Abstract
What, if any, are the limits of human understanding? Epistemic pessimists, sobered by our humble evolutionary origins, have argued that some parts of the universe will forever remain beyond our ken. But what exactly does it mean to say that humans are ‘cognitively closed’ to some parts of the world, or that some problems will forever remain ‘mysteries’? In this paper we develop a richer conceptual toolbox for thinking about different forms and varieties of cognitive limitation, which are often conflated by the so-called ‘new mysterians’. We distinguish between representational access (the ability to develop accurate scientific representations of reality) and imaginative understanding (immediate, intuitive comprehension of those representations), as well as between different modalities (hard vs. soft) of cognitive limitation. Next, we look at tried-and-tested strategies for overcoming our innate cognitive limitations, drawing from the literature on distributed cognition and cognitive scaffolding’. This allows us to distinguish between the limits of bare brains vs. scaffolded brains. Most importantly, we argue that this panoply of mind-extension devices is combinatorial and open-ended. In the end, this allows us to turn the table on the mysterians: for every alleged ‘mystery’, they should demonstrate that no possible combination of mind extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution.
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Notes
In our previous work (Vlerick and Boudry 2017) we called these predicaments, respectively, “representational closure” and “psychological closure”. We have now decided to opt for a slightly different terminology, because the adjective “psychological” was too broad for our purposes.
In his original formulation, McGinn wrote that “A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M’s disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T)?” (McGinn 1989, p. 350). By adding these parenthetical asides, McGinn suggests some rough equivalence, or a mere terminological difference. But there is a crucial difference between the claim that we cannot form a representation of some property P, and the claim that we cannot understand or grasp the representation itself.
According to the “extended mind” hypothesis in philosophy of mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998), the human mind literally extends beyond the skin/skull boundary, encompassing notebooks, computer screens, maps, file drawers, and so forth. But one does not need to embrace this radical philosophical view to appreciate how artefacts “extend” the reach of our minds.
Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675: https://bit.ly/2hIzhIe.
This thought experiment was earlier used in an essay for The Conversation (Boudry 2019).
It is curious that mysterians have not explored quantum mechanics as a possible example of a domain to which we are cognitively closed. This might perhaps be attributed to the fact that quantum mechanics is notoriously demanding, to the extent that even confidence about its status as a mystery might be hard to come by.
ΔxΔp ≥ ℏ/2 is really ΔxΔk ≥ ½ for waves in general, combined with the de Broglie relationship of p = ℏk.
In this respect, a more consistent (and radical) form of mysterianism can be found in Kriegel (2003), who maintains a strict second-order ignorance about the reasons for our sense of mystery.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Manvir Singh in particular for making extensive comments on an earlier draft of this paper, thus lending his versatile mind to “scaffold” ours. We also wish to thank Daniel Dennett, Stefaan Blancke, two anonymous reviewers and several participants during a seminar at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science at Leuven University, for offering useful feedback and constructive criticism.
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Boudry, M., Vlerick, M. & Edis, T. The end of science? On human cognitive limitations and how to overcome them. Biol Philos 35, 18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-9734-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-9734-7