Demarcating cognition: the cognitive life sciences
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Demarcating cognition: the cognitive life sciences Fred Keijzer1 Received: 24 July 2018 / Accepted: 14 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgments that drive them. Instead, cognition is reinterpreted and developed as a scientific concept that is tied to a material domain of research. In this reading, cognition becomes a changeable theoretical concept that can and must be adapted to the findings within this target domain. Taking humans as the best-established existing example of the relevant material target domain, this central case is extended to include all living systems. To clarify what it is about living systems that warrants their role as cognitive target domain, the new concept of cobolism is introduced as a complement to metabolism. Cobolism refers to the systematic ways in which each living system encompasses structures, processes and external events that maintain the fundamental metabolic processes that constitute the core of each living system. Cobolism is perfectly general, applies to bacterial and human cases alike, and provides a general format to describe wildly different cognitive organizations. It provides a clear target for the cognitive sciences to work on, turning them into what we can call the cognitive life sciences. Keywords Cognition · Cognitive science · Mark of the cognitive · Cognitive domain · Biocognition · Cognitive biology · Cognitive life sciences
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Fred Keijzer [email protected] http://www.rug.nl/staff/f.a.keijzer/index Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 52, 9712 GL Groningen, The Netherlands
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Synthese
1 Introduction The cognitive revolution and the subsequent rise of the cognitive sciences1 initiated a new scientific approach to the study of mind. This approach introduced concepts such as information processing, computation and representation, and applied them to produce a fully naturalized account of various mental processes that previously seemed beyond a clear natural science approach (e.g. Gardner 1987; Green 1996; Boden 2006). Within the cognitive sciences, the notion of ‘cognition’ became a standard term to refer to its target, which initially consisted only of topics like high-level human thought and language, but which widened over the years. ‘Cognition’ provided a scientific, naturalistic phrase that stressed a modern non-dualistic view on the mind that could be articulated in terms of information processing and computation. Nevertheless, the new scientific domain referred to as cognition remained intrinsically bound up with the pre-existing and long-standing notion of the mind. For a long time, the empirical extension of cognition was not explicitly articulated but simply taken to co
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