Cognitive Psychologies

Cognitive Psychologies

Epistemologists distinguish a priori and a posteriori knowledge, thus establishing a grand dichotomy—an undeniable dualism. But this duality is composed of a plurality of cognitive faculties: vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch (as well introspection and proprioception). Traditionally, we are said to have five senses, each operating differently; these differences are not trivial, anatomically or phenomenologically. It is a positive classificatory move to group them all together under the heading “the senses”. Other animals, or conceivable aliens, might have further senses. It is a pretty mixed bag. But we don’t see similar divisions on the a prioriside; here people just talk of Reason or Intellection or Rational Intuition. One gets the impression that it is all much of a muchness, a homogeneous collection. But is that really so? Is there just one rational faculty that gets deployed in different domains? Wouldn’t that be strange if the sensory side is so heterogeneous; wouldn’t we expect significantly distinct a priori sub-faculties? I am going to suggest that there are; indeed, that there are approximately five of them. In fact, this has been staring us in the face for lo these many years; it’s a mixed bag here too.

Let’s distinguish the following kinds of a priori knowledge: logical, geometric, numerical, ethical, and semantic. Think of these as separate competences, faculties, or modules. They have distinct subject-matters and operating principles—as different as seeing and smelling. They don’t correspond to distinct and distinctive anatomical structures on the body, but they do correspond to distinct and distinctive neural circuits (we may surmise). I don’t need to say much about what they each are—that is obvious enough—but we can note that I distinguish geometric from numerical (I don’t just say “mathematical”) and I include ethics with malice aforethought. Each has a different subject-matter and no doubt works differently, as for example with geometry and ethics. There is no need to suppose that ethics is geometric. By semantic I simply mean the knowledge that concerns analytic relations and the like. I put logic first because it seems to me the most fundamental and general. A lot can be said about each category and its relations to the other categories, but my point is just that these are genuinely distinguishable types of their subsuming genus (Wittgenstein might say they are linked only by family resemblance, and one would see his point). My thesis, then, is that there is as much variety here as there is on the sensory side; in fact, more variety. I would even speak of many a priori “senses” (the OEDdefines “sense” as “an awareness of something or feeling that something is the case”). There are multiple types of a priori awareness—a plurality of awarenesses. We can accordingly say that there are as many intellectual senses as there are bodily senses, thereby accentuating the affinity. We sense (verb) in different modalities in both areas. We have separate organs of intellectual sense (noun). You could have one intellectual organ but not another—say, be a mathematical genius who is an ethical dunce, or an excellent semanticist who is a lousy geometer. The faculties are dissociable. You could be brilliant at one but mediocre at the others. They are each comparable to the language faculty as conceived by Chomsky (a distinct “mental organ”). Call this “reason pluralism”.

Now several questions arise. Is there any natural mapping from one area to the other? Vision and logic, hearing and number, touch and geometry, taste and ethics, smell and meaning. Some of these pairings are more compelling than others; none strikes us intuitively as exactly on the money. But you never know: sometimes deep structure reveals unexpected areas of overlap. Seeing and logical insight seem related, as do taste and ethics (“That’s disgusting!”). What is the likely evolutionary order? I rather think logic came first, geometry second, number third, ethics fourth, and linguistics fifth (which is why I listed them above in that order). Could it be that the intellectual developed from the sensory in evolutionary history? Could the latter be precursors to the former with much modification in between? Not impossible—some of ethics must have roots in taste and smell, and arithmetic might have originated from geometry in the pre-historic brain (as feathers evolved from scales). Structurally, then, the two areas are quite alike—a motley collection of disparate faculties whose differences are as important as their similarities. It is the usual situation of modularity within broad general categories, an assemblage of organs with different functions and internal architecture. Not psychology but psychologies. The rational mind doesn’t work in just one way.

I have so far omitted to discuss what we call introspection. Here I want to repeat the same basic story—plurality of natural kinds not uniformity. We don’t have one homogeneous faculty of introspection but several—in fact, five. I will speak of “self-sensing” in conformity to my previous broad use of “sense” (noun and verb). Then I wish to suggest that we have five types of self-sensing faculty, corresponding to sensation, cognition, emotion, will, and imagination. We are self-aware of each of these categories in ways that vary with their subject-matter. Awareness of pain is not like awareness of thought, for example: pain is located subjectively in the body, but thought is not. Self-sensing is as various as sensory sensing and intellectual sensing; we just don’t perceive the various mediating organs, as we do for the bodily senses. And self-sensing is so elusive that we have little concrete idea of its underlying heterogeneity. So, in total, we have fifteen kinds of sensing (apprehension, awareness) not three. A whole field of study opens up regarding these multifarious modes of self-knowledge. How does the knowledge work in each case? In the case of imagination, knowledge of intention is crucial, but irrelevant in the case of visual perception. Did all these types of introspection evolve at the same time, and are any of them fundamental? Does introspection align with the perceptual faculty or the intellectual faculty? Is it a posteriori or a priori? It has always sat uneasily between the two, half one, half the other. It tests the old dichotomy of a priori and a posteriori. So, the five varieties of self-knowledge are genuine additions to the ten we have already recognized. The knowing mind really is a zoo of many epistemological species. We need an epistemology compartmentalized.[1]

[1] Note too that each separate cognitive module is itself granular: vision is famously divided as to color and shape, conscious and subconscious, intra-modal and inter-modal processes. There are sub-faculties within faculties. Maybe in ethics we have two types of ethical reason, corresponding to consequences and motives. It is complexity all the way down. We are not aware of most of this, so we tend to oversimplify and homogenize; but the mind and brain are products of millions of years of fine-grained evolution, richly layered. The mind is a great many things jammed together (like the body)—coordinated but highly differentiated. Our folk taxonomy is far too broad-brushed to catch psychological reality in its finely differentiated objective nature.