Daniel Andler

Fifty years before the present volume appeared, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science (Cogsci) emerged from a couple of small-scale academic encounters on the East Coast of the United States. Wedded together like Siamese twins, these nascent research programs appeared to rest on some general assumptions regarding the human mind, and closely connected methodological principles, which set them at such a distance from phenomenology that no contact between the two approaches seemed conceivable. Soon however contact was made, in the form of a head-on critique of the AI/Cogsci project mostly inspired by arguments from phenomenology. For a while, it seemed like nothing would come of it: AI/Cogsci bloomed while the small troop of critical phenomenologists kept objecting. Then AI and Cogsci went their separate ways. AI underwent a deep transformation and all but surrendered to the phenomenological critique. Cogsci meanwhile pursued the initial program with a far richer collection of problems, concepts and methods, and was for a long time quite unconcerned by suggestions and objections from phenomenology. The last decade and half has seen a remarkable reversal: on the one hand, a few cognitive scientists have been actively pursuing the goal of reconciliating Cogsci, whether empirically or foundationally, with some of the insights procured by phenomenology; on the other, many cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind who think of themselves as, respectively, mainstream and analytic, and have no or little acquaintance with, and often little sympathy for, phenomenology, have been actively pursuing research programs geared toward some of the key issues identified by phenomenological critics of early AI/Cogsci. It might seem then as if those critics were now vindicated. But while these new directions are undoubtedly promising, it is not yet clear that phenomenology and Cogsci can be truly reconciled. Some suspect that Cogsci must distort beyond recognition those phenomenological themes it means to weave into its fabric, while phenomenology may be losing touch with its roots by tuning onto the logic of Cogsci which is, after all, an empirical science. To the present writer, it is far too early for anything like a verdict, as the task of clarifying the issues and gaining a much deeper understanding of the issues on both sides has barely begun. But whatever emerges from this exploration will probably have deep consequences for both Cogsci and philosophy..

Scholars from various philosophical schools of thought, including cultural relativism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism, have recently critiqued rationalism in light of new developments in the cognitive sciences. Each of these new developments set into motion new inquiries in each school philosophical school of thought. Now, in Facets of Rationality, a distinguished team of scholars examines these new inquiries and bring rationality back into the mainstream of the social sciences. The unique feature of this book lies in its multidisciplinary exploration of rational concerns and in discovering the integral meaning of rationality as viewed by the perspectives of different disciplines. As such, it will of considerable interest to those involved with the study and teaching of philosophy, theoretical psychology, cognitive science, political theory, and linguistics.

Conventional wisdom holds two seemingly opposed beliefs. One is that communities are often much better than individuals at dealing with certain situations or solving certain problems. The other is that crowds are usually, and some say always, at best as intelligent as their least intelligent members and at worst even less. Consistency would seem to be easily re-established by distinguishing between advanced, sophisticated social organizations which afford the supporting communities a high level of collective performance, and primitive, mob-like structures which pull the group towards the lower end of the achievement scale. But this reconciliation meets with some objections. The most familiar ones concern the mixed record of elaborate social systems, which are said to occasionally or even, according to some accounts, systematically produce wrong decisions, poor assessments, disastrous plans, counterproductive measures, etc. A more recent set of objections rests on cases where ‘crowds’, i,e, groups not organized in a sophisticated way, produce good results, in fact, results which better those of most, or even all, members of the group. Such cases are collected in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, which argues more generally in favor of an ‘order out of chaos’ view of collective thinking: whether sophisticated or simple, social organizations for the production of knowledge or problem-solving can benefit from the absence of certain individualistc constraints which are traditionally thought to foster excellence in cognitive tasks. This flavor of paradox is enhanced by Surowiecki’s choice of phrase: at the surface level, ‘wisdom of crowds’ conflicts with the well-entrenched cliché of the folly1 of crowds; but at a deeper level, Surowiecki seems to appeal to one frequent connotation of ‘wisdom’ which is precisely its paradoxical character. Whether Surowiecki actually intended to exploit this..

David Atkinson asks whether nonempirical constructions can lead to genuine knowledge in science, and answers in the negative. Thought experiments, in his view, are to be commended only insofar as they eventually lead to real experiments. The claim does not rely on a general study, conceptual or historical, of thought experiments as such: the range of the paper is at once narrower and broader. Atkinson views thought experiments as commonly understood as just one kind of episode in the development of physics in which real experimentation is bypassed, and he believes that such episodes are justified only inasmuch as they are transitory stages on the way to genuine empirical inquiry. Atkinson wants to kill with one arrow what is usually regarded as two different birds: the notion that thought experiments proper can be persuasive in themselves, and the thesis that theories which cannot be brought to the tribunal of experience can nevertheless belong to science. He thus implicitly opposes three views which are commonly, albeit not universally, held: (i) some thought experiments are conclusive; (ii) some theories belong to science despite not being evidently and concretely amenable to empirical corroboration; (iii) the two issues are largely independent. The standpoint from which Atkinson operates is a rather strict form of empiricism, one which relies on a fairly sharp distinction between the conceptual and empirical dimensions of inquiry. My outlook is rather different: the conceptual and empirical seem to me to be intertwined, both conceptually, as suggested by Quine’s critique of logical positivism, and empirically, as revealed by the evidence provided by science itself in its daily and historical reality. Rather than take the high road, I propose to focus first on the critique to which Atkinson subjects Galileo’s thought experiment, and the lessons he draws from his analysis..