Title: Contextual Emergence and the Future of Cognitive Science
Recent debates about the essence of cognitive systems, e.g., computationalism versus dynamicism versus neo-mechanism have limited value. I would say the same is true of debates about the unit of cognition, e.g., just brains, add bodies, add the environment, etc. Just like the identity theory versus functionalism debates before them, these debates have reached the stale stage. While it is important to push back against reification of explanatory models, these debates can easily be deflated by the right kind of integrative pluralism that shows how these various explanations fit together such that the capacities and contributions of the various entities, processes, etc., they range over are self-consistently accounted for. But as a philosopher I’m interested in going beyond mere prediction, control, and explanation to understanding or truth in the sense of the nature of cognitive systems as they are beyond our pragmatic and instrumental concerns. Based on our best science of various complex systems, I will make an argument from inference to the best explanation that contextual emergence best captures the nature of cognitive systems. Contextual emergence says properties and behaviors in a particular domain or scale (including its laws) at best offer some necessary but no sufficient conditions to determine properties and behaviors in another domain or scale. Contexts are characterized by stability conditions (such as various types of constraints), whether these are large-scale dynamical constraints or some other sort. Constraints could include global acausal constraints, symmetry constraints, or their breakings, topological, normative, social, etc. Indeed, for humans and certain other non-human animals, the ultimate understanding of cognitive abilities will be based on mutual bio-psycho-social constraints of various sorts. Contextual emergence thus emphasizes the ontological and explanatory fundamentality of multiscale contextual constraints, often operating globally over interconnected, interdependent, and interacting entities and their relations at multiple scales. Related explanations seek to make explicit the multiscale conditions and transitions rendering particular regions of possibility space accessible or inaccessible. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that 4E accounts of cognition that focus on the tools of complexity science come closest to the picture at hand. But as many have noted, such science is so far limited in its ability to capture rich cognitive abilities and to be scaled-up to bio-psycho-social multiscale networks. Advancing this kind of science will also improve prediction and control. My conclusion is that for anyone who accepts the contextually emergent nature of cognitive systems, our focus should be on advancing such science. I will make some suggestions about how that might be done.
The College of Arts