the next. Thus the course of a falling body was described as a series of states (a, b, c, d, etc.), each one of which was the effect of the state preceding, and cause of the one next following. This may be designated as the ‘bead theory ' of causation. In asmuch, however, … [the states] gave no clue toward explaining the course or even the continuance of the process, an unobservable impetus (vis viva, Anstoss, ‘force') was postulated. This hidden impetus was said to be the ultimate secret of physical causation. But, alas, a secret! For it remained, just as the ‘consciousness’ of one's fellow-man remains today in psychology, utterly refractory to further investigation.

Pinker should worry about things that exist! (Election Day Special)

In anticipation of today's election (with polls to open in 6 hours or so), I thought I would use this opportunity to complain about Stephen Pinker. Pinker wrote a recent editorial in the New York times that has been making the rounds. In it, he speculates about the causes for the "red state" vs. "blue state" segregation in our country - a familiar "T" shaped pattern in which the central and northern parts of the country vote solid conservative and the coasts vote liberal. The article is actually interesting... but it has one big problem.

Embodied Cognition and the Direction of Inquiry in Psychology

One aspect of the embodied cognition argument regards the direction in which psychology should proceed. My impression (from sparse readings of works from Plato through the middle ages) is that once upon a time you could start psychology at any point, by wondering about any interesting phenomenon, and proceeding from there however you wanted.

Sometime around Descartes, I’m not sure if he started it or just popularized it, everyone decided that you had to start by figuring out so-called higher mental functions. The idea was that if you got a handle on how that stuff worked, you would automatically understanding how lower mental functions. In those days, hierarchies of being were all the rage, so the higher vs. lower metaphor worked. The modern “offline” vs. “online” distinction, taken from the cog-psych computer metaphor, is basically the same thing. This was not a bad hypothesis, but it really hasn’t worked out. It is not clear that all of our studies of thinking, reasoning, planning, imagining, etc., over the past centuries have told us much about how behavior works and, worse, it is also unclear how much it has told us about thinking, reasoning, planning, and imagining.

Physiology and behavioral causation: Part 2

In the last post, I claimed:

...given the questions we typically ask about behavior --- "we" being either psychologists or laymen --- the fact of physiological happenings is typically implicit in the description that starts the question rolling. Though we might not know the details of the physiology, and we might find those details interesting on a personal level, they do nothing to help answer the questions we are asking. Thus, relative to the concerns of the psychologist, physiological facts should rarely be accepted as explanations. 

 And yet, people commonly accept physiological facts as explanations for behavioral or psychological happenings. Why? This question is, I suspect, pretty easy to answer, and the answer is telling about one of the major problems in psychology:

Physiology and behavioral causation

Sorry for the delay, aside from gallivanting around more than usual (Tony Chemero invited me out to teach a class and give a department seminar at Franklin and Marshall), I have been trying to take a bit of a mental break since the Holt book finally came out. To try to get started again, I want to write at least a little bit about the potential difficulties in talking about physiological causation (including neural causation) of behavioral phenomenon.