De las tablas estadísticas a los principios matemáticos del léxico

The present investigation subjected the basic tenets and fundamental premises underlying the explanatory framework adopted by cognitive scientists - the

cognitive view – to a detailed philosophical investigation. The philosophical ideas of the later Wittgenstein provided the backbone of this investigation. In the light of the numerous flaws, confusions and misconceptions, which this study has uncovered, the cognitive view emerges as an entirely inadequate framework within which the possession of psychological attributes by human beings could be explained. The discussion in chapter III excavated the most basic claims which cognitive scientists and philosophers make about mind and brain, before proceeding to demonstrate that many of these common and accepted ways of thinking about and explaining mental phenomena make use of a degenerate form of Cartesianism (crypto-Cartesianism, brain/body dualism). This degenerate form of Cartesianism is exemplified, for instance, by the widespread tendency to ascribe psychological attributes to the brain and parts of the brain. However, by investigating the grammar of psychological predicates it has been shown that such ascriptions constitute a violation of mereological principles, which imply a transgression of the bounds of sense. Importantly, these violations tend to conceal the fact that the proposed explanans

does in fact not explain anything, thus leaving cognitive scientists and philosophers with an illusory understanding of many mental phenomena. Following the discussion of mereological errors in cognitive science chapter III also highlighted the profound interconnection existing between the tendency to violate the principles of mereology and the numerous misconceptions and conceptual confusions inherent in the intuitively appealing and widely spread picture of the human mind as a private entity, to whose contents one has privileged access through introspection. It was shown that the mythology underlying this Inner/Outer picture, is the result of profound conceptual confusions regarding the nature of introspection, privacy, and the nature and foundation of language. In the course of investigating this mythology, it was highlighted that claims like “I know that I am in pain”, for example, are not epistemic but grammatical claims. Thus, contrary to popular believe different people can have

the same experience, share the same feeling etc., as inner states stand in need for outward criteria. The analyses and investigations conducted in this chapter were based around examinations of Kenny (1984, 1989) and Bennett and Hacker (2003) and thus covered territory, which may have been familiar to some. However, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the variety of confusions and misconception underlying the cognitive view as well as their subtle yet intimate interconnections, it was of the utmost importance to start the present investigation by following in the footsteps of these principal investigators.

Chapter IV, continued the conceptual investigation initiated in the preceding chapter, by investigating the concept of mind and highlighting the fact that contrary to the cognitive view, which views the mind as a biological information processor, minds are not entities of any kind. Rather, if one feels pressed to give a general account of mind, it is best to adopt an Aristotelian position and think of the mind as the capacity to acquire intellectual skills. To think otherwise constitutes a transition from the metaphorical to the metaphysical. Furthermore, the discussion of chapter IV identified the mind-body problem and the problem of the explanatory gap as two examples of the type of confusion and problem the entity view of the mind gives rise to. In abandoning the entity view of the mind, however, the mind body problem as well as the explanatory gap, dissolve and vanish from view. After concluding the examination of the entity view of the mind, the notion of mental representations was subjected to a thorough scrutiny. This part of the discussion revealed that the cognitive scientist’s understanding of mental representations as (symbolic) descriptions (in the ordinary sense of this term) is fundamentally flawed, as descriptions in this sense are not to be found in the brain. For something to qualify as a symbol, it must have a rule- governed use. Despite intuitions to the contrary, neural activity in the brain, however, does not qualify as a symbolic description of any kind as it lacks a rule governed use. For something to be a symbol there must be correct and incorrect ways of applying it (i.e. the concept of a symbol is correctly only applied to those forms of expression to which a standard of correctness can be applied). The neurons of the brain, however, do neither know nor do they not know what any array of symbols means. Similar difficulties were highlighted and discussed with regard to the notion of representations and maps. As in the case of symbolic representations such systems of representation imply the agreement upon and the usage of conventions, i.e. rules

of representation. And, as in the context of the notion of symbolic representation, there exist no conventions of representation, which are not vindicated by their intentional use by individuals, and which makes them able to apply these conventions. Yet, neither brains nor neurons can be said to employ symbols (or maps for that matter) as they neither know nor are ignorant of what the symbols or maps mean. Similarly, both brains and neurons can neither be said to follow nor can they be accused of failing to follow rules for the use of symbols. Thus, while certain features or stimuli in ones sensory field can indeed be mapped, (that is causally correlated with), onto the firings of cortical neurons, indicating an inductive correlation, talk of mental maps in the sense of neural “communication of meanings by topological analogies”, constitutes a transgression of the bounds of sense. Finally, chapter IV also examined the notion of storing representations in the brain, a claim that is integral to the cognitive view (see above). However, the discussion showed that the notion of a stored representation can only make sense if the representation can be accessed and is available to a person, which could read and recognize the representation and potentially tell somebody what it is a representation of. But cognitive scientists and philosophers have yet to specify the criteria for identifying what counts as storing a landscape representation, for example, in the brain. Yet, as they use the concepts of representation and storage in their customary way when talking about the storage of representations in the brain they unwittingly transgress the bounds of sense.

Chapter V focused on examining the notion of thought and thinking inherent in the cognitive view, viz. the cognitive conception of thought, which portraits thinking as the processing of mental representations in a language of thought (LOT). However, as the conceptual investigation of this chapter showed, the cognitive conception of thinking fails to take into account the polymorphous character of thinking, instead providing an account of the nature of thought which could not be supported by the most rudimentary philosophical, i.e. grammatical, analysis. Above all, it ignores the crucial link between thinking and the expression of thought, a link which is forged through the normative constraints governing the use of concepts in thought, and the various judgments involved in the ascription of concepts. In line with the Aristotelian conception of mind proposed in chapter IV, it was suggested to conceive of thinking as the ability to participate in an interlocking network of rule-governed abilities.