Content and Cognition

In response to a post from Clark Quinn.

My view is that if you're still channeling Paul Kirschner you are at the very least endorsing an idea of cognition as a representational system, even if not a physical symbol system, in which there is a clear separation between 'content' and other (presumably incidental) cognitive activities. That to my mind would be enough to make you a cognitivist.

This isn't contrary to situationism. It can be true that our actions can inform our cognitive state, and still have a basis in both 'content' and (presumably incidental) non-content. Consider for example Wittgenstein inferring what a person 'knows' or 'believes' about the thickness of the ice as we walks across the frozen lake. And how we act can feed back into what we 'know' through the creation of contentful experiences.

I think that to be a non-cognitivist it is necessary to be a non-representationalist. What that means is a bit difficult to tease out (since, in principle, anything can be a representation of anything, if viewed in the right way). Minimally, though, to be a representationalist is to be able to describe functionally some significant property of a person that can be shared across physical instances without respect to the physical constitution of that property. In other words, for 'content', qua content, to have physical effects (ie., to influence thoughts, experiences and behaviours).

This is where the debate on consciousness comes in. We all (presumably) have consciousness. But what is it? Many (most?) theorists say that consciousness has to be consciousness *of* something (cf Descartes' cogito). So we can draw a separation between the 'content' of consciousness, and the experience (or 'qualia'). "There must be something more than the physical elements." But must there? In my view, consciousness is experience - that is, to be conscious is to have experiences.  There's no distinction to be drawn between the two.

If you go sub-symbolic (which I think you do) then the 'representations' are patterns of neural activation. To be a cognitivist from that perspective becomes rather more difficult, as in requires holding that there are certain  patterns of activation that are common across individuals (ie., you could see pattern P in both person A and person B) and where the *pattern* - and not the physical instantiation of the pattern - is causally relevant. I can't imagine such a thing, but I guess there are some constructivists that can.

In general - the cognitivist (ie., the non-reductionist) will always say there's something (usually formal) and non physical that constitutes (actual) cognition, and that it is this 'content' that is what we are trying to pass from person to person in education. Presented in bits and pieces it can sound convincing, but when we view the mechanism as a whole, it becomes (to my mind) implausible.