Cognisance and cognitive science. Part two: Towards an empirical psychology of cognisance

Philosophical Psychology 2 (2):165-201 (1989)
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Abstract

Abstract In the first part of this essay (Russell, 1988a) I argued that ?cognisance? (roughly: a subject's knowledge of his relation to the physical world as an experiencer of it) cannot be explained in terms of a syntactic theory of mind, due to the ?referential? and ?holistic? nature of this knowledge. The syntactic account of the higher mental functions is immediately intelligible to us due to its derivation from computer technology, so this would not appear to be a happy result for scientific psychology. In this paper I outline a strategy for developing a scientific psychology of cognisance, beginning from the assumption that such a theory should have a similar status to Chomsky's competence theory of human grammar, whilst diverging from Chomsky on the question of how such a theory should be answerable to data. Most of the paper is taken up with illustrating the way in which Jean Piaget's theory of mental development in humans is at least a first approximation to such a theory

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James Russell
Trent University

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Reconsidering pain.Norton Nelkin - 1994 - Philosophical Psychology 7 (3):325-43.

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References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Vision.David Marr - 1982 - W. H. Freeman.
Criticism and the growth of knowledge.Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave (eds.) - 1970 - Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press.
Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.Daniel Clement Dennett (ed.) - 1978 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books.

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