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Notes
I cannot do justice to the wide array of arguments that Carruthers presents for the theses elsewhere, especially in his 2011 (e.g. evolutionary considerations play a significant role). My discussion will focus on the issues of attention and of working memory raised in his article (this issue).
There’s going to be a bit of sloppiness in what follows between representational content and representational vehicles. When we speak of the property of neurons and neural assemblies, we are speaking of the vehicles. As the empirical matters will loom large, it is worth keeping this in mind.
It is worth noting that there are other ways one might arrive at the positive thesis. For example, one could argue that all concepts are sensory. This is not Carruthers’ route since he allows for amodal concepts. Alternatively, one might argue from introspection that cognition has a sensory phenomenology to the claim that its materials are sensory. This is also not Carruthers’ route, or at least not the primary route. Rather, the issues he adduces are drawn from experimental cognitive science.
That attentional selection is distinct from relevant computational role seems to be why top-down attentional modulation of visual areas by a subject’s goals fails to count as a form of the cognitive penetration of vision.
Note that there is a third model where only conceptual areas feed into cognition. Perhaps that view is obviously too strong.
My thanks to Peter Carruthers for discussing these matters with me and to Todd Ganson for the opportunity to engage Peter’s interesting ideas in the very enjoyable forum of the Oberlin Colloquium.
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Wu, W. Being in the workspace, from a neural point of view: comments on Peter Carruthers, ‘On central cognition’. Philos Stud 170, 163–174 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0169-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0169-8