Cognitive psychology and the philosophy of science

Why cognitive psychology?

It might not be immediately apparent why my study of the philosophy of science devotes so much time and space to cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Why am I bothering with Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Jordan Peterson? How, exactly, does the study of human cognition link up with philosophy of science? I’ll address these questions by looking at the dissimilar roles of cognitive psychology and science in the philosophy of James Ladyman and Bernard Lonergan.

First, a prefatory note on terminology: cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience are not strict synonyms. They are a cluster of importantly related terms and disciplines which inspect different aspects of similar and related phenomenon. I will use them interchangeably because Ladyman and Ross appear to do so in Every Thing Must Go and because Lonergan wrote in a time when such distinctions were not as clearly drawn as they are today. Ultimately, I take all three of these disciplines to revolve around the same question: what light can analysis of our cognitive processes shed upon the nature of human knowing and, more specifically, on scientific inquiry?

Why cognitive psychology for James Ladyman?

In Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman and Ross defer to the authority of cognitive science on multiple occasions. As an example, in their chapter “Rainforest Realism and the Unity of Science,” in which they discuss the role that Daniel Dennett’s real patterns play in their scientific ontology, they are willing (in principle) to be eliminate the theory of mind if cognitive science should determine that mental concepts do not track real patterns (1). However, the precise role that cognitive science, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience plays in epistemological justification is unclear.

As good naturalists, Ladyman and Ross claim to follow W.V.O. Quine’s project of naturalizing epistemology. Simply put, this means that epistemological concerns and questions should be taken up by empirical psychology. From this viewpoint, epistemology is treated as a chapter of psychology and whatever methods are employed by empirical psychology should be brought to bear upon epistemology. 

But adequately addressing the place of cognitive science in Ladyman and Ross’s scientism requires some comments on scientific method.

Now, my primary concern is to understand what the relation of scientific knowing is to other forms of human knowing. Implicitly, this concern presupposes that science operates according to certain rules which provide some way of demarcating science from non-science. Anticipating this position, Ladyman and Ross declare that “there is no such thing as ‘scientific method,'” by which they mean that there is “no particular set of positive rules for reasoning that all and only scientists do or should follow.” (2) Instead, Ladyman and Ross speak of science as a set of institutional error filters. “Thus, science is, according to us, demarcated from non-science solely by institutional norms: requirements for rigorous peer review before claims may be deposited in ‘serious’ registers of scientific belief, requirements governing representational rigour with respect to both theoretical claims and accounts of observations and experiments, and so on.” (3)

But this seems only to move the question about the nature of scientific methodology back a step rather than eliminate it altogether. How do these scientific norms and institutions vet the information and proposals that come to them? By what standards do they evaluate the data? What rules or principles do they use to assess the hypotheses they assess? Further, what professional rules or metrics do scientists use to organize the data they represent and submit to such institutions for examination? Surely scientists know, even as individual persons, what sorts and forms of data are likely to count as “scientific” prior to submitting it to these institutions for their assessment.

Ladyman and Ross’s suggestion that there is “no particular set of positive rules” obfuscates the matter. It is not enough to assert that scientific institutions and norms possess exclusive epistemological authority simply because they provide filters that prevent human beings from falling into error while investigating the objective character of reailty. More precisely, how are we to tell scientific institutions apart from, say, theological institutions or political institutions? Ladyman and Ross provide no criteria for separating these institutions from one another. And it will not do to say that it is those institutions that turn out to provide true descriptions of the objective nature of the world which will be called scientific.

Behind Ladyman and Ross’s claim, then, there must be some tacit methodology that distinguishes these various institutions, all of which consider themselves to make claims about the objective character of the world. But since it is unstated, I am unclear precisely what it is.

Where are the epistemological criteria that separate good science from bad science, pseudoscience, and non-science? Shifting the demand for epistemological justification to a different context neither answers nor dissolves the question.

Returning to the role of cognitive science: once the question of the epistemological underpinning of scientific norms and institutions is taken up, what role does cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience play in that answer?

Ladyman and Ross are aware of their answers here may be greeted with skepticism:

This might seem to be special pleading on our part. It might be thought that, after thundering about our intention to scourge the land of bad metaphysics, we’ve now just admitted that we can’t even exactly say what bad metaphysics is. However, while our point above is obviously ‘pleading’ of a sort – don’t ask us to do the impossible, please – our pragmatist framework of assumptions saves it from being ad hoc. We demarcate good science – around lines which are inevitably fuzzy near the boundary – by reference to institutional factors, not to directly epistemological ones. (Again, this reference is indirectly epistemological, and not irreducibly sociological, if the institutional factors that make science epistemologically superior themselves admit of epistemological justification, as they do.) This in turn implies that our principle must have the status of a normative heuristic, not that of logical analysis. It also suggests a strategy for rendering the requirement of ‘specificity’ less vague. We can do this not by reference to representational (syntactic or semantic) properties of hypotheses themselves, but by reference to well-understood norms of scientific practice that are identified empirically. (4)

Still, their principal shortcoming is the failure to provide epistemological justification for the scientific norms and institutions that they declare to be epistemologically authoritative. While I am sympathetic to the epistemologist who would first assume the existence of knowledge and then go on to analyze it, this move neither answers nor dissolves the fundamental questions. An account of science’s epistemic success must be given, all the more so by the advocate of scientism. And, for the advocate of scientism, one would expect cognitive science to play a central role in providing such justification.

Why cognitive psychology for Bernard Lonergan?

Lonergan’s approach to epistemology in Insight is profoundly practical, even personal. The first half of the work is devoted not to a theory of knowledge, but to taking the reader through the process of recognizing himself as a knower. It is a pedagogically structured exercise which examines the operative cognitional processes of those engaged in accepted epistemic disciplines, such as science and mathematics, and which demonstrates how these same processes are operative in every instance of human knowing.

This practical and personal approach to knowing is guided by three questions:

1. What am I doing when I am knowing?
2. Why is doing that knowing?
3. What do I know when I do it?

The first half of Insight, then, is dedicated to an extended examination of the recurrent and universal cognitional structure inherent to all forms of knowing. Only afterwards does he articulate what might be called a theory of knowledge. Cognitive and empirical psychology, then, are central to Lonergan’s work in epistemology.  

 Cognitive psychology in my work

My treatment of Lonergan here has been brief, but in agreeing with his methodology, it is natural that I would spend some time with the literature of cognitive science as it pertains to understanding the relation between science and non-science, or commonsense. 

Often advocates of scientism seem to believe that claiming exclusive epistemic authority for science is the only means of taking science seriously and that to acknowledge epistemological rivals to science somehow undermines the truth of scientific claims. Yet I find it odd that Ladyman and Ross are silent about the epistemological underpinning of science and, by extension, seem to pay lip service to cognitive science and psychology. Alternatively, in a sense Lonergan begins from cognitive and empirical psychology, thereby providing the epistemological underpinning of science which Ladyman and Ross fail to provide. 

It seems to me that the philosophy of science which can provide epistemological justification for the scientific endeavor should be considered to take science most seriously.

Notes

1. James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. p. 254.
2. ibid., p. 28.
3. ibid., p. 28.
4. ibid., p. 33.