Science Friction: Phenomenology, Naturalism and Cognitive Science

Recent years have seen growing evidence of a fruitful engagement between phenomenology and cognitive science. This paper confronts an in-principle problem that stands in the way of this (perhaps unlikely) intellectual coalition, namely the fact that a tension exists between the transcendentalism that characterizes phenomenology and the naturalism that accompanies cognitive science. After articulating the general shape of this tension, I respond as follows. First, I argue that, if we view things through a kind of neo-McDowellian lens, we can open up a conceptual space in which phenomenology and cognitive science may exert productive constraints on each other. Second, I describe some examples of phenomenological cognitive science that illustrate such constraints in action. Third, I use the mutually constraining relationship at work here as the platform from which to bring to light a domesticated version of the transcendental and a minimal form of naturalism that are compatible with each other. 1. Beginning in the Middle Recent years have seen growing evidence of a fruitful engagement between phenomenology in the contemporary European tradition (that is, phenomenology as pursued by thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and cognitive science. This intriguing development marks a positive shift in the diplomatic relations between these two mighty intellectual edifices, since, historically 1 For book-length examples, see: F.J. Varela, E. Thompson and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); S. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); M. Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); E. Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); S. Gallagher and D. Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: an Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008); and M. Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: from Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). This is not an exhaustive list. 135 doi:10.1017/S1358246113000076 ©The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 2013 speaking, their ‘conversations’ were either frosty or downright hostile. For example, phenomenological insights were often wielded in order to expose certain supposed limits, or even the fundamental misguidedness, of cognitive science as a branch of knowledge. The benchmark for such arguments was probably set by Hubert Dreyfus’s seminal, phenomenology-driven analysis of why artificial intelligence (AI) has so far failed to produce machines that are smoothly and flexibly sensitive to context-dependent relevance, in the way that human beings routinely are. One might wonder why it should matter to cognitive science if the research programme of creating intelligent machines (or of creating them in a certain way) is shown to be suspect. The fact is that AI, in its role as a source of basic concepts and models for mechanistic explanations of intelligence, is plausibly at the very core of cognitive science, so any injurious attack on AI is arguably a blow to the very heart of cognitive science. Dreyfus’s critique was just such an attack. Or at least, that’s what some people thought. Many AI practitioners, it must be said, took a rather different view, accusing Dreyfus of various misunderstandings regarding AI, of targeting obsolete programs, and/or of attempting to replace good (even if provisional and incomplete) science with (what they took to be) the nebulous mystery-mongering of phenomenology. As I mentioned, diplomatic relations were not exactly cordial. The historical furore surrounding Dreyfus’s critique of AI, as fascinating as it is, is not the topic of this paper, although some of Dreyfus’s philosophical views and arguments will figure importantly inwhat follows.The point in recalling the fracas here is only to illustrate the fact that the recent enthusiasm for combining phenomenology and cognitive science, even if it seems to some thinkers to be yielding explanatory insights, is far from uncontroversial. There remains work to be done to establish beyond doubt that the philosophical credentials of 2 See e.g. H.L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1972); H.L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, chapter 6); H.L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 3 For this view of AI, see e.g.M.A. Boden,MindAsMachine: AHistory of Cognitive Science, 2 vols. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006, chapter 4). 4 For evidence and discussion of this response, see Boden, Mind As Machine, 838–49.