Touraj BaniRostam

What does it mean to explain intelligence scientifically? Twentieth-century psychology offered differently oriented responses to this question. Behaviourism prioritised the objective description and prediction of observable behaviour; the Cognitive Revolution redirected explanation towards internal representations and information-processing mechanisms; and Piagetian constructivism examined how cognitive organisation emerges and changes through development. Rather than treating these traditions as isolated theories or successive stages in which one displaced another, this paper reconstructs them as articulating three complementary explanatory demands. It therefore proposes a Performance–Mechanism–Development framework: performance concerns what a system can reliably do; mechanism concerns the organised processes that generate its behaviour; and development concerns the learning history, interaction, adaptation, and structural transformation through which its capacities emerge. In concise terms, performance constrains explanation, mechanism accounts for the production of behaviour, and development accounts for the formation of cognitive organisation. Applied to contemporary artificial intelligence, this framework reveals the limits of predominantly performance-centred evaluation. Although mechanistic interpretability and research on continual and developmental learning increasingly address mechanism and development, neither high performance nor access to internal model states constitutes a complete explanation of intelligence. At the same time, artificial systems need not reproduce human or Piagetian development. A more adequate scientific account must distinguish what a system does, how it does it, and how it became capable of doing it.

Phenomenology transformed the study of mind by challenging the assumption that cognition should be explained through an isolated subject confronting an external world. This paper reconstructs the movement from Edmund Husserl through Martin Heidegger to Maurice Merleau-Ponty as conceptual transformations in the relations among experience, body, and world. Using comparative conceptual reconstruction, it examines how Husserl’s intentionality disclosed the directedness of consciousness and the intentional correlation; how Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world situated understanding within practical involvement; and how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body grounded perception and agency in embodied engagement. The paper argues that these developments expanded the unit of analysis for understanding mind: from intentional consciousness, through practical world-involvement, to the embodied subject–world relation. This trajectory was not a simple linear progression, since Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty transformed possibilities already present in Husserl’s analyses of intentionality, embodiment, and the lifeworld. The paper considers the significance of this transformation for embodied and situated cognition, 4E approaches, and artificial intelligence. Phenomenology challenges accounts that identify intelligence exclusively with internal information processing, without proving that computation is insufficient or that embodiment necessarily produces experience. It thereby relocates the problem of mind within the structured relations among experience, practical activity, embodiment, and world.

Modern philosophy transformed not only how mind was understood but also what explanatory work the concept of mind was expected to perform. This paper reconstructs the development from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Hegel as a sequence of conceptual reorganizations rather than a succession of competing doctrines. Using comparative conceptual reconstruction, it examines how each position reconfigured the relations among subject, world, experience, and justification. Descartes established the thinking subject as the foundation of certainty while intensifying the epistemic separation between mind and world. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume relocated the analysis of cognition within experience, progressively revealing difficulties concerning external reality, causality, necessity, and the unity of the self. Kant responded by treating cognitive organization as a constitutive condition of coherent experience, without reducing reality to a fabrication of the individual mind. Hegel subsequently challenged the model of an isolated subject by situating self-consciousness within recognition, social practices, and historical development. The paper argues that this trajectory produced a systematic expansion in both the explanatory role and the unit of analysis of mind: from epistemic foundation, through experiential and transcendental organization, to socially and historically mediated self-consciousness. This transformation did not resolve the modern problem of mind but relocated it across successive explanatory boundaries. The resulting questions concerning representation, learning, cognitive structure, selfhood, and social mediation continue to shape contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Why have accounts of mind and cognition differed so profoundly across intellectual history? They are often reconstructed as competing answers to a single, enduring question: What is the mind? This article proposes a different historiographical approach, arguing that theoretical differences may also reflect changes in the phenomena treated as requiring explanation and in the priorities governing explanatory inquiry. It distinguishes among the explanandum, explanatory problem, explanatory priority, explanatory framework, and conceptual transformation, and applies these distinctions to a comparative reconstruction of Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s epistemological project gives priority to explaining the possibility of stable knowledge amid the variability of sensible experience. Aristotle retains the demand for universal knowledge but reorients inquiry toward natural substances, living organization, and the capacities through which perception and understanding become possible. The transition should therefore be understood neither as the straightforward replacement of an obsolete doctrine nor as a simple movement from rationalism to empiricism. It represents a reorganization of explanatory priorities, sources of inquiry, and relations among knowledge, nature, and living activity. This reconstruction illustrates how a problem-oriented historiography can clarify both continuities and transformations in early accounts of cognition without treating ancient concepts as preliminary versions of contemporary cognitive science.