The Role of Mental Variation in Cognitive Science :: Cognitive Sciences Scientific Essays

The Role of Mental Variation in Cognitive Science ABSTRACT: What is the role of mental variation in cognitive science? I will attempt to answer this question by dividing it into two separate questions: (1) what role does mental variation already (or implicitly) play in cognitive science? and (2) would cognitive science benefit by inquiring (explicitly) into the role of mental variation? I will attempt to show that mental variation already plays an important (though not always explicit) role in cognitive science. Additionally, I will suggest that explicating the role of mental variations in cognition may be seen as a vital component of maintaining the strength of certain approaches and "schools" of cognitive science. (1) Preliminary Remarks (a) Introduction What is the role of mental variation in cognitive science? I will attempt to answer this question, as it often happens in philosophy, by dividing it into two separate questions: (1) What role does mental variation already (implicitly) play in cognitive science? and (2) Would cognitive science benefit by inquiring (explicitly) into the role of mental variation? I will attempt to show that mental variation already plays an important, although not always explicit, role in cognitive science. Additionally, I will suggest that explicating the role of mental variation in cognition may be seen as a vital component of maintaining the strength of certain approaches and "schools" of cognitive science. To illustrate this, let me present the relevance of variation in disputes between the connectionist and more traditional theories of cognition. The dispute between more traditional (propositional and "language of thought" based) understanding of cognitive science and recent connectionist theories may be seen as centred, in part, on the role of variation (manipulation) in cognition. More traditional account would appeal to the fact that the correspondence between formal languages and propositional content may be seen as dependent upon the combinatorial structure of strings of symbols. Thus, one may claim that sentences have parts with both fixed and adjustable meanings and that we form new meaningful sentences by rearranging these parts in new combinations. In this case, the ability to vary parts of structured sentences may be seen as quite significant: this ability would help us account for our understanding of propositions we never encountered before. Instead of appealing to the paradigms of cognition which involve either strings of symbols or some sort of propositional structure, connectionists would rather appeal to some type of neural architecture. They argue that the properties of some sort of functional networks in cognition represent the properties of neural activity much closer than the properties of any sequential symbol-processing system.