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Philosophy of cognitive science
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Short Description: within the philosophy of science, on par with philosophy of biology, philosophy of ... As for the philosophy of cognitive science, its fate has been closely ...
Content Inside: Daniel Andler: Philosophy of cognitive science. 15/06/07 p. 1 This is the unedited author's final version of a chapter to appear in A. Brenner & J. Gayon, eds., French Philosophy of Science. Contemporary Issues, Springer. Philosophy of cognitive science Daniel Andler The rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by a considerable amount of philosophical activity. No other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. Philosophical work relevant to cognitive science has become a sprawling field (extending beyond analytic philosophy) which no one can fully master, although some try and keep abreast of the philosophical literature and of the essential scientific developments. Due to the particular nature of its subject, it touches on a multitude of distinct special branches in philosophy and in science. It has also become quite a difficult, complicated and technical field, to the point of being nearly impenetrable for philosophers or scientists coming from other fields or traditions. Finally, it is contentious: Cognitive science is far from having reached stability, it is still widely regarded with suspicion, philosophers working within its confine have sharp disagreements amongst themselves, and philosophers standing outside, especially (but not only) of non-analytic persuasion, are often inclined to see both cognitive science and its accompanying philosophy as more or less confused or even deeply flawed. The sensible way to go under the circumstances, or so one might judge, would be to pick a sample of salient topics, in the present case, philosophical discussions of some central foundational issues, in the hope thereby of giving the reader a sense of what the field is about. This however is not the path I propose to take. There are two reasons for choosing another tack. The negative reason is that there is now available a plethora of excellent expositions, of any length one might desire, from one-page summaries to chapter- or volume-length introductions, of central topics in philosophy of mind (which constitutes in turn the core of what most philosophers think of as philosophy of cognitive science: more on this in a moment)1. Producing one more such exposition seems hardly worth the effort. The positive reason is that philosophy of science in general has a number of goals not all of which consist in elucidating foundational issues; for example, there are issues of methodology; there are conceptual problems linked to empirical issues which seem not yet ripe for direct scientific resolution by available means. But there is also the more general concern of providing a perspective on the structure and dynamics of a field, its relations to other areas of inquiry, its purported limitations or misconceptions, its future directions. This 1 Including abundant web resources: Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy - http://plato.stanford.edu/; Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/; Internet Encylcopaedia of Philosophy -- http://www.iep.utm.edu/; Field Guide in the Philosophy of Mind (Nani, M. & Marraffa, M., eds.) - http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field; / Chalmers, D., Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography - http://consc.net/biblio.html
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