Liz Irvine --- Problems and Possibilities for Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind

[New Waves in Philosophy of Mind]

Problems and Possibilities for Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind

Liz Irvine

The use of empirical work in philosophy of mind is increasing trend, now segueing into philosophy of cognitive science, and the starting point for this chapter. While in favour of this kind of interdisciplinary research, several problems are outlined that raise important questions about the nature of interdisciplinary research across philosophy and the mind/brain sciences. These include how empirical work can be used to support or revise existing philosophical positions, and the role of the empirically-based philosopher in cognitive science. Following this, I suggest an alternative way of approaching questions in philosophy of mind and cognitive science in an interdisciplinary way, based on contemporary work in philosophy of science. This approach is explored through two examples, focusing on the interpretation of first-person data, and questions about the boundaries of cognition. While not the only, or necessarily the best, approach to interdisciplinary work, I suggest that a focus on methodological questions from the point of view of philosophy of science is a potentially invaluable way of pursuing philosophical questions about the mind.

A PDF of the paper is ready to view and download in the attachment below. 

A direct link to the PDF: http://goo.gl/pvGp7

[Joseph Edmund Dewhurst]

I absolutely agree with your diagnosis of the central problem in the extended cognition debate, and more generally with your thoughts about interdisciplinary philosophy. One thing that I've been considering recently is whether the kind of pluralism about cognitive systems that you suggest here would entail something like the elimination of our folk/common-sense understanding of cognition. If questions about cognitive systems aren't as clear-cut as philosophers have assumed them to be, what should we be saying about cognition as such?

This kinds of worry also seems to extend to folk psychological states more generally - if, say, pain turns out to be scientifically speaking more ambiguous than philosophers assume it is, should we just do away with the concept of pain altogether? In your forthcoming book you propose a "scientific eliminativism" about consciousness, and I'm inclined to say that this might be a good approach towards folk psychology more generally.

Apologies if this goes beyond the scope of the paper/chapter, but it's what's on my mind right now, so here it is!

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your comment! 

I don't think that folk concepts or understandings of cognition are problematic per se. More that the expectation that there are clear cut answers about what cognition is/is not, is unfounded, particularly when an interdisciplinary approach to the problem is taken. Cognitive science is not based on a universally agreed on, clear cut definition of cognition, rather that its a collection of examples, with some rough sketch of why they should be grouped together (e.g. rather than studied in a vision science lab). This is typical of scientific practice, not a problem that needs to be solved by philosophers. Scientific concepts, particularly biological ones, are rarely clear cut, and we should not expect them to be.

Folk terms like 'pain' are fine when used in the right contexts. Of course if you start generating (interdisciplinary) theories of pain without much knowledge of how the concept splinters in scientific research (there are lots of types of pain, with different causes and treatments), then your theory may end up being way off the mark. In my recent book (see also work by Machery, Griffiths, Ereshevsky) I suggested that ambiguous terms are fine in scientific practice (and possibly in philosophy), if we're careful with them, either intentionally or just in a way that is embedded in scientific practice. The concept consciousness is so wildly ambiguous and so badly used that I suggested we drop it from cognitive science. Folk terms might be fine though - if people know they're talking about different things but using the same label (e.g. pain, happiness), then there's no problem. But philosophical use of a concept may of course be very different to scientific uses of a concept - if philosophers ignore the ambiguities that scientists are aware of (and careful about), then clearly the philosophy that results from this can suffer. It just means that you have to be really careful when you do interdisciplinary work...

Liz

[cvklein]

Liz, 

Cool paper; I'm very sympathetic. But I wonder, perhaps as a way of clarifying the positive proposal --- who do you see as the audience for Philosophy of the Science of the Mind? Or more particularly: ought it be the sort of thing that scientists themselves should be interested in and take seriously? I'd like to think that it is, and that focusing on methodological questions is a good place to start if that's your goal. Philosophers of Physics and Philosophers of Biology seem to have gotten to this point, at least in some sub-fields. Philosophy of mind occasionally does this -- I think of Fodor's big books, and maybe Dennett and the Churchlands to a lesser extent --- but it seems to me far more rare. 

But it seems to me that philosophers who care about 'methodology' can very easily fall into a kind of hectoring criticism---that, for example, some whole field is philosophically suspect and so worthless. In my opinion, that rarely makes any impact on scientists. (think of the phrase "neural correlate of consciousness". On the philosophy side it conveys some weighty metaphysical and methodological theses. On the psychology side, so far as I can tell, authors use it so they won't get yelled at by philosophers, and otherwise don't much care.)  Far more useful is if you can get to a "do this, not that" sort of critique, right? 

Curious to know what you think. I think this is definitely the sort of issue we ought, as a field, be thinking about right now! 

Colin Klein

[Eric Funkhouser]

I enjoyed reading your paper. I have just one, perhaps nitpicky, challenge.

Your proposal is to introduce more philosophy of science into this interdisciplinary work. But I didn't really see how the introspection example was philosophy of science, per se. In the section on introspection you wrote:

"The approach outlined above favours an investigation of fundamental questions about scientific measurement and the interpretation of data that underlie any scientific enterprise."

I guess I didn't quite see this. I saw the methodological questions you were pressing as being rather specific, as opposed to general as you claim. They were questions like "What is introspection?" and "How reliable is it?" These are methodological questions, sure. But they seemed specific to just the topic of introspection, and they don't seem to be within the philosophy of science. But, I am probably missing something here. The issues you raise about mechanisms, in contrast, are quite general. They don't apply only to extended mind or cognition.

[Liz Irvine]

Ha, that's a good, and not very nit-picky challenge. I guess most of my motivation for challenging introspection and subjective measures of consciousness came from history and philosophy of psychology. So, not philosophy of science per se, but I guess more so than coming from a philosophy of mind perspective. But I do think there are general points here (that I didn't necessarily raise in the paper) - the distinction between phenomena ('experience') and data (reports/button presses), what is typically required of scientific measures (something like reliability, possibility of calibration), what it could mean to have first-person measures or data, notions of convergent/divergent measures and what to infer from them. So sure, it probably doesn't come across as very philosophy of science-ish, but there are deeper questions here that come out in a very specific way when applied to introspection and subjective measures of consciousness. So, good call!

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Colin,

Good question. A meandering reply... 

One of the things I tend to learn (over and over) doing interdisciplinary work, organising interdisciplinary conferences/seminars etc, is that doing good interdisciplinary work as a philosopher is hard work. One of the reasons seems to be that 'interdisciplinary' philosophers, trained largely within philosophy, have little understanding of how science actually works. At a (interdisciplinary) summer school I was involved with recently, the philosophy students there seemed to think that science should just be able to hand them over facts about the brain, that they could then use to 'inform' their philosophy. But of course science is not just a big warehouse of facts...and a lot of the time you realise that the question you want to ask makes no sense in the other discipline you're looking at. So at least part of the intended audience are (younger?) philosophers who want to go down the interdisciplinary route, and to point out that its not as easy as it looks, but that there are lots of interesting methodological questions from philosophy of science where there is the possibility of your question making sense in the long run, and where scientists are maybe more likely to benefit from your work.

So coming to the scientists, yes, I think it is something that they could/should take an interest in. I'm currently working at a neuroscience institute and one of the easier ways to engage with the scientists there is to talk methodology. To some extent they are already interested in this stuff, and sometimes have a really deep understanding of relevant history and philosophy of science issues in their area. So, from the events we're run at our institute, it really pays to talk about methodology - both sides usually end up coming away having learned something from each other.

About hectoring criticism - I've just done that in my book :-) (suggesting the elimination of 'consciousness' as a viable scientific concept, on methodological grounds about measures/mechanisms etc). But hopefully I've done it in a way that properly engages with scientific work on its own grounds, makes positive suggestions, and so on. The aim is at least to get scientists to think about methodological questions in their field more deeply. Whereas 'neural correlate' talk doesn't really do that...I guess it depends whether your criticism is intended to stop scientists sounding like they're making (philosophically suspect) metaphysical claims, or whether its aimed at stuff they care about when not being shouted at by philosophers (like measures and experimental design)....

So anyway, yes, a significant part of my intended audience is always practicing scientists - and I think philosophy of science makes it possible for me to do this in a more engaging way than other approaches. I'd be really interested to hear what other people think to!

Liz

[Ian Phillips]

Hi Liz

Great paper as always. It's very hard to disagree with a lot of what you say, and I'm sure everyone should be thinking about the challenges you raise.

Really my only hesitation, I think much like Eric's, was to query how center stage a 'philosophy of science' approach should be, as opposed to taking a more inclusive approach which looks wherever it can for ideas and assistance, including but not limited to philosophy of science.

For example, I'm very sympathetic towards your diagnosis of what's going on in the extended cognition debate. But insofar as I've thought similar things it's because I've been influenced by work in epistemology and philosophy of perception, work arguing for a context-sensitivity in our attributions of mental states/episodes. Whilst not quite the same as your pluralistic proposal, this seems to fit quite well with many of the remarks you make about our ways of carving up the world being sensitive to our 'explanatory interests'. Yet this way of 'calming things down' isn't a fruit of philosophy of science but (more or less) philosophy of language/epistemology.

Similarly, the issues you raise about introspective access, and report, and the extent we can be realists about mental phenomena strike me as really serious challenges, and can certainly be pressed in the ways you do by pointing to SDT etc. But these issues aren't uniquely associated with philosophy of science. To me at least they look like particular ways of pressing traditional concerns about the mind which one might as easily find Shoemaker grappling with as Snodgrass.

So whilst I'm completely convinced we should look to ideas from philosophy of science, I'm not so convinced any single approach should occupy center stage. We need all the help we can get, and so we should look everywhere for it.

Cheers

-- Ian

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your comment - that's a really good point, which I largely agree with! Of course we should look anywhere that offers new/useful ideas, and one approach should not take center stage (this seems dangerous). Also, as you point out, you can often find similar ideas across different ares of philosophy, so philosophy of science doesn't necessarily offer a gold-mine of undiscovered ideas. 

But, having said all that, I think that right now philosophy of science can offer a lot to current debates, simply because it is (currently) so under-utilised. Also, using other philosophical perspectives, that have developed in relation to other paradigms and case studies, can often shed really new light on 'old' debates that carry a lot of philosophical baggage. Moving away from the standard assumptions and argumentative moves within a field can in itself be really useful, and philosophy of science can (at least sometimes) offer this. So, as an under-utilised source, I think philosophy of science should be used more often, but of course as one source of many. And if more people are doing philosophy of science-ish work without actually calling it philosophy of science, that's fine with me too :-)

Cheers,

Liz

[Ian Phillips]

Especially given the work of yours I know, I wouldn't want to disagree with any of that for a moment.

Cheers

-- Ian

[Glenn Carruthers]

Hi Liz

Fascinating paper and there is lots in it to discuss, sorry if I get too long or ranty here!

 

First I wanted to bring up an issue of interpretation in some of the examples you use. In regards to doing empirically informed philosophy you talk about interpretations of Sperling experiments. I think I’m right that your interpretation of these findings is:

 

“The Sperling paradigm, and the general phenomenon of informational persistence, are not measures of what is experienced, only what is ‘remembered’ and reported when the display is no longer present.” (P.7)

 

Now this conclusion, and I think the reasoning leading up to it depends on their being a clear cut distinction between visual short term memory and experience. I take it that you argue that this kind of memory and visual experience do not have identical contents, which I’m on board with, but there are other ways in which the distinction might be challenged. In particular it could be that whilst there are visual representations prior to them entering STM (or visuo-spatial scratch pad etc) that consciousness of those representations is partially constituted by their effects on STM (and wholly constituted by effects on the broader system). This would be a Dennettian kind of option and to support it we may simply repeat Dennett’s old worries about the possibility of a distinction between Orwellian and Stalinesque theories of visual experience, eg. Do subjects only ever see 4 items (even though they are shown twelve- the show trial option) or do they see twelve and the quickly forget 8 of them (the revisionist history option). How might these options be distinguished experimentally? If they can’t are we to agree with Dennett that this is because there is no moment when the visual representation becomes conscious, but that consciousness of the visual representation (representing vehicle) is just the broader cognitive effects of the vehicle?

 

So my worry is this are we entitled to assume a clear distinction between consciousness and memory? If so what is the evidence for this claim? How might we deal with the worries Dennett has raised?

 

Now you also offer a second idea of what it is that philosopher’s do/have done to date. That being empirically based philosophy and the formation of high level theories. One of your criticisms of such theories is that they sometimes don’t lead to testable predictions, at least not without further implementation hypotheses. But for one of the examples you give this seems a bit unfair. Specifically Prinz’s attention based account of consciousness was responsible for new experiments done by Kentridge to see if there could be such a thing as unconscious object based attention (Prinz of course predicts that there can be no attention to objects without consciousness as attention to objects constitutes consciousness). That’s not a big problem for you, I don’t think, as you have many examples; I just thought you were being a bit (I say a bit as other researchers were needed to test the theory) uncharitable to Prinz.

 

A last point on that kind of work, it seemed to me that all the examples you chose were the big picture examples and I understand that you did this as you have specific worries about that kind of theory. But within this kind of philosophy we also see smaller scale theories. Eg de Vignemont’s explanation of the sense of body ownership in terms of the localisation of bodily senstations on a map of the body which is part of the body schema. Now this is a hypothesis about a specific phenomenon so I don’t see it as being in the same class as the big picture theories you’re worried about. It may also be worth noting that there is a negative (as well as constructive) part of this project, in particular examining hypotheses from philosophers and scientists against literatures that the original authors were unaware of or not well versed in eg. we might test Wegner’s theory of the sense of agency against developmental findings. This again would be a small picture project, but one still part of empirically informed philosophy as its aim is to developed an explanation of a particular set of findings (it just does so by showing that a proposed hypothesis fails).

 

Finally you mention explicitly on page 10 the problem of defining the role(s) of philosopher I cognitive science. This I think is a pervasive theme in your paper so I’m wondering if you could say a bit on why you think it’s important to do this. What’s the value of having a specific philosopher role? What would we lose if there wasn’t one?    

all the best
Glenn

[Mark Sprevak]

Hi Liz! Great paper! I always enjoy reading your stuff, and this is great.

Just a few random comments, please ignore this if it is not useful!

1. Special role for philosophy of science.
   
   I had the same worry as Ian and Eric that philosophy of science (much as I love it) seems to getting more credit than it deserves in your argument. Your cases appear to be able to be read as providing reasons for paying more attention to the details of the science simpliciter, or simply just thinking harder about the issues involved. Philosophy of science could be just one resource among many to draw on in this.
   
   
2. Philosophy of cognitive science as foundations of cognitive science.
   
   I’m also tempted to give philosophy of science a special role in philosophy of cognitive science, but for different reasons from those that you suggest. I see philosophy of cognitive science as aiming, in large part, at performing foundational work in cognitive science (much as philosophy of physics often aims to perform foundational work in physics). Such foundational work typically consists in paying attention to questions that also concern scientists, but to which scientists rarely devote full attention for various reasons (the task of building empirically adequate models is hard enough). So there is an overlap in interests, but still a distinctive role for philosophers to play.
   
   Questions on this approach would include how theories and models in science (can and should) be interpreted—how do they relate to reality, which bits should be realists about, which bits are just instrumental artefacts. Also included would be trying to get clear on foundational concepts deployed in science (probability, causation, law, mechanism). So it’s back to Hempel and Reichenbach for me! Often good work in this area reveals distinctions that are important to practice, but not obvious and previously ignored. So philosophical work can contribute to practice in a better way than providing re-hashes and poor generalisations of scientific models. Often such good inter-disciplinary work is not visible after the event since it gets absorbed in both disciplines.

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Glenn, 

Thanks for your comments, and sorry for taking a while to respond!

About consciousness vs. memory: So I'm not quite sure I understand the motivation for first point. But here goes...I've written more on the Sperling paradigm elsewhere, where the point isn't that memory and experience have different contents (where experience is separate stage or state). Instead, its that there are ways to understand the results of the Sperling paradigm that make no reference to consciousness/experience, and that in fact there is no need to, and that its more methodologically 'respectable' not to refer to consciousness (both in this particular case, and more generally). Clearly there's a lot to say about the information processing going on in STVM, and how that's expressed in reports and other behaviors, but linking this up to 'consciousness' is not so straightforward. Identifying consciousness in a Dennettian way seems to offer an easy way out, and then there's going to be no fact of the matter between Stalinesque/Orwellian accounts. But I have my doubts about the methodological viability of just re-labelling cognitive effects as consciousness. So its not that I think there is a distinction between consciousness and memory, but that its unclear whether we can draw any inferences from STVM beyond its effects on reports. 

Your comment on Prinz - fair enough (I wasn't aware of the experiment, will remember to change that bit :-) ). Clearly there are some pay offs from philosophers acting as cognitive scientists, even if its just getting scientists to think about their own theories in a different light, which is similar to what you note in your comment on de Vignemont. Which I guess goes into your final point on having a role for philosophers. Perhaps we don't really need to specify roles for ourselves, but I think that discussing what we're doing is always a valuable activity - outlining the possible roles, goals, methods that interdisciplinary philosophers can use/fulfill helps keep us on our toes. It can also help in getting scientists to engage with us (many aren't sure what we do, and are often quite unaware of the philosophy of science side in particular). Having some meta-level discussion is useful even if we don't reach any conclusions.

Hope this in some way addresses your questions!

Liz 

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your comments! For your no. 1) - this is becoming a common response. There are philosophy of science issues involved in the examples I used, but clearly there's a lot to deal with the actual science too (though you also find this in philosophy of biology/physics etc). I'm going to have to sell my examples better :-)

Your 2): I totally agree with this, and this is more the direction I'm going now (particularly model construction and inference structures in cognitive neuroscience). Should note this philosophy of science approach more explicitly in the chapter.

Cheers!

Liz

[Glenn Carruthers]

Hi Liz
great! that's really helpful. I just wanted to pick up one little point to push on. If there is no need to refer to consciousness then isn't there one piece of data that can't be explained? Namely that it seems like something to see the array?


Ps- when's the book out?
G

[Liz Irvine]

Ha, so you've just thrown the hard problem back in my face :-)

I have no solution to that, other than the usual its-just-a-whole-bunch-of-cognitive-effects and that we need to get over it. Not very satisfactory I know.

Book is out now, at great expense here, or there's a pdf going round (let me know and I can send you the link - that goes for anyone else who might be interested!)

Cheers,

Liz

[Glenn Carruthers]

Hi Liz

so I didn't mean to throw the hard problem at you. In fact I think there is no such problem (even considered on purely analytic grounds- i.e. playing their game-, there is no non-question begging argument for the problem of consciousness being Hard).

So here is a different way of putting my worry. If consciousness is just effects on the cognitive system, then it can't be the cause of those effects. This seems inconsistent with work in cognitive neuropsychiatry where disorders are explained with reference to conscious feelings, eg capgras by a lack of a feeling of familiarity, delusions of alien control by deficits in the feeling of agency. Your account suggests that revisions to this entire field are needed. What revisions would you suggest, how should it be done?

[Liz Irvine]

Hmm, ok, so maybe what I wrote earlier was misleading. I don't think that consciousness is a bunch of effects in the causal sense, just a name that we give to lots of cognitive 'stuff' (cognitive processes, products, etc). 

So explaining disorders in cog neuropsychiatry by referring to 'stuff' that we want to call conscious is fine (well, not really, but that's another question). If Capgras is due to a lack of a 'conscious' (reported? assumed? affective?) feeling of familiarity, and some delusions are due to lack in 'conscious' feelings of agency, then I'm not going to disagree with that, at least on the grounds of consciousness being a cause or effect. 

Sorry, that might not be very helpful, but I'm not trying to say that consciousness is epiphenomenal or (weirdly) emergent or whatever...   

[Bence]

Thanks for the paper - it's good to have a good bunch of papers on the empirical side of things in the volume.

I may have the same worry as Ian and Eric, but from a different angle. I really like your case studies, but I was not sure that the framing rhetoric was fitting them. 

So the general structure is that philosophy/empirical science interactions are problematic as they are and we can do better by focusing on the 'philosophy of science' method. Leaving aside the worry raised by many above about just how phil sc the new methodology is, I am not convinced that there is a real worry about the existing philosophy/empirical science interactions. 

You say pretty strong things, like there are 'serious problems' (p.23) for contemporary approaches to interdisciplinary work across philosophy and the mind/brain sciences. I'm not sure I see any 'serious problems'. Yes, some philosophers use outdated science and some philosophers only poke around for five minutes on google scholar to find 'empirical support'. But these are hardly 'serious problems' for the general approach. (98% of everything is crap, right?) Your more general worry seems to be that the distinctions the empirical sciences give us are often not the same as the one philosophy gives us. But why is this a problem? I would say that this is the starting point of interdisciplinary philosophy. Now we need to understand why we have this discrepancy and how to resolve it. That's where most of the work is, I think and we do need to consider just dropping our precious philosophical distinctions sometimes. I think this is not too far from the way you think about these things (see your p. 9), but then I wonder whether there really is any 'serious problem' for interdisciplinary philosophy of mind as we know it...

[Glenn Carruthers]

so if consciousness is "just a name that we give to lots of cognitive 'stuff' (cognitive processes, products, etc)." then there are many problems of consciousness? (sorry taking my own direction here!)

[Renée Bleau]

Dear Liz
I am coming to the debate a little late and as a novice philosopher - I just completed an MLItt (conversion course in Phil and hope to go on to do a Phil phd focusing on how methods in social psychology produce knowledge for psychologists) - my background however is academic psychology with specialist interest in research methods in psychology.

I am very interested in what you say about first person data ... but I think that first person data don't constitute a single category of data. If a person is asked in a cognitive type experiment to tell what they see and responds "I see ..." and we do this for 60 subjects in one condition and 60 subjects in another comparison condition - one might say we have first person data. Data that have been reported in the first person. However if a person is asked to tell of their story of how (Biographic Interpretaive Method) e.g. he came be expelled from a school and he starts the telling with "I did a thing that I don't what to speak of" - he may then go on to actually give an account - his first personal accout of what came go pass. Again we have data in the first person.

You may want to say that the second example I give does not "fit" into philosophy of mind - as it is not of immediate perceptual states - but it is a case of reporting of memory states?

Anyway I am just curious what you think of these differences of first person reporting ... Many thanks Renée Bleau

[Renée Bleau]

Please excuse the typos! I am on holiday and using my iPad! "Biographic Narrative Interpretative Method" "what came to pass" etc!

[Liz Irvine]

@Glenn. Bah. There are many problems about cognitive stuff. And there it stops. But you'll have to read the book for the argument for this. (Roughly that 'consciousness' fails a series of methodological tests so cannot be treated as a scientifically viable concept - so all scientific questions at least are about cognitive stuff. There are some suggestions about what to do with all the tricky questions left over...).  

@Bence. The examples/framing not being very philosophy-of-science-y seems to be the main issue with the paper. I think I have ways of defending my position (some noted above), so will fix this!

So - sure if 98% of everything is crap, then standard interdisciplinary approaches are still ok. And yes, there are interesting things to say when scientific and philosophical distinctions don't match up. And sure, as in the discussion with Ian, you can see similar ideas across philosophy, so whether you're calling an approach a philosophy of science one, or one motivated by epistemology, it doesn't really matter. 

Two things worry me however (building on earlier comments, particularly in reply to Colin). One is the common presumption that scientific and philosophical distinctions should match up, or that they can definitely be of use to both disciplines, or that there really is something interesting to say about their relation to each other. To me at least, it seems like much of the 98% crap stems from the assumption that the two disciplines can/must be mushed together somehow. Sometimes, there just isn't much to say, and its fine to leave it like that. So this is a worry about what we think we can achieve from interdisiplinary work. Clearly, there's a lot of interesting stuff we can do, but perhaps rather less than we think there is. 

This is related to worry number two, that at least many philosophers in the younger generations I've spoken to, who engage in interdisciplinary work, have no idea how science works. This means they often have rather unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve, or even how to proceed, with interdisciplinary research. It would be great if everyone in philosophy of mind also had a background in philosophy of science, but many don't. At least being aware of work in philosophy of science, and taking inspiration from it, either in terms of specific questions (or more likely) constraints on questions such that they make sense, would be immensely useful. So this doesn't mean that we should only be doing philosophy of science, but rather that a working knowledge of current scientific research, and relevant philosophy (and history!) of science, really helps to outline what kinds of interdisciplinary questions are coherent and interesting ones to ask, because then at least you understand the basics of how science works. 

So sure, there are lots of people doing 'standard' interdisciplinary research in philosophy of mind who do good work, but as I hoped to show in the examples, there are also ideas from philosophy of science that can sometimes cut through long-standing 'interdisciplinary' debates in philosophy of mind. If we have such a underused but powerful resource, it seems that we should be using it more often (and perhaps that not doing so leads to 'serious problems' with the standard method).

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Renee,

Great question!

We had a workshop in the summer in Tuebingen to partly address the question of what exactly first person data is. Unsurprisingly we came up with no answers. Its not clear that every response a person gives should count as first-person data, but then where to draw the line is tricky. There are lots of measures where its unclear how to categorise subjects' responses - if people are asked 'is there a stimulus present' they can give different responses compared to the question 'did you see a stimulus' - maybe the answer to the second question is more obviously first-person data than the answer to the first. Then again, answers to the first question are presumably based on information that the subject has access to, so its first-person data in some sense. 

(I think the memory example you suggest is not necessarily a problem (at least I don't see why it being a case of memory should make a difference), though others may disagree?).

So, yes, big questions here, but I'm afraid I don't how to solve them!

Liz  

[Renée Bleau]

Hi Liz

many thanks for you reply ...

it is interesting that people give different responses to "is there a stimulus present" and "did you see a stimulus" - but then we know that people do respond differently depending on how a question is phrased or how response categories are presented to them (e.g. if in a 5 choice likert response format the option "neither agree nor disagree" is placed in the 5th position rather than the 3rd as it normally is - this influences how people respond.

I take your point about the memory case not necessarily being a problem - ie I assume you mean that it would straightforwardly be taken as a case of "first-person" data - but again it is open as to what we do with such data? - usually the point of such data is not to reduce it to numbers (and thus it can't be used as quantitative data and be part of a hypothesis testing approach).  If the discourse as data approach is taken - then it is a big question as to what we can do with it.

Anyway - at this point I am musing aloud!  I was wondering though if you had a view on the use of "discourse as data" ...

Also - I note in one of your earlier posts that your book is out but you might be willing to send a .pdf to interested parties - I am certainly interested if it would be possible to send me a copy!

All best wishes - and many thanks for such an interesting paper and discussion. Renée

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Renée,

I'm not very familiar with the discourse as data literature so I'm afraid I have no informed opinion about it! Most of the questions about first-person data that I engage with are about qualitative data. Tony Marcel was at our workshop though, and had lots of interesting things to say about discourse from the point of view as a clinician. He suggested that within discourse there may be several perspectives expressed, so 'first-person' may cover a range of first-person-ish data. How you interpret it (particularly as a clinician) is of course an important question, but one that I'm afraid I don't know much about.

Here's a link to the uncorrected proofs of the book though, hope you find it interesting: http://cl.ly/3X42340T2u44

And thanks again for the good questions!

Liz

[Adrian Downey]

Hi Liz,

Great paper, I really enjoyed reading it and it offers a lot of food for thought. I was just wondering if you could expand a bit more on why we need philosophers in cognitive science at all.  

You suggest that a focus on the methodological questions could be “a potentially invaluable way of pursuing philosophical questions about the mind.” However you also state that “we will have to accept that some philosophical positions will turn out to be mistaken or uninteresting when confronted with contemporary scientific work.”

So it seems that you are saying the legitimacy of philosophical questions about mind is determined by scientific means. Your conclusion is that philosophers are best suited to pursuing methodological questions in cognitive science. But if what counts as a philosophical question about the mind is determined by scientific means and philosophers should pursue scientific methodology, then what is there left in this situation that is distinctively philosophical? Will philosophers end up “having to do cognitive science anyway.”?

I think your paper highlights a lot of analogies with the pre-socratics. The pre-socratics are generally thought of as the first scientists, who only happened to be philosophers, because they lacked the requisite tools to engage in science proper. Perhaps philosophers’ specialty of offering “vague, qualitative, not specifying the boundary conditions” theories is symptomatic that they perform a similar role. Now that psychology, linguistics and neuroscience are firmly established, could it be that the philosophical era of mind has ended?

Even on what you indicate as philosophers’ strong-point (methodology) I don’t quite get why philosophers are particularly suited to dealing with these questions. In your example of biological systems it seems to me that all the work has been done by the biologist. Biologists are doing the work and philosophers pick up on it after that. Why isn't this something a scientist in the relevant field is better equipped to deal with?

I’m just wondering whether there is anything left which philosophers are any better at doing than scientists. Especially given the failings you highlight, maybe it is best they leave the discussion altogether.

To be clear, I don’t mean this as an attack on your position (which in fact I agree with entirely). My research is focused on consciousness, and I often wonder how relevant my training in a humanities subject is to what (I personally consider) a scientific question. It just seemed to me that if you take a lot of what you said then it could possibly follow that philosophy has absolutely nothing to offer to cognitive science. So yeah, if you could justify my personal relevance to cognitive science, then that would be great!

Very Best,

Adrian

[Liz Irvine]

Hi Adrian,

Good questions! I guess the paper is my attempt to vindicate myself as a useful philosopher, so I understand your worries. So here’s a response, drawing on some of the discussions above:

A philosophy of science approach (or whatever else raises similar kinds of questions) is not the only way to engage in interdisciplinary research in cog sci. Just that its an underused resource, and one that I’ve found to be really powerful.

Also, I don’t think that philosophical questions about the mind per se are determined by scientific means, just that if you’re doing interdisciplinary philosophy of mind, then you have to be careful that your philosophical questions make sense in this new context (they may or may not).

Further, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience are far from established – there are still maaaany questions surrounding the phenomena they study, the paradigms and measures and technology they use, etc– this leaves open a lot of opportunity for philosophers to do really useful work.

And of course philosophers are not the only folks who can deal with methodological or theoretical issues. Scientists do this too. But being outside a field can sometimes, by itself, offer a broader perspective on a set of issues, so this is one way that philosophers can say really insightful things. Knowing about the history of a discipline, and general frameworks for thinking about scientific practices, can make it easier to evaluate particular scientific claims and methods.

Finally, you ask what might be ‘distinctly philosophical’. Many researchers I know in philosophy of cognitive science have been asked if what they do is ‘proper philosophy’. Are they trying to answer traditional philosophical questions? Sometimes not. But they are using a range of argumentative strategies to get to grips with questions that are not straightforwardly empirical. That might be philosophy enough for me, and if it turns out that lots of other people are doing it too, that’s also ok!

Hope that helps a bit?

Liz

[Ruth Hibbert]

Hi Liz,

I really enjoyed reading this paper. I am trying to do something very similar to what you recommend (using the methods of philosophy of science to try to answer questions about the mind, in particular in relation to extended cognition). So I wondered how you would respond to a question I received recently: Is there an important difference between the natural and human sciences (perhaps naturwissenschaft and geisteswissenschaft)? So to address it more directly to your paper, is there a problem with using ideas from the study of natural sciences like biology and applying them to sciences of the human mind, like psychology? If the methods and practices of the sciences are different, it seems like a case would have to be made for applying our existing philosophy of science to the cognitive sciences.

Best,
Ruth

[Richard Stöckle-Schobel]

Hi Liz,

Thank you for a really great paper! I enjoyed reading it very much, and think that your point about the importance of philosophy of science for good interdisciplinarily informed philosophy of mind is spot on. I wanted to share a comment, or reflection, or maybe just a reading suggestion, which occurred to me while I read your paper, and which might prove an interesting contribution to the question "What is the role of the philosopher when facing questions the sciences deal with as well".

To state it succinctly, I was reminded of WIlfrid Sellars's essay "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (in: Science, Perception, and Reality, 1963). In the first section of the essay, Sellars discusses what philosophers can contribute to the search for knowledge, broadly construed. From my reading, he draws an interesting distinction between the 'philosophically minded special scientist' and the philosopher - while both aim to have the bigger picture in view, and to reflect not just on the subject matter but also on thinking about the subject matter, they could still be construed as having different projects. The philosophically minded scientist is still primarily concerned with the details of her science, while the philosopher could be expected to reflect on the nature of philosophical thinking in conjunction with engaging with the science. This, of course, can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but at its most basic I would take it to mean: The philosopher should use her knowledge of argumentation, reasoning, common intuitions (folk notions, socio-historical explanatory constructs, ...) when engaging with the hard science, and have an eye on how the specific results or the work of a subfield fits in with the rest of what we know so far and with how we want to understand what we research in. Another thought that comes in here, and which Sellars discusses a bit on the last pages of the essay, is that the philosopher might be best trained to reflect on the normativity of our search for knowledge, and to integrate the scientific picture of the world with the 'manifest image' that traditional philosophy and folk theorising have shaped over centuries. In his view, notions related to the concept 'person' will be the ones that will resist scientific conceptualisations most persistently, and will therefore need a philosophical discussion and exploration to potentially become properly joined to our scientific knowledge. 

Still vague, but maybe in the right ballpark. 

I don't know if this is going to sound especially pertinent to your research interests, but I thought at least the first few pages of Sellars's piece might be of interest when thinking about the general role of philosophy within science.

All the best!

Richard

[Liz Irvine]

@Ruth

This is really good and important question. There are clearly differences between the practices of biology and psychology, but also a lot in common. So, I think that applying ideas from philosophy of science/biology to cog sci is perfectly legitimate, and that this is in fact a really productive way of identifying what is unique to the methods/claims of psychology and what is potentially problematic. I'm working on a project now looking at what the literature on modeling from philosophy of biology/economics can tell us about modeling in cog sci, and vice versa. It seems to be a little arrogant to say that we can't learn anything from philosophy of science, even if there are differences in the practices across disciplines. We can learn a lot from at least considering these other frameworks, and they may offer useful new perspectives on old problems. I'd be really interested to read your work in this area! (Could you email me some papers or links?) So, great question, thanks!

@Richard

Great comment! There were a few papers by Dennett and Thagard and others in a journal special issue on this question at some point, which echoes at least some of the points from Sellars' paper. Maybe I do more of this kind of philosophy than I think I do, or maybe so far I've just avoided it because things always get tricky when you're talking about consciousness :-). I hope to have outlined an alternative approach in the paper though that focuses more on scientific methodology, and how this can affect questions and concepts in philosophy of mind/cog sci. This maybe provides a back-door way into the kind of philosophical approaches you outline above (in particular the history of a discipline and the development of its methods is often really instructive in trying to link back up the scientific and manifest image). So, thanks for bringing this up - something I need to think about more!

Liz

[Adrian Downey]

Hi Liz,

Thanks for the prompt reply and sorry for my late one (had some internet trouble).

Yep, that was very helpful. I decided to get out some psychology and neuroscience books to check for myself, and philosophers are even (occasionally) mentioned. Confidence in the discipline is restored! 

Cheers,

Adrian