Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science

Chapter 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science Peter Slezak Abstract Bunge’s writings on the mind-body problem (Bunge 1980, 1991, 2010) provide a rigorous, analytical antidote to the persistent anti-materialist tendency that has characterized the history of philosophy and science. Bunge suggests that dualism can be neutralized “with a bit of philosophical analysis” (Bunge 1991) but this is clearly too optimistic in view of the recent revival of dualism as a respectable doctrine despite a vast industry of philosophical analysis. The conceivability of zombies (Chalmers 1996) leads to the possibility of dualism and thereby to the falsity of materialism. Bunge relies on his general case that “arguably all the factual (“empirical”) sciences only study concrete (or material) entities, from photons to rocks to organisms to societies” (Bunge 2010). Bunge’s immunity to philosophical extravagance is to be commended, but he is perhaps like someone who rejects Zeno’s paradoxes as physical absurdities and thereby leaves the puzzle itself untouched. While philosophers need to be cured of their paradoxes, perhaps Bunge’s strategy of just getting on with real scientific inquiry is, after all, the best approach. Bunge has mastery of an improbably vast range of disciplines. His writings provide a manifesto for the materialist conception of mind and body, placing ideas in their rich historical context. Few philosophers have written in such depth and breadth as we see in Bunge’s work and there is much to cheer for someone who shares Bunge’s views and prejudices. However, the very dazzling comprehensiveness and deftness in Bunge’s analyses often means a correlative lack of sufficiently detailed argumentation for its many insights, bold claims and criticisms. Accordingly, I have focused my following comments selectively on Bunge’s more controversial claims in order to engage with them seriously as his eminent status deserves. P. Slezak () School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. R. Matthews (ed.), Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_21 363 364 P. Slezak 21.1 Functionalism, Behaviourism, Dualism Following an erudite discourse on the various kinds of matter (physical, chemical, living, thinking, social and artificial), it is difficult to dispute Bunge’s jaundiced observation: “The reader is invited to compare this rich crop to the contributions made by metaphysicians to both their own discipline and to science during the same period” (Bunge 2010, p. 83–4). Indeed, despite recent heroic efforts (Stoljar 2017) to demonstrate progress in philosophy, a wide consensus among professional philosophers since Russell (1912) concurs with Bunge’s scepticism (Slezak 2018). Nevertheless, a difficulty arising from Bunge’s provocative critiques is that not all the targets of his admitted “bashings” (2010, p. xi) are equally deserving. For example, Bunge suggests “most contemporary philosophers of mind are indifferent to psychology, or are remarkably uninformed about it” (2010, p. ix). This charge cannot be sustained today in light of the work of such eminent philosophers as Stich, Fodor, Cummins, Dennett, Churchlands, Thagard, Nersessian, Bechtel, Egan, Bickhard, Elster and dozens of others. Bunge’s diagnosis is quite misplaced as, for example, when he suggests that in the philosophy of mind “few of its practitioners bother to keep up to date with the science of mind” (Bunge 2010, p. x). Such sweeping ad hominem pronouncements lead Bunge to hand-waving dismissals of important, subtle doctrines. Thus, for example, he says “the functionalist view of the mind, favoured by most contemporary philosophers of mind, should be dropped as being both scientifically shallow and medically hazardous” (Bunge 2010, p. 155). Functionalism in philosophy of mind is the doctrine that a mental state is identified, not on the basis of its material composition but on the basis of its functional role in the system of which it is a part. The doctrine may be seen in Aristotle who begins his De Anima asking: A . . . problem presented by the affections of soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. (Aristotle 1941, p. 536) Bunge asks the same question “Are mind and body two separate entities?” (Bunge 1980, xiii). As Bunge himself notes, Aristotle recognized that the question whether body and soul are one is as misleading as the question of whether the wax and its shape are one (Bunge 1980). The modern version of functionalism derives from insights into computational or abstractly specifiable states that are not intrinsically dependent on their composition or realization. An early statement of the view was Fodor’s Psychological Explanation (Fodor 1968) in which he acknowledged particular inspiration from Chomsky’s (1965) highly idealized, mathematical models of linguistic competence. In particular, functionalism is, therefore, neutral between materialism and dualism because mental states are identified by their abstractly specified role rather than their substance or multiple possible realizations. The case for materialism then becomes the general scientific case for the only possible physical realizations of the relevant functional roles. Dualism is ruled out on this conception because there 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 365 are no scientific grounds for believing that an immaterial substance is a possible realization for the relevant functional states. Although the conception of the physical realization has changed, the mind-body problem has remained essentially the same for centuries. The functionalist solution is captured loosely in the familiar distinction between hardware and software in a computer. That is, the mind is to be understood in a literal sense as the software rather than the hardware of the brain. Pylyshyn’s (1984) landmark Computation and Cognition is perhaps the locus classicus of this doctrine that takes computation to be more than merely a metaphor and, rather, when appropriately spelled out, a literal account of information processing in the brain. To be sure, functionalism remains open to a variety of philosophical criticisms but cannot be dismissed in Bunge’s manner (Levin 2010). Characterizing modern information processing psychology as “brainless cognitive science,” Bunge suggests that, seen in historical perspective, “computationalism is a sophisticated version of behaviourism” (Bunge 2010, p. 227). On the face of it, this is a surprising claim because the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ and its computational paradigm has been seen as emerging from the downfall of behaviourism (Gardner 1987) once internal, mental representations and processes became legitimate theoretical constructs again. However, Bunge (2010) explicitly identifies computationalism with the behaviourism it has displaced. He offers the following schematic diagram to illustrate the parallel: (a) Classical behaviourism Stimulus ➔ Black box ➔ Response (b) Computationalism Stimulus ➔ Program ➔ Readout However, the “program” in computational models of cognition cannot be compared with the “Black Box” of behaviourism precisely because the “program” constitutes the theoretical postulation of internal representations that were eschewed by behaviourism. The ‘box-and-arrow’ models and formalisms of computational theories are precisely hypotheses about mental events and processes that were taboo for Skinner on the grounds that they must be question-begging. Daniel Dennett has been foremost in elucidating the significance of AI and computation for the philosophy of mind. For example, he has shown how modern computational approaches can avoid the difficulty that Skinner posed – that is, how to avoid the paradox that psychology with homunculi seems circular, whereas psychology without homunculi seems empty. The successive decomposition of tasks “discharging the loan on intelligence” with progressively stupider homunculi shows how psychological theories may posit internal states without falling afoul of Skinner’s worries. Dennett explains that AI is a form of psychological theorising adopting the “Intentional Stance” and differing from traditional philosophy in that “the AI worker pulls his armchair up to a console” (Dennett 1978a, p. 58). AI shares with philosophy (in particular, with epistemology and philosophy of mind) the status of most abstract investigation of the principles of psychology. But it shares with 366 P. Slezak psychology in distinction from philosophy a typical tactic in answering its questions. (Dennett 1978a, p. 60) In a seeming inconsistency, on the one hand, as we have just noted, Bunge takes computationalism to be behaviourist but, on the other hand, he also takes high-level computational theories to be dualist. For example, Bunge suggests that “advocates of this view [linguistic naturalism or biolinguistics] have adopted Cartesian mindbody dualism” (Bunge 2010, p. 112), but this is, at best, a caricature of Chomsky’s program (see Jenkins 2001; Di Sciullo and Boeckx 2011) for which Bunge gives no argument or justification. Bunge thinks that inquiry that stays at the higher level of mental phenomena rather than neuroscience and “objective brain facts” is evidence that “psycho-neural dualism prevails” (Bunge 2010, p. 154). This might be charitably understood as simply characterising the distinction between different levels of analysis rather than the usual Cartesian connotation of the term “dualism,” but Bunge appears to intend the latter pejorative reading. This reading is further suggested in his warning “that the dualist philosophies of mind are hazardous to mental health because they divert the researcher’s and the therapist’s attention from the brain to an immaterial and therefore inaccessible item.” (Bunge 2010, p. 155). On the contrary, the biolinguistics program has been explicitly conceived as integrating high level theories with their biological, neurological substrate. Fodor (1968) and Pylyshyn (1984) articulated the rationale for a high-level inquiry with its proprietary vocabulary and explanatory principles, just as we see elsewhere in science. One can fully acknowledge the reality of many phenomena without falling into dualism or ascribing them to the basic, elementary physical constituents of the world. As Fodor (1989) has argued in countering the ailment of “epiphobia”; rivers, sails and mountains are no less real for not figuring in basic physics – Bunge’s own reason for being a materialist rather than a physicalist, as he uses these terms. Indigestion, inflation and other kinds of “being” in good standing are surely real without belonging to properties of elementary particles. Thus, for example, whatever may be its other failings, economics is not committed to dualism or occult entities by virtue of seeking generalizations above the level of the individuals who make up the economic system. This was, of course, Durkheim’s (1898) famous conception of social facts as “things” widely, but unjustly, seen as some kind of mysticism but, in fact, an anticipation of Fodor’s (1989) criticism of “epiphobia” – the fear of postulating theoretical entities. In this spirit, Chomsky has referred to his abstract idealizations as adopting a ‘Galilean’ approach to science (see Pylyshyn 1972, 1973). Chomsky writes: . . . we are keeping to abstract conditions that unknown mechanisms must meet. We might go on to suggest actual mechanisms, but we know that it would be pointless to do so in the present stage of our ignorance concerning the functioning of the brain. . . . If we were able to investigate humans as we study other, defenceless organisms, we might well proceed to inquire into the operative mechanisms . . . (Chomsky 1980, p. 197) 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 367 Chomsky’s functionalist view was unmistakable in his Aspects, where he wrote: The mentalist . . . need make no assumptions about the possible physiological basis for the mental reality he studies. . . . One would guess . . . that it is the mentalistic studies that will ultimately be of greatest value for the investigation of neurophysiological mechanisms, since they alone are concerned with determining abstractly the properties that such mechanisms must exhibit and the functions they must perform. (Chomsky 1965, p. 193, fn. 1) Of course, philosophers are not the only ones tempted by the barren doctrine. Bunge notes, the foremost neuroscientists have been avowed dualists including Sherrington, Penfield, Sperry and Eccles. Thus, Bunge’s advice that researchers should stick to the brain is questionable if the alternative is not an avowed Cartesian ontological dualism but only high-level, top-down theory. The virtues of such an ‘Intentional Stance’ (Dennett 1989) or semantic, knowledge-level (Newell 1990) analysis above the level of cognitive architecture have been seen as providing the rationale for the enterprise of cognitive psychology. The approach is seen paradigmatically in Marr’s (1982) distinction between the levels of computation, algorithm and implementation, corresponding roughly to Chomsky’s competenceperformance distinction. Only the implementation or “realization” level is concerned directly with the physical, neural substrate that Bunge appears to insist on as the only respectable level of analysis. 21.2 Materialism, Physicalism and Dualism Bunge declares “I am an unabashed monist” and “I am a materialist but not a physicalist” (2010, p. vii). These latter terms have been often used interchangeably and so it is important to understand Bunge’s specific meaning. By “physicalist” Bunge means someone who holds that the laws of physics are explanatory for all phenomena. Bunge explains that his own expertise as a physicist led him to appreciate “that physics can explain neither life nor mind nor society” nor “chemical reactions, metabolism, color, mentality, sociality, or artifact” (Bunge 2010, p. vii). Bunge’s mission is “to reunite matter and mind” at a time when its materialist message is more timely than it would have been a decade or two earlier. Bunge’s writings on the mind-body problem (Bunge 1980, 1991, 2010) are intended to provide an antidote to a persistent anti-materialist tendency that has characterized the history of philosophy and science. He concludes: . . . psychoneural dualism is worse than barren: it is an obstacle to the advancement of science and medicine. Fortunately, this obstacle can easily be removed with a bit of philosophical analysis. (Bunge 1991, p. 520) This remark is clearly too optimistic in view of the revival of dualism as a respectable doctrine despite a vast industry of philosophical analysis. The materialist 368 P. Slezak orthodoxy of the mid twentieth century has been eroded and dualism has, indeed, regained a certain respectability (Chalmers 1996). However, besides taking a passing swipe (Bunge 2010, p. 177), Bunge does not address the principal arguments based on the Method of Conceivability’ and Zombies (see also Kirk 2005). Furthermore, there is a certain irony in the fact that Bunge’s criticism of functionalist theories places him in the same camp as leading critics of materialist theories such as Strawson (2006, 2018) who charge functionalism with leaving out the essentially subjective, first person, phenomenal, qualitative features of experience. For example, Strawson (2006, 2008) holds materialist philosophers to be guilty of “the silliest view ever held by any human being” (Strawson 2008, p. 8). He construes the Lucretius world-view of Dennett and others as a grievous error exceeding the implausibility of “every known religious belief.” He says, For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. (Strawson 2006, pp. 5–6) Albeit for different reasons, Bunge joins Strawson (2006) and Searle (1997) in heaping scorn on philosophical adversaries such as Dennett who are said to deny the most obvious reality of their own experience. Searle parodies the title of Dennett’s book as Consciousness Denied instead of Consciousness Explained. If Searle is right, Dennett has managed an intellectual achievement that Descartes showed to be impossible. This suggests that these rhetorical features of the debate about consciousness are not irrelevant matters of polemical style but rather symptoms of the peculiarity of the views at stake. Thus, Searle charges materialists with making “stunning mistakes” (Searle 1992, p. 246) and “saying things that are obviously false” (Searle 1992, p. 247). Block (1990, p. 129), too, suggests that Dennett’s (1991) book would be more aptly titled Consciousness Ignored. “Such authors pretend to think that consciousness exists, but in fact they end up denying its existence” (Searle 1992, p. 7). Searle (1997) includes Armstrong (1968, 1980) among such deniers. Searle writes acidly “I regard Dennett’s denial of the very existence of consciousness not as a new discovery or even as a serious possibility but rather as a form of intellectual pathology” (Searle 1997, p. 112). Since these accusations are directed at our foremost philosophers, we are confronted with a peculiar situation that deserves attention as something more than mere ad hominem rhetorical excess. 21.3 Fantasy Worlds Despite the difficulties of articulating a version of materialism that is immune from philosophical objections, from the 1950s there had been a consensus on materialism and the progress from early ‘Identity’ versions to the more recent ‘functionalist’ accounts (Fodor 1968). Thus, for example, originally Thomas Nagel (1965) avowed an intellectual commitment to materialism as the only scientifically respectable 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 369 account, while confessing a psychological discomfort because of its deep intuitive, introspective implausibility. Before his apostasy, Nagel (1965) took it as a datum of subjective experience that materialism has a deep, intuitive implausibility that is independent of its overwhelming systematic merits as a true scientific, philosophical thesis. Bunge makes a typically acerbic remark: “responsible people do not mistake conceptual possibility, or conceivability, for factual possibility or lawfulness; and they do not regard the ability to invent fantasy worlds as evidence for their real existence” (Bunge 2010, p. 177). It is perhaps understandable that philosophers will elevate their only research tool to a pre-eminent status as a guide to metaphysical possibilities, but the tendency gives grounds for Bunge’s jaundiced view of their discipline. Indeed, the balance has become reversed with intuitions coming to dominate systematic scientific considerations. Thus, Nagel has been among those who have shifted their allegiance to various forms of ‘Mysterianism’ (McGinn 1989), outright dualism or even panpsychism (Strawson 2006). Of this latter doctrine, in a related context, Bunge remarks that it “illustrates the cynical principle that, given an arbitrary extravagance, there is at least one philosopher capable of inventing an even more outrageous one” (Bunge 2010, p. 167). This is the sentiment that Descartes had expressed in his Discourse remarking that “nothing can be imagined which is too strange or incredible to have been said by some philosopher” (1637/1986, p. 118). The modern shift in the consensus has been due, not to any new scientific revelations that would provide grounds for doubting the broad materialist picture but rather to the increased weight placed on philosophical intuitions. Despite having been elevated to the status of an official “Conceivability Argument” (Stoljar 2001) or “Method of Conceivability” (Chalmers 2002), it is difficult to find anything other than a bare description of the faculty itself as “a kind of rational intuition or intellectual presentation of a possibility: a clear and distinct idea” (Stoljar 2001, p. 393). Indeed, as Levine puts it, “The conceivability of zombies is . . . the principal manifestation of the explanatory gap” (Levine 2001, p. 79). Yablo too, notes that for Chalmers (1996), “Almost everything in The Conscious Mind turns on a single claim . . . that there can be zombie worlds” (Yablo 1999, p. 455). The conceivability of zombies leads to the possibility of dualism and thereby to the falsity of materialism. Bunge suggests that this argument “does not even distinguish between conceptual and physical possibility” (Bunge 2010, p. 23) and, although this is not accurate, it captures something important about the extravagance of such contemporary philosophy which Bunge characterizes as “just jeux d’esprit” (Bunge 2010, p. 23). Current arguments concerning the conceivability of zombies and the “explanatory gap” are little more than unwitting, often verbatim, rehearsal of Descartes’ own reasoning in his Meditations. However, John Cottingham has bluntly remarked that Descartes’ argument from conceivability to dualism “is, or ought to be, regarded as one of the most notorious nonsequiturs in the history of philosophy” (Cottingham 1992, p. 242). The alleged metaphysical, ontological implications of conceivability intuitions have become a central topic of philosophical debate (Gendler and Hawthorne 2002) but the question to be considered is, in Loar’s words 370 P. Slezak echoing Bunge, whether “we have managed to break out” (Loar 1999) of purely conceptual premises to metaphysical conclusions. In fairness to Descartes, it is worth noting that he had good, essentially scientific reasons for his dualism and even his cogito meditations have an important logical structure that has not been properly recognized (See Slezak 1988, 2010). The criticism of Cottingham and Loar applies more to modern dualists than to Descartes himself. 21.4 Exorcising the Ghost or the Machine? Regarding the thesis of materialism, Bunge makes the important and perhaps surprising point that “there is no generally accepted concept of matter” and, therefore, “We do not have a generally accepted materialist theory of mind” (Bunge 2010, p.xvii). Although Bunge is harshly critical of Chomsky’s views on various issues concerning language, on this question Chomsky has made a similar point. Chomsky (2000) appears to undermine the entire philosophical mind-body enterprise as it has been traditionally conceived. Chomsky’s makes the surprising suggestion that the problem cannot even be formulated coherently. Whereas the problem is universally seen as the mystery of the mind and how it might be explained in material terms, Chomsky reverses the puzzle as one about the body. He suggests that since Isaac Newton “the theory of body was demonstrated to be untenable” (Chomsky 2000, p. 84). Ironically, he notes “Newton eliminated the problem of “the ghost in the machine” by exorcising the machine; the ghost was unaffected” (Chomsky 2000, p. 84). With this development, “the mind-body problem disappeared, and can be resurrected, if at all, only by producing a new notion of body (material, physical etc.) to replace the one that was abandoned” (Chomsky 2000, p. 84). For this reason, there is generally no reduction of one science to another but rather the reducing science changes to permit unification of the previously recalcitrant theory. This is a remarkable analysis of the puzzle of consciousness that turns everything on its head. If Chomsky is right, as Bunge would appear to concur, there is no more a mindbody problem than there was a valence-atom problem or electricity-matter problem. Chomsky writes: “the traditional mind-body problem became unformulable with the disappearance of the only coherent notion of the body (physical, material, and so on)” (Chomsky 2009, p. 189). While recognizing that commitment to computationalism is the central dogma of modern cognitive science, Bunge’s critique seems to miss its mark here. He writes: . . . computers are not exactly natural. Worse, unlike live human brains, they are limited to performing algorithmic operations. They lack spontaneity, creativity, insight (intuition), the ability to feel emotions, and sociality. Indeed, computers have to be programmed; there can be no programs for coming up with original ideas . . . (Bunge 2010, p. 110) 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 371 Elsewhere Bunge explains further, “And, of course, by definition of “original,” an original design is one that has never been described before – that is, one that is so far unknown” (Bunge 2010, p. 228). Ironically, given his own harsh criticism of social constructivists, here Bunge falls into the error seen notoriously in Brannigan (1981) who sees creativity and originality in science as a matter of social achievement and priority as if this precluded rational, cognitive, intellectual processes. Bunge cites exactly the same social notion of originality and thereby entirely side-steps the key question of whether computers can do what we do when we make original inventions or discoveries regardless of whether they happen to have been anticipated in an uninteresting sociological sense. 21.5 Programming Original Creativity On the more fundamental issue, Bunge’s critique of computer creativity and originality is the so-called “Lady Lovelace” objection addressed in Alan Turing’s classic article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). Aside from issues of principle, the empirical facts refute the charge that computer algorithms are incapable of originality, spontaneity and creativity as humans are. The AI programs of Newell and Simon (1972) developed further by Langley et al. (1987; see Slezak 1989) are an existence proof of original, creative scientific discovery by computer. For example, the BACON program has discovered Boyle’s Law and Kepler’s Law from the observational, numerical data which deserves to be regarded as original in the relevant sense that the result was not programmed but found by heuristic problem-solving methods that are essentially the methods that underlie human creative thought. Bunge’s suggestion that computers “are limited to performing algorithmic operations” (Bunge 2010, p. 110) fails to recognize the crucial distinction between algorithmic and heuristic problem solving as developed by Newell and Simon (1972). Although even the latter are strictly algorithmic by virtue of being fundamentally computer programs, they apply techniques of problem solving that are not guaranteed to find a solution since many interesting problems are not susceptible to algorithmic solution. Apart from such actual developments in AI, Bunge’s argument overlooks the fact that human beings are also strictly subject to programming in the sense that we are deterministic machines whose brains are a complex combination of inheritance and learning – all forms of programming, albeit not by a human or other independent intelligence. Unless human originality is ascribed to some mysterious, inexplicable indeterministic source, our own creative discoveries must also be due to describable cognitive processes that are ultimately products of the information processing physically embodied in the brain. On Bunge’s own materialist view of human minds, he must be committed to just such a view of originality and creativity as describable, that is, programmable. 372 P. Slezak 21.6 Plato’s Problem: Nature or Nurture? Perhaps the most sophisticated computational theory of mental phenomena is Chomsky’s generative grammar of language, that Bunge acknowledges to be a “naturalization project” (Bunge 2010, p. 112). However, far from being a kind of Cartesian dualism (Bunge 2010, p. 122), the generative program is a vindication of materialism by showing how a physical, biological system might embody the special properties of language such as compositionality and recursiveness. Moreover, Bunge’s response to Chomsky’s claims for the innateness of Universal Grammar (UG) does not address the fundamental grounds for the claim – the idea that the human brain has an initial state that includes the principles underlying all humanly learnable languages and, therefore, a species-specific aspect of the human genetic endowment. Purporting to answer Chomsky, Bunge asserts “all knowledge is learned” (Bunge 2010, p. 166). Bunge complains: Unfortunately no one has bothered to explicitly state the rules of UG, and geneticists have not found the presumptive UG gene(s). Nor is there any reason to expect such findings, for languages are highly conventional . . . . (Bunge 2010, p. 112) First, Bunge overlooks the fact that Chomsky’s claim at this level of generality should be uncontroversial because even the most extreme empiricist or behaviourist must agree that something is innate to permit language “learning” at all. The only question at issue is how much. Moreover, the “innateness” claim for language is essentially the same as for other cognitive systems such as vision in mammals which are not fully determined by genetically determined structures in the brain but partially fixed by innate factors and partly determined by experience. More specifically, the “reason to expect such findings” includes the “poverty of the stimulus” argument or what Chomsky refers to as “Plato’s Problem” – namely, that of explaining how we can know so much on the basis of so little data. Bunge asserts “there is no evidence whatsoever that anything learnable is encoded in the genome” (Bunge 2010, p. 183), but he doesn’t address the persuasive evidence from acquisition of the complex structures of language in all children by the age of three without effort, without instruction, without adequate evidence. This phenomenon is quite different from “learning” and rather typical of biologically determined maturation along a pre-determined course of development, triggered by experience but not learned from it. And, of course, despite Bunge’s assertion that “no one has bothered to explicitly state the rules of UG,” modern generative linguistics in the ‘Minimalist’ program is precisely stating the rules of UG, of course, as always, conjectured provisionally as in any other branch of empirical science. Bunge makes the surprising remark that “idealists like Chomsky and his followers ignore empirical linguistics” (Bunge 2010, p. 136) by which he means “real speakers and linguistic communities” rather than “abstract systems” (Bunge 2010, p. 136). In a certain sense Bunge is right, but this is merely the “Galilean” approach to science that Chomsky has championed on the basis of his famous “competence – performance” distinction (see Pylyshyn 1973; Slezak 2014). Galileo ignored the em- 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 373 pirical evidence of real pendulums and real projectiles in favour of mathematically idealized “abstract systems” for the same reason. Bunge complains that “brainless psychology” can only describe mental phenomena but not explain them “because genuine explanation involves revealing mechanisms” (Bunge 2010, p. 159). However, this would rule out Newton’s law of gravitation and Kepler’s law of elliptical planetary orbits, inter alia, which famously did not reveal underlying mechanisms. Like Marr’s (1982) computational model of vision, Chomsky’s competence model of tacit knowledge abstracts and idealizes from underlying mechanisms and, thereby provides the most fruitful approach to ultimately discovering them. 21.7 Conclusion Bunge’s work is both exhilarating and exasperating at the same time. Its characteristic scope, insight and erudition is joined with a refreshing impatience for the many varieties of nonsense in the academy. I confess to considerable sympathy for Bunge’s jaundiced view of those “professors who play parlour games instead of tackling serious problems” (Bunge 2010, p. 11) and I share his conviction that much modern philosophy is guilty of this kind of lapse. However, as stated at the outset, there are points where his insights, bold claims and criticisms need much finer detail and attention to contemporary literature in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. References Aristotle (1941). De Anima (R. McKeon, Trans.). The basic works of aristotle (pp. 535–561). New York: Random House. Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A materialist theory of mind. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Armstrong, D. M. (1980). The nature of mind. Sydney: University of Queensland Press. Block, N. (1990). Consciousness ignored. Review of Daniel Dennett consciousness explained. The Journal of Philosophy, 181–193. Brannigan, A. (1981). The social basis of scientific discoveries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunge, M. (1980). The mind-body problem: A psychobiological approach. New York: Pergamon Press. Bunge, M. (1991). A philosophical perspective on the mind-body problem or, why neuroscientists and psychologists should care about philosophy. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 135(4), 513–523. Bunge, M. (2010). Matter and mind: A philosophical inquiry. Boston studies in the philosophy of science volume 287. Dordrecht: Springer. Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D. (2002). Does conceivability entail possibility? In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conceivability and possibility (pp. 145–200). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 374 P. Slezak Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press. Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (2009). The mysteries of nature: How deeply hidden? The Journal of Philosophy, 106(4), 167–200. Cottingham, J. (1992). “Introduction” The Cambridge companion to Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennett, D. C. (1978a). Brainstorms. Vermont: Bradford Books. Dennett, D. C. (1978b). Current issues in the philosophy of mind. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 249–261. Dennett, D. C. (1989). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. London: Penguin. Descartes, R. (1637/1985). Discourse on the method In The philosophical writings of Descartes, volume 1 (J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff & D. Murdoch, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Di Sciullo, A. M., & Boeckx, C. (Eds.). (2011). The biolinguistic enterprise: New perspectives on the evolution and nature of the human language faculty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1898). Individual and collective representations. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vi, May. Reprinted in D.F. Pocock, 1974, translator, Sociology and Philosophy by Emile Durkheim. New York: The Free Press. Fodor, J. A. (1968). Psychological explanation. New York: Random House. Fodor, J. A. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical topics, 17, 59–79. Reprinted in Fodor, A theory of content and other essays ([DATE] pp. 137–160). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gardner, H. (1987). The mind’s new science. New York: Basic Books. Gendler, T., & Hawthorne, J. (Eds.). (2002). Conceivability and possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, L. (2001). Biolinguistics: Exploring the biology of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirk, R. (2005). Zombies and consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langley, P., Simon, H., Bradshaw, G., & Zytkow, J. (1987). Scientific discovery: Computational explorations of the creative processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levin, J. (2010). Functionalism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/functionalism/. Accessed 10 June 2018. Levine, J. (2001). Purple haze: The puzzle of consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loar, B. (1999). David Chalmers’s the conscious mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(2), 465–472. Marr, D. (1982). Vision a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McGinn, C. (1989). Can we solve the mind-body problem. Mind, 98, 891. Nagel, T. (1965). Physicalism. The Philosophical Review, 74, 336–356. Reprinted in J. O’Connor ed., Modern Materialism. New York: Harcourt Brace & World. Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Pylyshyn, Z. (1972). Competence and psychological reality. American Psychologist, 27, 546–552. Pylyshyn, Z. (1973). The role of competence theories in cognitive psychology. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(1), 21–50. Pylyshyn, Z. (1984). Computation and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Russell, B. (1912/1967). The problems of philosophy. London: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle, J. R. (1997). The mystery of consciousness. London: Granta Books. Slezak, P. (1988). Was Descartes a liar? Diagonal doubt defended. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 39, 379–388. 21 Mario Bunge and Contemporary Cognitive Science 375 Slezak, P. (1989). Scientific discovery by computer as refutation of the strong programme. Social Studies of Science, 19(4), 563–600. Slezak, P. (2010). Doubts about Descartes’ indubitability: The cogito as intuition and inference. Philosophical Forum, 41(4), 389–412. Slezak, P. (2014). Intuitions in the study of language: Syntax and semantics. In L. M. Osbeck & B. S. Held (Eds.), Rational intuition: Philosophical roots, scientific investigations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slezak, P. (2018). Is there progress in philosophy? The case for taking history seriously. Philosophy, 93(4), 529–555. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819118000232 Stoljar, D. (2001). The conceivability argument and two conceptions of the physical. Philosophical Perspectives, 15: Metaphysics, 393–413. Stoljar, D. (2017). Philosophical progress: In defence of a reasonable optimism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, G. (2006). Consciousness and its place in nature. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Strawson, G. (2008). Real materialism and other essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Strawson, G. (2018). Things that bother me. New York: NYRB Press. Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460. Yablo, S. (1999). Concepts and consciousness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(2), 455–463.