How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science

We analytic philosophers have signally failed our colleagues in cognitive science. We have done that by not sharing central lessons about the nature of concepts, concept-use, and conceptual content that have been entrusted to our care and feeding for more than a century. I take it that analytic philosophy began with the birth of the new logic that Gottlob Frege introduced in his seminal 1879 Begriffsschrift. The idea, taken up and championed to begin with by Bertrand Russell, was that the fundamental insights and tools Frege made available there, and developed and deployed through the 1890s, could be applied throughout philosophy to advance our understanding of understanding and of thought in general, by advancing our understanding of concepts—including the particular concepts with which the philosophical tradition had wrestled since its inception. For Frege brought about a revolution not just in logic, but in semantics. He made possible for the first time a mathematical characterization of meaning and conceptual content, and so of the structure of sapience itself. Henceforth it was to be the business of the new movement of analytic philosophy to explore and amplify those ideas, to exploit and apply them wherever they could do the most good. Those ideas are the cultural birthright, heritage, and responsibility of analytic philosophers. But we have not done right by them. For we have failed to communicate some of the most basic of those ideas, failed to explain their significance, failed to make them available in forms usable by those working in allied disciplines who are also professionally concerned to understand the nature of thought, minds, and reason. Contemporary cognitive science is a house with many mansions. The provinces I mean particularly to be addressing are cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, animal psychology (especially primatology), and artificial intelligence. (To be sure, this is not all of cognitive science. But the points I will be making in this paper are not of similarly immediate significance for such other subfields as neurophysiology, linguistics, perceptual psychology, learning theory, and the study of the mechanisms of memory.) Cognitive psychology aims at reverse-engineering the human mind: figuring out how we do what we do, what more basic abilities are recruited and deployed (and how) so as to result in the higher cognitive abilities we actually display. Developmental psychology investigates the sequence of stages by which those abilities emerge from more primitive versions as individual humans mature. Animal psychology, as I am construing it, is a sort of combination of cognitive psychology of non-human intelligences and a phylogenetic version of ontogenetic human developmental psychology. By contrast to all these empirical inquiries into actual cognition, artificial intelligence swings free of questions about how any actual organisms do what they do, and asks instead what constellation of abilities of the sort we know how to implement in artifacts might in principle yield sapience. Each of these disciplines is in its own way concerned with the empirical question of how the trick of cognition is or might be done. Philosophers are concerned with the normative question of what counts as doing it—with what understanding, particularly discursive, conceptual understanding consists in, rather than how creatures with a particular contingent constitution, history, and armamentarium of basic abilities come to exhibit it. I think Frege taught us three fundamental lessons about the structure of concepts, and hence about all possible abilities that deserve to count as concept-using abilities. The conclusion we should draw from his discoveries is that concept-use is intrinsically stratified. It exhibits at least four basic layers, with each capacity to deploy concepts in a more sophisticated sense of ‘concept’ structurally presupposing the capacities to use concepts in all of the more primitive senses. The three lessons that generate the structural hierarchy oblige us to distinguish between: • concepts that only label and concepts that describe,