Structure of Thinking: A Process-Oriented Account of Mind - Hardcover

Weed, Laura E

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0907845274 ISBN 13: 9780907845270

Publisher: Imprint Academic (Ips), 2003

Synopsis

Analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists have long argued that the mind is a computer-like syntactical engine, and that all human mental capacities can be described as digital computational processes. This book presents an alternative, naturalistic view of human thinking, arguing that computers are merely sophisticated machines. Computers are only simulating thought when they crunch symbols, not thinking. Human cognition--semantics, de re reference, indexicals, meaning and causation--are all rooted in human experience and life. Without life and experience, these elements of discourse and knowledge refer to nothing. And without these elements of discourse and knowledge, syntax is vacant structure, not thinking.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Weed is assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In the introduction to Reclaiming Cognition, Raphael Núñez and Walter J. Freeman claim that a revolution is taking place in the understanding of what a human mind is and how it works. Núñez and Freeman observe:

"We believe that the cognitive sciences have reached a situation in which they have been frozen into one narrow form by the machine metaphor. There is a need to thaw that form and move from a reductionist, atemporal, disembodied, static, rationalist, emotion- and culture-free view, to fundamentally richer understandings that include the primacy of action, intention, emotion, culture, real-time constraints, real-world opportunities, and the peculiarities of living bodies."

The Structure of Thinking is a book dedicated to developing some aspects of the fundamentally richer philosophy of thinking that Núñez and Freeman are seeking.

This book has had a very long genesis. The oldest section is chapter ten, The Third Man , which originated as my master s thesis, supervised by Dr. José Benardete at Syracuse University in 1979. That chapter was re-written and folded into my doctoral dissertation, which also included the rest of the chapters, except for the current chapter four, Cognitive Science on Kausation Rather Than Causation which is completely new. I received the doctorate from Syracuse University in 1992, under the direction of Dr. Stuart Thau, to whom I owe many thanks for his guidance and assistance. But chapters nine, The Relation between X-type and Y-type Thinking Processes , and eleven, Is Platonic Heaven all that Pure? have been substantially re-written, as well, and are more new than recycled.

Despite the age of some of the arguments in The Structure of Thinking, I suspect that most of the Imprint Academic audience will still not have seen either them or anything like them. This is so because the form of philosophical inquiry, driven by the machine metaphor, to which Núñez and Freeman referred in my opening quotation, has completely dominated philosophical inquiry, at least in the prestigious universities and journals in the United States, for all of the time period over which these arguments have been in existence. I believe it is important to publish these arguments at this time, and I am most grateful to Keith Sutherland at Imprint Academic for giving me the opportunity to do so, for at least three reasons.

First, I believe the arguments in this book indicate that the twentieth century underpinnings of the logical and mechanical reductivist program in philosophy are basically unsound. The arguments from philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Carl Hempel, J.L. Mackie, Rudolph Carnap, Alan Turing and Gottlob Frege, and from behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, on which dominant philosophers at the end of the century, such as W.V.O. Quine, Daniel Dennett and Fred Dretske have been relying and expanding are basically flawed in their underpinning premises. And even in cases in which the early twentieth century philosophers had it right, their late century followers took some of their arguments in directions that were unsupported by the earlier claims on which they were based. Across the analytical tradition there is a general assumption that a small number of principles, limited to the tools of symbolic logic, computational mathematics, and experimental science, (construed on an early-twentieth century paradigm), are adequate to explain all that exists, and that any purported existents that are not analyzable in terms compatible with those few methods of analysis are fictitious and dispensable entities. Blindness to the need for first-person experience to understand reality, even in science, math and logic, let alone in respects such as language use and understanding of brains and minds has resulted from this devout reverence for too few principles of understanding. The arguments in this book point out some of the flaws and multiple areas of blindness of the dominant but narrow philosophical methodology in the United States, today.

Second, and more specifically, the mechanistic notion of causation with which the dominant tradition has intellectually shackled itself is preventing productive advances in a number of areas of inquiry which I find particularly important such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion and philosophical inquiry into understanding the social behavior of human beings in politics and economics.

Third, I believe now is a good time to bring the philosophical arguments in The Structure of Thinking to the foreground in public intellectual life, because the extensive research on the brain and in the neurosciences that is taking place at present is indicating that the flaws in the logical and mechanical reductivist methodology that I pointed out, starting more than twenty years ago, are seriously hampering the development of new understandings about humans and our world. The genesis of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the importance of David Chalmers arguments in favour of pan- psychism, and the recent development of research methodologies for studying first and second person experience, all indicate that the time is ripe for an intellectual re-examination of the experiential roots of human intellectual life. This book undertakes that task.

Edition details

• Publisher: Imprint Academic (Ips)
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0907845274
• ISBN 13: 9780907845270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208