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The Concrete Universal and Cognitive Science

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Abstract

Cognitive science depends on abstractions made from the complex reality of human behaviour. Cognitive scientists typically wish the abstractions in their theories to be universals, but seldom attend to the ontology of universals. Two sorts of universal, resulting from Galilean abstraction and materialist abstraction respectively, are available in the philosophical literature: the abstract universal—the one-over-many universal—is the universal conventionally employed by cognitive scientists; in contrast, a concrete universal is a material entity that can appear within the set of entities it describes, of which it represents the essential, paradigmatic case. The potential role of concrete universals in cognitive science is discussed.

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Notes

  1. This small typology of perspective-taking in abstraction is based on one presented by Ollman (2003). Ollman (2003) does not discuss the abstract-concrete distinction.

  2. As an exception to this observation, Perry et al. (2007) present what they term “nested incremental modeling” as a way of extending an implemented computational model, based on the principle of incorporating the most effective components of existing models addressing the domain in question.

  3. Ilyenkov’s readership is in inverse proportions among western and Soviet/Russian cognitive scientists.

  4. Characterizing the concrete universal as self-participating raises the twentieth-century issue of the paradoxes of self-containment, which are particularly relevant to cognition, given the widespread reliance on recurrent connectivity. As Ellerman (1988, p. 412) notes, set theory can only be a general theory of abstract universals. He argues that category theory is the formal escape from the inconsistencies of set theory; category theory captures the idea of the participation relation as the “uniquely-factors-through” relation, and a universal uniquely factors through itself by the identity morphism (see, also, Ellerman 1995, 2007).

  5. I exclude the contemporary critical realism literature and the older British idealist literature as outside the scope of this article.

  6. Some of the background justification for this example is taken from existing formal theorizing: schwa is seen as a bare [-cons] root, or as a root node with an empty (vocalic) place node, “the maximally unmarked vowel … marked for being a vowel ([-cons]) but for nothing else … (Van Oostendorp 1999). Van Oostendorp continues “If a language has schwa in its vowel inventory, this segment usually has a special role to play in the phonology of the language”, and goes on to define its special nature as consisting of the constrained contexts in which it occurs, with respect to syllabic structure and to stress, and its relation to reduction and deletion. He suggests that “as many phonological properties as possible should be made to follow from the interaction of [the minimal nature of schwa] and general principles of phonology … no linguistic rule or constraint should specifically refer to schwa” and “schwa literally is a substructure of all the other vowels” (italics in original). In English, schwa plays a special role in virtually every subdomain of language processing. N.B. This example, together with the above example of a concrete universal in a cognitive model of reading, is intended simply to give the flavour of the issues involved rather than to substantiate the particular cases.

  7. See Stern (2007) for more on the concrete universal as a solution to the philosophical problems associated with “bare individuals” and trope theory in specifying individuals.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of Axiomathes for reading and criticizing an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, Scotland, UK

    Richard Shillcock

  2. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Richard Shillcock

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Shillcock, R. The Concrete Universal and Cognitive Science. Axiomathes 24, 63–80 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-013-9210-y

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