Reviews by Joe Petrulionis Back to Joe’s “About Me” Page
3. History of Philosophy, Intellectual
Activities F. Philosophy 3. Philosophy
of Mind, Theory of Knowledge
Philip N. Johnson-Laird. How We Reason.
Removing the Brackets from
Context and Advanced Cognitive Processes
A Review by Joe Petrulionis
World
shaking intellectual projects have rarely been contained within boundary lines
of a solitary academic field. Nor did they all happen near the turn of the
seventeenth century. From Copernicus, to Kant, to Leibniz, to Husserl, and to
Einstein, some of these ideas and their originators were overlooked in their
first published editions. Among the ten thousand or so academic books published
initially in 2006, there will certainly be a few that will prove instrumental
to the preparation of future specialists within their respective fields,
specialists who will do their part, in turn, to push back the edge of the
unknown in their own incremental ways. Perhaps the true measure of a great book
is not the number of copies sold, but the number of scholars--external to the
author’s field--whose collective paradigm will be launched toward new
productivity through the insights contained in that one book. Only time and
future scholarship will tell if Philip N. Johnson-Laird has written “only”
another book that will shake up the field of psychology, or if the insights he
gleans from cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, logic, and
Philosophy’s “Theory of Knowledge” will be duly recognized as a founding
document of something new, an experimental science of human understanding.
In How We Reason, Johnson-Laird
offers up a menu of the four most probable ways humans might figure things out;
and he explains why sometimes we goof up. First, our reason might depend on an
extraordinary memory; we might be remembering prior solutions--even innate ones
learned by our species--and then applying them to contemporary problems.
Second, there might be “formal rules” for discovery and learning, a structure
of meaning that is a part of the world in which we live and around which our
species evolved. Or, perhaps we are more like a competent crafts-person; we
master the “content” of the problem, and use this context to devise solutions
through trial, error, and improvisation. Finally, we may be creating “models of
possibility.” By starting with all of the possible solutions to a problem, we
quickly cast out all of the unlikely and the inconsistent, leaving only the
probable.
Johnson-Laird
shows that inferences are not all the same, and therefore the ways we solve
problems are also diverse. Our solutions can be combinations of these four
possible approaches. But through an interesting argument, one with a surprise
ending that I refuse to ruin in a review, Johnson-Laird challenges a century’s
phenomenological mistrust of context and advanced cognitive processes. Much of human reason arises from models and
skills (such as abduction, deduction, and induction), higher order cognitive functions
that are bracketed away by many post Husserl philosophers/theorists/critics. Also,
if the human mind makes models of the problem at hand, and these models are not
dependent upon the point of view of an observer, then meaning may not be as
simplistic as essentialists often describe it. The implications of this theory should
encourage a return to fashionable contextualization in analysis, and could
change the way courses in logic, theory of knowledge, philosophy of history,
and epistemology are taught. I shall leave the evaluation of the book’s impact
on psychology to another reviewer, hopefully a specialist in recent cognitive
sciences.
Until
recently, the projects undertaken in How
We Reason would have been relegated to the Philosophy department, and turf
intrusions would have been robustly repelled. This is not to take away from the
fine work of such Cybernetics Brain Theorists as Michael A. Arbib, (see for
example, The Metaphorical Brain: An
Introduction to Cybernetics as Artificial Intelligence and Brain Theory,
Wiley-Interscience, 1972). But with Johnson-Laird’s recognition of the roles of
Logic and Philosophy of Mind/Theory of Knowledge in the mix of this new
experimental science of understanding, or whatever it turns out to be called,
there will still be room for the philosopher and logistician, working
elbow-to-elbow with physiologists, computer engineers, and psychologists.
Historically, many of our greatest breakthroughs have resulted from the
application of one “field’s” problems, methods, and tools to another “field’s”
enigma. The application of optics to astronomy, as one example of this
productive cross-fertilization, may now seem obvious in retrospect. Likewise,
this joint venture between computer modeling, symbolic logic, Philosophy of
Mind, and cognitive psychology, provides an experimental platform for
Epistemology. This may soon be ambient to the way we approach human reason.
This book should be read in many halls of the academy.