(Immature) cognitive science and explanatory levels

When I was working on cognitive extension last year, I was particularly taken by the suggestion that cognitive science is not yet a "mature science" (Ross & Ladyman 2010). By this it was meant that criticising a theory for failing to meet some intuitive "mark of the cognitive" presupposes that we have a good idea of what such a mark might look like. In fact cognitive science is still mired in metaphorical and imprecise language, making it conceptually unclear what we are even meant to be studying.

These guys lack the mark of the cognitive.

Bechtel (2005) makes a similar point, although he focuses on the level at which cognitive scientific explanation is aimed. Typically we begin with a characterisation of a phenomenon at either the neural or personal level, whilst seeking an explanation at some intermediary level (say, computational). The problem is that we have yet to settle on a clearly defined level that everyone agrees upon. Bechtel contrasts this with biological science, which appears to have gone through a similar struggle during the 19th century.

This helps explain why there is currently so much debate over what kind of answers we should even seek to be giving in cognitive science. Fodor rejects connectionism as simply specifying a certain kind of implementation, and in response he is accused of abstracting away from what really matters. There's no easy way to solve this problem, although the mechanistic approach that Bechtel (and others) have advocated does seem promising. Ultimately we'll have to wait for cognitive science as a whole to settle (or splinter), but this approach does at least have the virtue of conforming to (apparent) scientific practice.

More on this next time, where I will be attempting to summarise the mechanistic approach to scientific explanation...

• Bechtel, W. 2005. "Mental Mechanisms: What are the operations?" Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 208-13.
• Ross, D. & Ladyman, J. 2010. "The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences." In Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind. 155-65.