Baz, Avner
(2024)
Can Contemporary Cognitive Science Coherently Accommodate Itself?
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Can Contemporary Cognitive Science Accommodate Itself.docx
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Abstract
It should seem obvious that any purportedly comprehensive account of human cognition should be able to coherently accommodate itself—qua an instance of human cognition—where that means accommodating not just the specific tenets that distinguish it from competing accounts, but also the fundamental presuppositions that constitute the framework within which it has been developed and argued for. That seemingly obvious requirement of self-accommodation becomes problematic, I argue, when the cognitive scientist is committed, as most contemporary cognitive scientists are, to a broadly naturalist-physicalist perspective, or framework, and at the same time is moved by empirical findings and theoretical considerations to recognize our active and ineliminable contribution, not only to the sense the world makes to us cognitively, but already to the sense it makes to us at the level of (‘pre-objective’) perception. For the sake of clarity of exposition, this paper presses that difficulty of contemporary cognitive science by looking closely at how it manifests itself in Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty (Clark 2016); but the difficulty is principled and general. To avoid it, without denying the active role we play in the constitution of the world as pre-objectively perceived and as cognitively, objectively represented, contemporary cognitive scientists would need, at the very least, to acknowledge that their commitment to the naturalist-physicalist framework may not itself be justified from within that framework. Having taken that step, they might as well take another, and recognize that a truly satisfying understanding of human perception and cognition can only be attained from a perspective that, though fully attentive to empirical findings, transcends the naturalist-physicalist framework and affords a critical examination of it.
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