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General Preface GENERAL PREFACE Dov Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods Whenever science operates at the cutting edge of what is known, it invariably runs into philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and reality. Scientific controversies raise such questions as the relation of theory and experiment, the nature of explanation, and the extent to which science can approximate to the truth. Within particular sciences, special concerns arise about what exists and how it can be known, for example in physics about the nature of space and time, and in psychology about the nature of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of science is an essential part of the scientific investigation of the world. In recent decades, philosophy of science has become an increasingly central part of philosophy in general. Although there are still philosophers who think that theories of knowledge and reality can be developed by pure reflection, much current philosophical work finds it necessary and valuable to take into account relevant scientific findings. For example, the philosophy of mind is now closely tied to empirical psychology, and political theory often intersects with economics. Thus philosophy of science provides a valuable bridge between philosophical and scientific inquiry. More and more, the philosophy of science concerns itself not just with general issues about the nature and validity of science, but especially with particular issues that arise in specific sciences. Accordingly, we have organized this Handbook into many volumes reflecting the full range of current research in the philosophy of science. We invited volume editors who are fully involved in the specific sciences, and are delighted that they have solicited contributions by scientifically-informed philosophers and (in a few cases) philosophically-informed scientists. The result is the most comprehensive review ever provided of the philosophy of science. Here are the volumes in the Handbook: Philosophy of Science: Focal Issues, edited by Theo Kuipers. Philosophy of Physics, edited by Jeremy Butterfield and John Earman. Philosophy of Biology, edited by Mohan Matthen and Christopher Stephens. Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by Andrew Irvine. Philosophy of Logic, edited by Dale Jacquette. Philosophy of Chemistry and Pharmacology, edited by Andrea Woody and Robin Hendry. vi Dov Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods Philosophy of Statistics, edited by Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm Forster. Philosophy of Information, edited by Pieter Adriaans and Johan van Ben- them. Philosophy of Technological Sciences, edited by Anthonie Meijers. Philosophy of Complex Systems, edited by Cliff Hooker and John Collier. Philosophy of Earth Systems Science, edited by Bryson Brown and Kent Peacock. Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, edited by Paul Thagard. Philosophy of Economics, edited by Uskali Ma¨ki. Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by Martin Stokhof and Jeroen Groenendijk. Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord. Philosophy of Medicine, edited by Fred Gifford. Details about the contents and publishing schedule of the volumes can be found at http://www.johnwoods.ca/HPS/. As general editors, we are extremely grateful to the volume editors for arranging such a distinguished array of contributors and for managing their contributions. Production of these volumes has been a huge enterprise, and our warmest thanks go to Jane Spurr and Carol Woods for putting them together. Thanks also to Andy Deelen and Arjen Sevenster at Elsevier for their support and direction. INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE Paul Thagard This Handbook provides informative and insightful treatments of many of the key current issues in the philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The purpose of my introduction is to provide an overview of this branch of philosophy of science. Because I hope the handbook will be useful for scientists and students as well as philosophers, I begin with elementary expositions of the fields of psychology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of science. I then describe the fundamental epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical questions that arise in the practice of science, and sketch the forms they take in psychology and the other cognitive sciences. Finally, I preview the chapters in this Handbook. 1 PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE Psychology, the investigation of human mind and behavior, goes back at least to Plato and Aristotle. However, it became an experimental science only around 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory. Philoso- phers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant had developed many interesting conjectures about how minds work, but experimental tests of psycholog- ical theories began only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Psychological theorizing was gravely limited from the 1920s to the 1950s by the dominance of behaviorism, the view that scientific psychology must restrict itself to the study of observable behavior. But since the 1960s scientific psychology has been cogni- tive as well as behavioral, allowing for the postulation and experimental testing of mental structures and processes that are not directly observable. Many theoretical ideas in psychology over the last fifty years have originated from computer science, because the development of digital computers in the 1950s provided a powerful way of thinking about mechanisms by which information can be processed. Psychology is now part of cognitive science, the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, which also embraces the fields of neuroscience, ar- tificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. In the past decade, neuroscience has made rapidly increasing experimental and theoretical contribu- tions to psychology, because of the advent of brain scanning techniques that pro- vide ways of observing neural processes. Psychology also overlaps with artificial intelligence in the development of computational models of thinking, and with linguistics in the study of how minds understand and produce language. In ad- dition, psychology overlaps with anthropology in the study of cultural aspects of Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of PsychologyandCognitiveScience Volume editor: Paul Thagard General editors: Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard and John Woods c 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved x Paul Thagard social cognition, and with philosophy in a concern for fundamental issues about the nature and explanation of human minds. The philosophy of scientific psychology must be distinguished from enterprises that have been popular in philosophy: “philosophical psychology” and armchair philosophy of mind. These enterprises assume that it is possible to learn about the mind from introspection, ordinary language, or thought experiments that gen- erate conceptual truths about what minds must be like. In contrast, psychology is largely practiced today by means of behavioral and neural experiments that provide data used to evaluate theories about underlying mental structures and processes. Attention to introspection, everyday language and thought experiments may be useful for generating hypotheses about such structures and processes, but they are useless for evaluating hypotheses. Hence I want to sharply distinguish philosophy of psychology and cognitive science from approaches to philosophy of mind that attempt to ignore scientific developments. The point of philosophy of psychology is not to develop conceptual truths about minds, but rather to deal with philosophical issues through close attention to developments in scientific psy- chology and the allied areas of cognitive science. All of the essays in this handbook take a scientific rather than an armchair approach to the philosophy of psychology. 2 PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE Philosophy is the investigation of fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and morals. According to some philosophers, philosophy is inherently different from science in that it can use pure reasoning to acquire ab- solute certainty in answers to these questions, but no one has ever managed to generate a set of answers that seemed unassailable to anyone but their generators. The view of philosophy I prefer is naturalistic, seeing philosophy and science as strongly interconnected attempts to understand the world, including the operation of human minds. Naturalism does not proclaim that philosophy is reducible to science, because philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and morals are more general and more normative than questions that are usually investigated in empirical science. Philosophical questions are more general in that they do not concern the particular kinds of entities and processes investigated by a science such as the plants and animals studied in biology; rather they concern the general nature of existence and our knowledge of it. Moreover, philosophi- cal questions differ from scientific ones in being normative as well as descriptive, concerned with how the world should be as well as how it is. Despite their generality and normativity, philosophical questions are intimately connected with descriptive, scientific ones. The connections are best seen by con- sidering the three main branches of philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, asks whether people know any- thing, what we know, and how we know it. It has often been pursued in an a priori fashion,
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