The Internal and External Components of Cognition

In his chapter in this volume, Timothy Williamson presents several arguments that seek to cast doubt on the idea that cognition can be factorized into internal and external components. In the first section of my chapter, I shall attempt to evaluate these arguments. My conclusion will be that these arguments establish several highly important points, but in the end these arguments fail to cast any doubt either on the idea that cognitive science should be largely concerned with internal mental processes, or on the idea that cognition can be analysed in terms of the existence of a suitable connection between internal and external components. In the second and third sections of the chapter, I shall present an argument for the conclusion that cognition involves certain causal processes that are entirely internal — processes in which certain purely internal states and events cause certain other purely internal states and events. There is every reason to think that at least a large part of cognitive science will consist in the study of these purely internal causal processes.