Cognitive Closure Generalized

Cognitive Closure Generalized

Transcendental naturalism (TN) is the idea that nature naturally transcends our ability naturally to know about it. Ignorance is real and natural—a biological fact.[1] Cognitive closure (CC) is the fact of being cut off from nature cognitively; not all of it, to be sure, but some of it. TN is a metaphysical doctrine; CC is an epistemological doctrine. Nature is transcendent to the degree to which we are cognitively closed to it. Generalizing, any cognitive organism (conscious, sentient) has a cognitive horizon beyond which it cannot reach—a subjective view it cannot transcend. There are limits to what can be cognized. Nature exists whether it can be cognized or not; reality is not beholden to cognition. Thus, we combine metaphysical realism with epistemological modesty: truth and knowledge do not necessarily coincide. Knowledge is part of nature not the whole of it, and this is a natural fact. In this paper I will expand the concept of closure beyond what we might think of as intellectual closure—what we cannot theoretically understand. It will turn out that cognitive closure is the rule not the exception; indeed, it is a law of nature. This will be a taxonomy of mental limitation, or natural transcendence, depending on which way you look at it.

First, I will give a list, eloquent in itself: perceptual closure, sensorimotor closure, attentional closure, memory closure, temporal closure, knowledge closure, linguistic closure, logical closure, mathematical closure, emotional closure. Most of these will be obvious, some perhaps less so. Perceptual closure is just sensory limitation—what we can see, hear, smell, etc. The visual field is limited, the eyes have limited acuity, and they are not in the back of the head. There is only so much of nature the eyes (any eyes) can take in—this is a complete truism. Sensorimotor closure relates to motor skills: we (and animals in general) don’t have every motor skill, as a matter of principle. Skills tend to be species-specific. Don’t jump off a building hoping to fly. Attentional closure is the familiar idea that we can’t attend to everything simultaneously; indeed, attention is sharply limited, severely bounded. This fact limits our cognitive powers considerably. Attention has limitation built into it. Memory is notoriously partial, unstable, and selective; we remember hardly anything of our past. Short term memory is extremely confined and perishable. By temporal closure I mean knowledge of the past and future: there is an awful lot about both that we don’t possess knowledge of. Nor can we ever know everything about past and future facts; here reality vastly exceeds the humanly knowable. Knowledge closure is what the skeptic fastens onto: we just don’t know much, including what we think we know. Skepticism is only too easy to fall into, because it exposes a weakness in the foundations. Linguistic closure concerns sentence comprehension: sentences easily get too long or involved for us to understand, what with iterations, embeddings, and relative clauses. Logical closure pertains to our ability to construct or follow a logical argument: this becomes a strain even when the number of premises and deductions is relatively small, but we quickly become logically incompetent once complexity mounts. Mathematical closure concerns mainly the infinite and unsurveyable: unsolved conjectures, endless decimals, etc. Emotional closure (which I add for completeness) is the fact that our emotional responses are not as elastic and generous as we might wish: often we just cannot summon compassion when we should, or suppress anger, or love our neighbor. We are emotionally circumscribed beings, like other animals. Then there are individual variations of CC on a vast scale: some people are just better at some things than others, as a result of genetics or upbringing—music, mathematics, writing, observing, science, art, etc. We are all educationally closed to some degree, but some of us are more closed than others (some even find philosophy difficult). The intellect is not an infinitely malleable substance or a universal machine—any more than the body is. We all have cognitive biases and no-go areas.

The upshot of all this is that closure is a fact of nature—a natural law, in biological fact. The law is this: every organism has cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Every organism is built not to know some things and to know others. Ignorance is natural and universal. Let’s call this “the law of biological closure”; it’s like the law of natural selection. Natural selection weeds out the good from the bad; the law of biological closure enables some cognition but precludes other cognition. It is epistemically selective. We can now connect this law with three general types of closure: descriptive, analytic, and explanatory—in ascending order of magnitude.[2] By descriptive closure I mean the inability to describe experience: I cannot describe in words what it is like to feel pain or see red or hear bells ring. I can’t convey these things to people who never experience them (and if they did, I wouldn’t need to describe them). I could convey this by making them experience the things in question, but not by uttering a bunch of words. Thus, people say “I have no words”, and they are right: language is limited as a method of communicating knowledge. Language is communicatively closed with respect to subjective experience. By analytic closure I mean the inability to analyze one’s own concepts: it isn’t easy to analyze concepts, and in some cases downright impossible; we just don’t have that much insight into our own conceptual scheme. The concept of knowledge is still refusing to submit to analysis! The concept of the good is remarkably recalcitrant. The concept of beauty eludes us analytically. If we are honest, we recognize that many of our concepts resist (complete] analysis. The concept of a concept itself is remarkably difficult to articulate. The whole business of conceptual analysis is deeply mysterious. Explanatory closure just means the difficulty of explaining things—consciousness, the origin of the universe, the nature of numbers, meaning, the a priori, etc. This is the field covered by the label “mysterianism” (not my coinage). It is one form of CC among many others (the CC family is extensive and various). Cognitive closure is everywhere, with us always, a fact of nature, a biological law.

But what explains it? Suggestions have been made, but they are not very impressive. Is it that everything good has a downside, like the giraffe’s neck? But if that is so, it isn’t obvious in the cases I have listed: it isn’t written into these cases that closure should hold. Knowledge doesn’t entail its own limitations, or else the concept of omniscience would be contradictory (we can’t disprove God’s existence this way). The limitations appear to be contingent. Is it that everything has a nature and so not another nature? Is it that cognition must be bad at some things because by nature it is good at other things? Is it that the eyes are bad at seeing behind you because they are excellent at seeing in front of you? But this lacks self-evidence, to put it mildly: why should being good at knowing some things make you bad at knowing other things? Some animals do have eyes in the back of their head, after all. Or is it that biological resources are scarce, so evolution doesn’t install cognitive capacities that are energy-costly? This strikes me as on the right lines: it isn’t that omniscience is logically impossible; it’s just economically impossible—just too expensive. Animals have the traits they need to survive, physical and mental, not traits that can do absolutely anything—including things that have zero payoff. There don’t seem to be any cases of closure about things it’s vital biologically to know. The closure is all about things it might be nice to know, but evolution doesn’t care about nice. It cares about necessary or needed. Thus, closure is a fact of nature not logic (or meaning or metaphysical necessity). We are cognitively closed de facto not de jure—like other animals.

Lastly, I want to talk about Russell’s so-called Principle of Acquaintance: “Every proposition we understand is composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted”.[3] This is clearly a closure principle: it says that any proposition not meeting the stated condition cannot be understood by us (but may be by others). And it is not difficult to fail to meet this condition: you won’t be able to understand a proposition about red unless you are acquainted with that color. So, blind people will be semantically closed with respect to such a proposition. Indeed, you won’t be able to understand a proposition about a particular person if that proposition contains a logically proper name of that person (you will need a definite description instead). This is actually a strong empiricist principle, limiting all graspable meaning to acquaintance-based knowledge, and threatening to make a great many propositions inaccessible to us. But even if we relax the principle a bit, as Russell does, we still get a rather restrictive result: all understanding requires some kind of direct acquaintance with respect to all constituents of the proposition. The fact that this principle is so restrictive doesn’t strike us as absurd; it merely reflects the truism of cognive closure. Yet we easily forget that we are imprisoned in our own little world—the world of our senses and inherited cognitive structure. The genes that construct our brains are not miracle workers; they are laborers in a stingy biological universe that won’t finance anything exceeding its limited budget. They are not going to buy a Rolls-Royce if a VW will do. We live in a need-to-know world.[4]

[1] See my Problems in Philosophy (1993).

[2] I discuss this further in “Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy”.

[3] See his The Problems of Philosophy (1912).

[4] Of course, qualifications need to be made to this blanket statement, which do nothing to blunt its force. Clearly, we know many things not necessary to our survival, just as we see and feel things not necessary to our survival; but these are inevitable by-products of faculties that do serve our survival (the same thing is true of other animals). However, there are other areas of potential knowledge that are closed off biologically because they are not by-products of useful faculties. These have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The general point is that knowledge exists because it is useful, like other evolved traits; it doesn’t exist because it would be nice to have it. Solving philosophical and scientific problems is not part of the biological agenda.