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Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science, and the Theory-Ladenness of Perception

  • Special Section Article: Theory-Ladenness
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Abstract

Theory-ladenness of perception and cognition is pervasive and variable. Emerging maturationally natural (MN) perception and cognition, which are on-line, fast, automatic, unconscious, and, by virtue of their selectivity, theoretical in import, if not in form, define normal development. They contrast with off-line, slow, deliberate, conscious perceptual and cognitive judgments that reflective theories, including scientific ones, inform. Although culture tunes MN systems, their emergence and operation do not rely on culturally distinctive inputs. The sciences advance radically counter-intuitive (RCI) representations that depart drastically from MN systems’ deliverances. Extensive experience with RCI scientific theories can result in a practiced naturalness with their perceptual and cognitive consequences; nevertheless, automatic MN verdicts persistently intrude. Fodor suggests that the uniformity of the biases MN systems introduce can serve as a theory-neutral means for adjudicating scientific disputes. Findings about vision challenge Fodor’s proposal for circumventing problems that MN theory-ladenness presents. These considerations indicate that RCI scientific ideas are difficult to learn, master, and deploy; consequently, the corrective import of science’s social and institutional arrangements plays a critical role in its epistemic stature.

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Notes

  1. “If perceptual recognition and explanatory understanding are… instances of the same form of cognitive achievement, as I have suggested… then it is proper to regard perceptual recognition itself as being just a case of explanatory understanding at the sensory periphery” (Churchland 1989, 228).

  2. This is not to imply either that all researchers draw the relevant distinction the same way (Evans and Frankish 2009) or that all endorse such a distinction, in the first place (Keren and Schul 2009).

  3. This paper uses senses of “intuitive” and “intuition” employed in the cognitive sciences, as discussed herein. Crucially, these terms can pertain to both perception and cognition (and will be used so here). These senses are, of course, distant on many fronts from the technical senses of these terms in Modern philosophy.

  4. This paper uses the term “knowledge” in the broad sense cognitive scientists do. Since it includes both knowing how (procedural knowledge) as well as knowing that (declarative knowledge), truth is not a necessary condition for knowledge on this view.

  5. Churchland holds that “even the humblest judgment or assertion is always a speculative leap…” (1989, 278).

  6. That skepticism seems particularly justified regarding claims about innateness, in a time when genetics is undergoing fundamental transformations (Jablonka and Lamb 2005) that virtually all of the parties to these debates ignore!

  7. Not only does establishing MN capacities not rely on culturally distinctive inputs, it may, in some cases, not even rely on any distinctively cultural inputs. What appears to be a spontaneous emergence of a collective sign language at a Nicaraguan school for the deaf suggests that such capacities may emerge from basic social interaction (Senghas et al. 2004; Coppola and Newport 2005).

  8. See the discussion in Jordan-Young (2010) of complete androgen insensitive (CAIS) females who are genetic males, i.e., they possess X and Y chromosomes, but who are to all external appearances morphologically female and who respond, if anything, as more feminine than average genetic females on most psychological measures.

  9. If this comment elicits an incredulous response, that, at least in part, is the point.

  10. For an extensive review of this research, see Henrich et al. (2010).

  11. See McCauley (2011) for a general discussion of these matters.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ioannis Votsis and two anonymous referees for many helpful comments and to Mark Johnson for valuable discussions about theories and concepts.

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  1. Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Robert N. McCauley

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Correspondence to Robert N. McCauley.

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McCauley, R.N. Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science, and the Theory-Ladenness of Perception. J Gen Philos Sci 46, 183–199 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-015-9292-x

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