Philosophical Reflections on the Status of Cognitive Science

Abstract

Philosophy of mind has been one of the most active and productive fields of philosophy during the past three decades. This has been due, in part, to the explosive growth of the cognitive sciences-cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, AI, and related fields. And there have been fruitful exchanges between philosophers and the scientists who are interested in the philosophical foundations of these burgeoning fields. The philosophical mind-body problem is that of understanding and elucidating the relationship between mentality and its physical basis-how perceptions, sensations, thoughts, memory, reasoning, and the like are related to their biological/neural substrates. Among the many issues that arise in this connection, two have been especially prominent of late: consciousness and mental causation. The problem of consciousness concerns whether and how the phenomenon of consciousness can be physically explained