Abstract

This is a critical examination of the ontological and methodological commitments of contemporary cognitive science, and more generally, of the relation between the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world. A preliminary characterization is offered of the relationship between these images, and of the nature of intertheoretic reduction in science, followed by an account of the structure of theory, explanation, and account of the psychophysical relation embodied by contemporary cognitive psychology as practiced within the computational framework. It is argued that the relational and intentional character of propositional attitudes poses a prima facie problem for any cognitive psychology which treats of them, viz., that any purely computational account of psychological phenomena is ontologically individualistic in character. Four standard approaches to resolving this problem are considered: Methodological Solipsism; Naturalistic Individualism; Eliminative Computationalism; and Eliminative Materialism. The first two are characterized as attempts to reconcile the propositional attitudes with the demands of computational psychology, and the latter two as proposals for the elimination of the attitudes from psychology. It is argued that the first approach founders on the essentially relational character of the attitudes, and the second as a result of a misconstrual of the necessity of the manifest image for the intelligibility of science, and of the location of the attitudes within the manifest image. Finally, a proposal is offered for a Sellarsian reconceptualization of the nature of cognitive theory and of the nature of propositional representation according to which cognitive psychology is more naturalistic and socially based than is generally thought, and according to which the attitudes can be accommodated as broadly supervenient, relational states of their subjects.