🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <45gegb$kun@infa.central.susx.ac.uk>
           ronaldl@cogs.susx.ac.uk "Ronald Lemmen" writes:

> I have created a web-page in which I try to bring together information and
> links that might be of interest to those cognitive scientists who are
> interested in non-Cartesian approaches to cognition.  Its address is:
> 
> http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ronaldl/noncartesian.html
> 
> Let me briefly explain what this page is about.
> The large majority of research approaches in cognitive science is Cartesian in
> the sense that it follows Descartes' assumption that the opposition between the
> mental and the physical (or between the subjective and the objective) is
> fundamental. You don't have to be a dualist to be a Cartesian in this sense.
> Materialism and idealism are Cartesian options as well.  Non-Cartesian
> cognitive science does not start from an opposition between mind and world
> (including the body), but it starts with the unity of mind and body.  It
> denies, for example, the common claim in cognitive science and analytic
> philosophy that the relationshp between mind and body is merely a contingent
> one.  Hence, the body and its behaviour are understood as immanently meaningful
> and the mind is understood as essentially embodied.  The body not merely
> harbours the mental, but it IS the mental entity (not the brain).  The focus of
> cognitive science research is no longer on internal mechanisms or
> representations, but on the relations and interactions between body and world.
> At the moment, the Web-page has sections on such topics as conscious
> experience,
> phenomenology, existentialism, embodiment, ethology, Artificial Life, emotion,
> and pragmatism. I would be grateful for any suggestions as to how the page
> could be improved.
> 
> -- 
> Ronald Lemmen,
> email ronaldl@cogs.susx.ac.uk
> 

Anything which challenges the insidious growth of cognitivism has got to 
be a good thing, but from what you say above, I don't see how it difffers
from the 'naturalistic' approach:

    '..there's a tradition which argues that -  epistemology 
    to  one  side  - it is at best a  strategic  mistake  to 
    attempt  to  develop  a  psychology  which  individuates 
    mental  states without reference to their  environmental 
    causes and effects...I have in mind the tradition  which 
    includes  the American Naturalists (notably  Pierce  and 
    Dewey),   all   the   learning   theorists,   and   such 
    contemporary representatives as Quine in philosophy  and 
    Gibson  in psychology. The recurrent theme here is  that 
    psychology  is a branch of biology, hence that one  must 
    view the organism as embedded in a physical environment. 
    The    psychologist's    job   is   to    trace    those 
    organism/environment  interactions which constitute  its 
    behavior.'

    J A Fodor (1980)
    Methodological   solipsism  considered  as  a   research 
    strategy in cognitive psychology.
    Massachusetts Inst of Technology
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1980 Mar Vol 3(1) 63-109

ie:

    'One  may  accept  the Brentano thesis  as  showing  the 
    indispensability   of   intentional   idioms   and   the 
    importance of an autonomous science of intention, or  as 
    showing  the baselessness of intentional idioms and  the 
    emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike 
    Brentano's,  is the second. To accept intentional  usage 
    at  face  value  is, we saw,  to  postulate  translation 
    relations    as   somehow   objectively   valid   though 
    indeterminate in principle relative to  the totality  of 
    speech  dispositions. Such postulation  promises  little 
    gain in scientific insight if there is no better  ground 
    for it than that the supposed translation relations  are 
    presupposed   by   the  vernacular  of   semantics   and 
    intention.'

    W. V. O. Quine
    The Double Standard
    Flight from Intension
    Word and Object (1960), p218-221

-- 
David Longley