Cognitive Pluralism: Unities and Disunities of Knowledge and the Mind

FAIN: FB-52344-06

Steven Horst
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT 06459-3208)

This project explores issues of how knowledge and the mind are unified and disunified. It critiques the prevalent philosophical tradition of holding (a) that the mind is best viewed as a single, indivisible, well-unified entity, and (b) that all knowledge can be united, whether in the robust form of a reduction of all facts to those of basic physics, or in the more modest form of a comprehensive yet consistent world view or frame of reference. An alternative view, Cognitive Pluralism, will be developed and defended, drawing upon convergent evidence from several sciences of cognition: neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, comparative ethology and evolutionary psychology.

Associated Products

Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Book)
Title: Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: This book argues that reductionism has been rejected in philosophy of science and traces the implications of this for mainline views in philosophy of mind, including reductive and non-reductive physicalism and dualism.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Mind/?view=usa&ci=9780195317114
Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press catalog entry
Secondary URL: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Reduction-Philosophy-Post-Reductionist-Science/dp/0199914699
Secondary URL Description: Amazon page for paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-019531711

Laws, Mind, and Free Will (Book)
Title: Laws, Mind, and Free Will
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: In Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Steven Horst addresses the apparent dissonance between the picture of the natural world that arises from the sciences and our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act. If the mind and the world are entirely governed by natural laws, there seems to be no room left for free will to operate. Moreover, although the laws of physical science are clear and verifiable, the sciences of the mind seem to yield only rough generalizations rather than universal laws of nature. Horst argues that these two familiar problems in philosophy--the apparent tension between free will and natural law and the absence of "strict" laws in the sciences of the mind--are artifacts of a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of laws: that laws make claims about how objects actually behave. Horst argues against this Empiricist orthodoxy and proposes an alternative account of laws--an account rooted in a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science. Horst argues that once we abandon the Empiricist misunderstandings of the nature of laws there is no contrast between "strict" laws and generalizations about the mind ("ceteris paribus" laws, laws hedged by the caveat "other things being equal"), and that a commitment to laws is compatible with a commitment to the existence of free will. Horst's alternative account, which he calls "cognitive Pluralism," vindicates the truth of psychological laws and resolves the tension between human freedom and the sciences.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12581
Primary URL Description: MIT Press catalog
Secondary URL: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Mind-Free-Will-Life/dp/0262015250/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324479603&sr=1-3
Secondary URL Description: Amazon entry
Publisher: MIT Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-262-015

Cognitive Pluralism (Book)
Title: Cognitive Pluralism
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: Philosophers have traditionally assumed that the basic units of knowledge and understanding are concepts, beliefs, and argumentative inferences. In Cognitive Pluralism, Steven Horst proposes that another sort of unit -- a mental model of a content domain -- is the fundamental unit of understanding. He argues that understanding comes not in word-sized concepts, sentence-sized beliefs, or argument-sized reasoning but in the form of idealized models and in domain-sized chunks. He argues further that this idea of "cognitive pluralism" -- the claim that we understand the world through many such models of a variety of content domains -- sheds light on a number of problems in philosophy. Horst first presents the "standard view" of cognitive architecture assumed in mainstream epistemology, semantics, truth theory, and theory of reasoning. He then explains the notion of a mental model as an internal surrogate that mirrors features of its target domain, and puts it in the context of ideas in psychology, philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, and theoretical cognitive science. Finally, he argues that the cognitive pluralist view not only helps to explain puzzling disunities of knowledge but also raises doubts about the feasibility of attempts to "unify" the sciences; presents a model-based account of intuitive judgments; and contends that cognitive pluralism favors a reliabilist epistemology and a "molecularist" semantics. Horst suggests that cognitive pluralism allows us to view rival epistemological and semantic theories not as direct competitors but as complementary accounts, each an idealized model of different dimensions of evaluation.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cognitive-pluralism
Primary URL Description: Book page at publisher's website
Access Model: Print and ebooks for sale
Publisher: MIT Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0262034239
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Beyond Reduction: From Naturalism to Cognitive Pluralism (Article)
Title: Beyond Reduction: From Naturalism to Cognitive Pluralism
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: One of the most popular and long-lived approaches to naturalizing the mind is the attempt to reduce mental phenomena to physical, biological, or neural phenomena. Reductionism has held a special allure among philosophers for a number of reasons: the intuitive appeal of part-whole explanations, reductive explanation's resemblance to the axiomatic method in mathematics, its apparent promise as a strategy for unifying different knowledge domains, and the fact that true reductions, when successful, are almost unique in yielding both metaphysical necessity and complete explanations. Reductionism was a very influential view in philosophy of science, both in early modernity and through much of the twentieth century, and some central contemporary issues in philosophy of mind -- the explanatory gap and the hard problem of consciousness -- are framed as claims that conscious mental states (and perhaps they alone) are not reducible to physical phenomena. In fact, however, most philosophers of science today would agree that true intertheoretic reductions are rare even in the natural sciences. I propose an explanation of both the appeal and the failure of reductionism in terms of a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science called Cognitive Pluralism, and then explore what implications post-reductionist philosophy of science has for philosophy of mind. If it is "explanatory gaps all the way down," what are the implications for dualism and for reductive, non-reductive and eliminative physicalisms? Is the mind-matter gap different than other explanatory gaps? And, if the Cognitive Pluralist analysis is correct, is there any hope more generally for a unified science, or that scientific theories generally can provide answers to metaphysical questions?
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.mindmatter.de/journal/issues/mmissue12_2.html
Primary URL Description: Page for journal issue.
Secondary URL: https://www.academia.edu/9979319/Beyond_Reduction_From_Naturalism_to_Cognitive_Pluralism
Secondary URL Description: Article at author's Academia.edu site
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Mind & Matter
Publisher: Mind and Matter

Cognitive Pluralism (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Cognitive Pluralism
Abstract: This talk introduces Cognitive Pluralism, the view that we understand the world through a variety of idealized, domain-specific models, and explores its implications for semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Author: Steven Horst
Date: 3/17/2014
Location: University of Stirling, UK

Implicit Ontologies, Critical Metaphysics, and Cognitive Pluralism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Implicit Ontologies, Critical Metaphysics, and Cognitive Pluralism
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: This talk distinguishes three uses of the word 'ontology' and unites them by way of a Cognitive Pluralist account of the relationship between mental models and the world.
Date: 12/13/2011
Conference Name: Psycho-Ontology (Shalem Center, Jerusalem)

Beyond Reduction: From Naturalism to Cognitive Pluralism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Beyond Reduction: From Naturalism to Cognitive Pluralism
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: One of the most popular and long-lived approaches to naturalizing the mind is the attempt to reduce mental phenomena to physical, biological, or neural phenomena. Reductionism has held a special allure among philosophers for a number of reasons: the intuitive appeal of part-whole explanations, reductive explanation's resemblance to the axiomatic method in mathematics, its apparent promise as a strategy for unifying different knowledge domains, and the fact that true reductions, when successful, are almost unique in yielding both metaphysical necessity and complete explanations. Reductionism was a very influential view in philosophy of science, both in early modernity and through much of the twentieth century, and some central contemporary issues in philosophy of mind -- the explanatory gap and the hard problem of consciousness -- are framed as claims that conscious mental states (and perhaps they alone) are not reducible to physical phenomena. In fact, however, most philosophers of science today would agree that true intertheoretic reductions are rare even in the natural sciences. I propose an explanation of both the appeal and the failure of reductionism in terms of a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science called Cognitive Pluralism, and then explore what implications post-reductionist philosophy of science has for philosophy of mind. If it is "explanatory gaps all the way down," what are the implications for dualism and for reductive, non-reductive and eliminative physicalisms? Is the mind-matter gap different than other explanatory gaps? And, if the Cognitive Pluralist analysis is correct, is there any hope more generally for a unified science, or that scientific theories generally can provide answers to metaphysical questions?
Date: 3/17/2014
Conference Name: Mind-Matter Research Society (Annual Meeting)

Cognitive Pluralism and Biblical Truth (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Cognitive Pluralism and Biblical Truth
Author: Steven Horst
Abstract: Cognitive Pluralism is introduced in order to provide the basis for a Biblical hermeneutics that sees Biblical texts as providing a number of idealized models for understanding God and God's relation to human beings.
Date: 10/26/2009
Conference Name: Philosophy and the Bible (Shalem Institute, Jerusalem)

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