cognitive Tao within the circle

M.C. Escher, Dragon, 1952

Defined the cognitive science main approaches Varela, Thompson and Rosch introduce the specific basic characteristic for the study of the mind: the circular recursion of the operational closure of the autopoietic living systems characterized by their autonomy and cognition becomes maximum and paradoxical when with the mind one attempts to investigate the mind; the result is in an endless recursion between the describing mind and the described mind, where the distinction between subject and object disappears. For the enactive point of view proposed by the authors this circularity is central and should be integrated with experience:

Cognitive Science within the Circle

We began this chapter with a reflection on the fundamental circularity in scientific method that would be noted by a philosophically inclined cognitive scientist. From the standpoint of enactive cognitive science, this Circularity is central; it is an epistemological necessity. In contrast, the other, more extant forms of cognitive science start from the view that cognition and mind are entirely due to the particular structures of cognitive systems. The most obvious expression of this view is found in neuroscience, where cognition is investigated by looking at the properties of the brain . One can associate these biologically based properties with cognition only through behavior. It is only because this structure, the brain, undergoes interactions in an environment that we can label the ensuing behavior as cognitive . The basic assumption, then, is that to every form of behavior and experience we can ascribe specific brain structures (however roughly). And, conversely, changes in brain structure manifest themselves in behavioral and experiential alterations. We may diagram this view as in figure: (In this diagram and those that follow, the double arrows express interdependence or mutual specification.)

Interdependence or mutual specification of structure and behavior/experience.

Yet upon reflection we cannot avoid as a matter of consistency the logical implication that by this same view any such scientific description, either of biological or mental phenomena, must itself be a product of the structure of our own cognitive system. We may diagram this further understanding as in figure:

Interdependency of scientific description and our own cognitive structure.

Furthermore , the act of reflection that tells us this does not come from nowhere; we find ourselves performing that act of reflection out of a given background (in the Heideggerian sense) of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices. We portray this further step as in figure:

Interdependency of reflection and the background of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices.

But then yet again, our very postulation of such a background is something that we are doing : we are here, living embodied beings, sitting and thinking of this entire scheme, including what we call a background.

Plainly, this kind of layering could go on indefinitely, as in an Escher drawing . This last move makes it evident that, rather than adding layers of continued abstraction, we should go back where we started, to the concreteness and particularity of our own experience - even in the endeavor of reflection . The fundamental insight of the enactive approach as explored in this book is to be able to see our activities as reflections of a structure without losing sight of the directness of our own experience.

The Theme

This book is devoted to the exploration of this deep circularity . We will endeavor throughout to keep in mind our theoretical constructs about structure without losing sight of the immediacy of our experience.

Some aspects of the basic circularity of our condition have been discussed by philosophers in various ways at least since Hegel. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor refers to it when he says that we are " self-interpreting animals" and so wonders "whether features which are crucial to our self-understanding as agents can be accorded no place in our explanatory theory " The usual response on the part of cognitive scientists is well put by Daniel Dennett when he writes that "every cognitivist theory currently defended or envisaged . . . is a theory of the sub-personal level . It is not at all clear to me, indeed, how a psychological theory - as distinct from a philosophical theory - could fail to be a sub-personal theory." For Dennett, our self-understanding presupposes cognitive notions such as believing, desiring , and knowing but does not explain them. Therefore, if the study of mind is to be rigorous and scientific, it cannot be bound to explanations in terms of features essential to our self-understanding.

For the moment we wish simply to emphasize the deep tension in our present world between science and experience. In our present world science is so dominant that we give it the authority to explain even when it denies what is most immediate and direct- our everyday, immediate experience. Thus most people would hold as a fundamental truth the scientific account of matter/space as collections of atomic particles, while treating what is given in their immediate experience, with all of its richness, as less profound and true. Yet when we relax into the immediate bodily well-being of a sunny day or of the bodily tension of anxiously running to catch a bus, such accounts of space/matter fade into the background as abstract and secondary.

When it is cognition or mind that is being examined, the dismissal of experience becomes untenable, even paradoxical. The tension comes to the surface especially in cognitive science because cognitive science stands at the crossroads where the natural sciences and the human sciences meet. Cognitive science is therefore Janus-faced, for it looks down both roads at once: One of its faces is turned toward nature and sees cognitive processes as behavior. The other is turned toward the human world (or what phenomenologists call the "lifeworld") and sees cognition as experience.

When we ignore the fundamental circularity of our situation, this double face of cognitive science gives rise to two extremes: we suppose either that our human self-understanding is simply false and hence will eventually be replaced by a mature cognitive science, or we suppose that there can be no science of the human life-world because science must always presuppose it.

These two extremes'summarize much of the general philosophical debate surrounding cognitive science. At one end stand philosophers such as Stephen Stich and Paul and Patricia Churchland who argue that our self-understanding is simply false. (Note the Churchlands'suggestion that we might come to refer to brain states instead of experiences in actual daily discourse.) At the other end stand philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor who seriously doubt the very possibility of cognitive science (perhaps because they often seem to accept the equation of cognitive science with cognitivism).

The debate thus recapitulates - though with new twiststhe typical oppositions within the human sciences. If, in the midst of this confusion, the fate of human experience has been left to the philosophers, their lack of agreement does not bode well.

Unless we move beyond these oppositions, the rift between science and experience in our society will deepen. Neither extreme is workable for a pluralistic society that must embrace both science and the actuality of human experience. To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter.

But to suppose that science cannot contribute to an understanding of our experience may be to abandon, within the modem context, the task of self-understanding. Experience and scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk.

We can phrase this very same idea in positive terms: it is only by having a sense of common ground between cognitive science and human experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete and reach a satisfying level. We thus propose a constructive task: to enlarge the horizon of cognitive science to include the broader panorama of human, lived experience in a disciplined, transformative analysis. As a constructive task, the search for this expansion becomes motivated by scientific research itself, as we will see throughout this work.