| | Science and Philosophy of Mind | For most of human history, researchers did not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy and science. Indeed, until this century, many sciences were thought of as simply branches of philosophy. (To this day, a senior professorship in physics at the University of Cambridge is called the Chair of Natural Philosophy). Then about one hundred years ago philosophers started to think that what they did was very different from any science. Once this split settled in, philosophers started to talk about seeking a kind of knowledge quite different from what scientists seek and using very different methods and kinds of analysis to do so. As has often been noted, philosophers do not need laboratories to carry out their investigations. This by itself seemed enough to make philosophy quite different from most, if not all, sciences. (Partitioning philosophy off from the natural sciences in this way conveniently overlooks the fact that mathematics, linguistics, theoretical physics, archeology, evolutionary theory, and parts of other disciplines such as economics do not use laboratories for their research, either.) In addition, many philosophers believed that science, whatever its power elsewhere, offered little to their enterprise. Philosophy might have something to offer the sciences, ran this line of thinking; in particular, philosophy can help science to get its concepts and the general nature of the scientific enterprise clearer. But the sciences have little to offer philosophy. From the other side and contrary to what the philosophers may have thought, many scientists doubted that philosophy had much to offer science. (This was true in particular of experimental psychology. Philosophical analysis of issues about mind and knowledge… played little role in their thinking.) These two notions—that sciences such as psychology have little to contribute to our understanding of traditional philosophical issues such as knowledge and mind and that philosophy of knowledge and mind has little to contribute to the science of these topics—are really bizarre when you think about them for a minute. Philosophy of mind and psychology are both concerned with perception, belief, memory, reasoning, representation, the relation of cognition to the brain, and so on. Philosophy of language and linguistics are both concerned with knowledge of language and the nature of meaning. How could such central parts of our intellectual tradition as psychology and linguistics have little or nothing to contribute to a philosophical understanding of knowledge and mind? And how could philosophy of knowledge and mind, with its 2,500-year heritage of study of these topics, have little or nothing to contribute to psychology and linguistics? Well, these carefully constructed walls of mutual indifference were bound to collapse, and, we are happy to report, they have. A sense that most of the wide variety of approaches to cognition should work together to enrich one another began to grow about forty years ago. It came together in a very concrete way in the 1970s in the form of a new field of study, cognitive science. Cognitive science is based on the idea that individual approaches to cognition have to influence and be influenced by the widest variety of other approaches if we are ever to develop a deep, comprehensive understanding of human cognition. Just to fill this exciting new idea of combining all the approaches to cognition into a single, unified research program out a little, notice how diverse the initiating influences were. One major force behind the creation of cognitive science was the development of the computer. The first programmable computers were built in England during World War II to assist in breaking German military codes. For hundreds of years, philosophers and mathematicians have speculated that the mind might be something like a vast adding machine, a vast computer, but the invention of the computer gave this speculation some substance for the first time. In the early 1970s computers first became fast, powerful, and convenient enough to offer hope of actually seeing these speculations come true. The second major influence could not have been more different. It was Noam Chomsky's discoveries about the deep, complex structures that underlay language. Nowadays, cognitive science combines artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and other disciplines and is beginning to unite these diverse activities into a single, comprehensive understanding of knowledge and mind. | — Andrew Brook, Robert J. Stainton, Knowledge and Mind – A Philosophical Introduction, Chapter 8 – A New Approach to Knowledge and Mind | Indexes/23 |
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