Abstract
Executive functioning has been said to bear on a range of traditional philosophical topics, such as consciousness, thought, and action. Surprisingly, philosophers have not much engaged with the scientific literature on executive functioning. This lack of engagement may be due to several influential criticisms of that literature by Daniel Dennett, Alan Allport, and others. In this paper I argue that more recent research on executive functioning shows that these criticisms are no longer valid. The paper clears the way to a more fruitful philosophical engagement with findings on the central executive system.
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Notes
Sebastian Watzl appeals to executive functioning in explaining the active nature of attention. Watzl (2017) draws upon work by Denis Buehler who sketches an explication of agency in terms of executive functioning (Buehler 2014). Peter Carruthers mentions executive functioning in his book on working memory (Carruthers 2015). Andy Clark points out the explanatory potential of appeals to executive functioning in reply to a negative review of this research by Catherine Stinson (Stinson 2009; Clark 2009). There has been much philosophical interest in a related phenomenon—the nature of attention (Mole 2010; Wu 2014; Watzl 2017). To the extent that this literature engages with empirical research its focus tends to be on perceptual attention. It does not engage with the empirical literature on executive functioning.
In what follows I will for brevity’s sake often drop the ‘central’ and merely refer to the ‘executive system’.
The precise nature of working memory is a matter of ongoing debate. Researchers disagree about the amount of information working memory can store and about what determines this amount (Baddeley 2012, pp. 15 and 20; Cowan 2005, pp. 75ff and 80ff; Cowan 1995; Alvarez and Cavanagh 2004; Brady et al. 2011).
See Fodor (1983, p. 47ff, 2001, p. 55). For a discussion of Fodor’s notion of modularity, see Shea (2015), Firestone and Scholl (2016). I do not here take a stand in the debate about whether there are Fodorian modules in a strict sense, or whether Fodorian modules constitute an important psychological kind.
Dennett writes: “The frontal lobes of the cortex ... are known to be involved in long-term control, and the scheduling and sequencing of behavior. ... So it is tempting to install the Boss in the frontal lobes, and several models make moves in this direction. ... [A]nyone who goes hunting for the frontal display screen where the Boss keeps track of the projects he is controlling is on a wild goose chase” (Dennett 1994, p. 275). Also: “Since there is no single organizational summit to the brain ... In an arena of opponent processes ... the ‘top’ is distributed, not localized” (Dennett 2005, p. 133). And: “It is ... the accessibility [of specialized brain modules] to each other (and not to some imagined higher Executive or Central Ego) that could in principle explain the dramatic increases in cognitive competence that we associate with consciousness: the availability to deliberate reflection, the non-automaticity, in short, the open-mindedness that permits a conscious agent to consider anything in its purview in any way it chooses” (Dennett 2005, p. 136).
For any set of hypothesized cognitive operations, one had to find a task involving all of them, and several tasks involving only subsets. Researchers reasoned that brain areas active during tasks engaging all cognitive operations in the set, but not in tasks engaging all cognitive operations but one, realize this one cognitive operation at the level of the brain.
Stinson confines her discussion to evidence about the prefrontal cortex’ connectedness and its being the unique area in the brain that has this property. She does not mention the other evidence discussed in the main text.. Stinson writes that the “psychological phenomenon of executive control may be difficult to deny, but it does not follow from this that a part of the brain is the controller.” (Stinson 2009, p. 149; my emphasis) I agree. But the neuroscientific evidence does make the implementation of executive functioning by prefrontal cortex plausible. Stinson then apparently concludes, from her claim that empirical evidence is not sufficient to identify the prefrontal cortex as a controller, that “we have instead reason to believe that there is not an executive controller in the brain.” (Ibid. 149) As far as I can see, no support is provided for this further step.
In a later article, Allport seems to implicitly recognize the availability of this reply to his early argument (Allport 2011, p. 39ff).
The first assumption might be supported by claiming that cognitive processes are connectionist or parallel-distributed brain processes. According to this position, cognitive processes emerge from the activity of entire neural networks. No part of a neural network is privileged as the control system for other parts of the network (Dennett 1994, 2005). But even the earliest connectionist models acknowledged hierarchical levels of processing (Rumelhart et al. 1986, p. 59). Dennett provides no reason for thinking that his more radical ‘global’ version of a parallel-distributed architecture is the right version. Connectionism as a general model of neural activity is consistent with the existence of a hierarchical structure of systems (Stokes and Duncan 2014). Some of the more sophisticated computational models of the executive system are indeed connectionist models (O’Reilly 2006). Thanks to Calvin Normore for pressing me to address this objection.
The locus classicus for these claims in psychology is Marr (1982).
Computational modeling provides a further way of specifying a psychological system or competency without relying on neuroscience.
Psychologists are clear on this point. See for example Anderson (2008, p. 6): “Executive function is a psychological construct, but the concomitant neural systems (i.e. prefrontal cortex and related systems) provide important information about specific processes and the integration of these functions.” Baddeley insists that his model is “principally a functional model that would exist and be useful even if there proved to be no simple mapping on to underlying neuro-anatomy” (Baddeley 1996, p. 6).
See also also Dennett (1994, Chapter 5). Monsell & Driver write: “The homunculus has continued to parade about in broad daylight, its powers largely intact and indeed dignified by even grander titles—not merely the “executive” but the “central executive” or the “supervisory attention system”.” (Monsell and Driver 2000, p. 3)
Individual difference studies typically picked fairly complex tests for studying executive function. They correlated individuals’ performance on different such tests. A consistent result from these studies was that the inter-correlations among different tasks were low and often statistically not significant. These results were mistakenly used to argue that the executive system is highly fractionated Cf. Rabbitt (1997).
For research on the relation between executive system and the brain, cf. Munakata et al. (2011, p. 453 ff, 2012). On the connection between the executive system and more complex tasks, see Miyake et al. (2000). On the connection between the executive system and development, learning, or general intelligence, see Munakata et al. (2012), Anderson et al. (2008), Anderson (2008), Miyake and Shah (1999), Conway et al. (2007) and Zaitchik et al. (2014). On the executive system and the will or self-control, see Inzlicht and Schmeichel (2012) and Kurzban et al. (2013). For attempts to computationally model executive functions, e.g. O’Reilly (2006). Thanks to Ned Block and Susan Carey for pointing out some of this literature to me.
There is some evidence that neither exercises of executive functions, nor the states upon which executive functions operate, must be accessible to consciousness (see Fockert and Bremner 2011; Lavie and Dalton 2014; Soto et al. 2011; Soto and Silvanto 2014). For an overview of empirical research on unconscious exercises of executive functions, see Ansorge (2014). The empirical distinction between conscious and unconscious states and events is a matter of ongoing debate (cf. Phillips 2016; Block 2016; Block and Phillips 2016). The evidence must be treated as preliminary and with extreme caution.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Tyler Burge. Thanks also to Felipe De Brigard and other participants in a workshop at UNAM-IIF, Mexico City, August 2016. I am, finally, grateful for detailed feedback from Gualtiero Piccinini and two anonymous referees.
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Buehler, D. The central executive system. Synthese 195, 1969–1991 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1589-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1589-3