Radicalizing numerical cognition
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Radicalizing numerical cognition Karim Zahidi1 Received: 23 July 2018 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In recent decades, non-representational approaches to mental phenomena and cognition have been gaining traction in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. In these alternative approach, mental representations either lose their central status or, in its most radical form, are banned completely. While there is growing agreement that non-representational accounts may succeed in explaining some cognitive capacities (e.g. perception), there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of giving non-representational accounts of cognitive capacities such as memory, imagination or abstract thought. In this paper, I will critically examine the view that there are fundamental limitations to non-representational explanations of cognition. Rather than challenging these arguments on general grounds, I will examine a set of human cognitive capacities that are generally thought to fall outside the scope of non-representational accounts, i.e. numerical cognition. After criticizing standard representational accounts of numerical cognition for their lack of explanatory power, I will argue that a non-representational approach that is inspired by radical enactivism offers the best hope for developing a genuine naturalistic explanatory account for these cognitive capacities. Keywords Numerical cognition · Philosophy of mind · Enactivism · Non-representational cognitive science
1 Introduction In recent decades, non-representational approaches to mental phenomena and cognition have been gaining traction in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. The major difference between traditional representational views and these alternative views concerns the role of mental representations (where representations are mental states with content, see Sect. 2). While there seems to be a growing acceptance that at least
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Karim Zahidi [email protected] Center for Philosophical Psychology, Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium
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some forms of cognition can be explained without the use of mental representations, many working within mainstream cognitive science are skeptical about the possibility of giving a non-representational account of higher cognition. For example, Shapiro (2014) challenges radical enactivists to explain numerical cognition without making an appeal to contentfull mental states: “Imagine that you have a contentless mind. None of your mental states have intrinsic, or non-derived, content. What does it mean to say that the word ‘cat’ means cat, or that ‘2 + 3 5’ means that 2 + 3 5? External symbols acquire their meaning from meaningful thoughts—how could it be otherwise?” (Shapiro 2014, p. 489). In what follows I will take up this challenge and will argue that a nonrepresentational approach to cognition can offer a coherent account of numerical cognition that is able to accommodate the wealth of empirical results obtained in the resear
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