Daniel Andler

Investigating Emotions as Functional States Distinct From Feelings

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes (e.g., focusing on feelings or on neurobiology as the starting point) are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion.

Philosophy of Cognitive Science

The rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by a considerable amount of philosophical activity. No other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. Philosophical work relevant to cognitive science has become a sprawling field (extending beyond analytic philosophy) which no one can fully master, although some try and keep abreast of the philosophical literature and of the essential scientific developments. Due to the particular nature of its subject, it touches on a multitude of distinct special branches in philosophy and in science. It has also become quite a difficult, complicated and technical field, to the point of being nearly impenetrable for philosophers or scientists coming from other fields or traditions. Finally, it is contentious: Cognitive science is far from having reached stability, it is still widely regarded with suspicion, philosophers working within its confine have sharp disagreements amongst themselves, and philosophers standing outside, especially (but not only) of non-analytic persuasion, are often inclined to see both cognitive science and its accompanying philosophy as more or less confused or even deeply flawed.

Unity Without Myths

We seem to suffer from a case of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, we seem to have almost unanimously rejected as hopeless or incoherent the aim of a unified science. On the other, we passionately debate about the prospects of research programs which, if successful, would considerably enhance the prospects of unification: from particle physics to cognitive neuroscience, from evolutionary theory to logical modeling or dynamic systems, a common motivation seems to be the quest for unity. The purpose of this paper is to relieve the dissonance. I will defend a moderate form of unity, one which is compatible with the diversity and open-endedness of science, for which I can think of no better name than federalism, as it combines plurality and the construction of a common epistemic area. This view is not original: Otto Neurath himself espoused it, albeit in a context which is in certain respects quite unlike ours.

Is naturalism the unsurpassable philosophy for the sciences of man in the 21st century

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, nearly 50 years ago, that Marxism “remains the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it.” In his critic Raymond Aron’s words, Marxism was for Sartre the “insurpassable [or, in other translations: unsuperable] philosophy of our time.1” Taken in context, Sartre’s pronouncement was at once descriptive and prescriptive: it was, according to him, neither objectively possible for the philosopher to leave the confines of Marxism, nor ethically permissible to attempt to do so.

From Paleo- to Neo-Connectionism

The paper seeks to clarify some conceptual issues raised by contemporary connectionism, and its relation to classical computationalism, by means of a comparative study of the major features of early, ’paleo’-connectionism, and late, ’neo’-connectionism. An examination of the celebrated inaugural paper by McCulloch and Pitts (1943) reveals a deep ambivalence: their neural nets are presented both as ’logic machines’ and as neural near-equivalents of Turing machines. It is shown that the lack of an intrinsic, ’embodied’ representational level prevents these nets from attaining real logical powers, while as computational devices they herald contemporary computationalism in both classical and connectionist forms, but leave its representational face entirely in the dark.

Author Reply: We Don’t Yet Know What Emotions Are (But Need to Develop the Methods to Find Out):

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. (a) We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer (henceforth “SGS”) or Luiz Pessoa (henceforth “LP”). Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (b) We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. (c) But our version of functionalism is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions.

Mathematics in cognitive science

What role does mathematics play in cognitive science today, what role should mathematics play in cognitive science tomorrow? The cautious short answers are: to the factual question, a rather modest role, except in peripheral areas to the normative question, a far greater role, as the peripherys place is reevaluated and as both cognitive science and mathematics grow. This paper aims at providing more detailed, perhaps more contentious answers.

Naturalism and the Scientific Status of the Social Sciences

The purpose of this paper is to characterize a dichotomous view of the current situation in the sciences of man and show it to be fallacious. On the view to be rejected, the sciences of man are undergoing the first serious attempt in history to thoroughly naturalize their subject matter and thus to put an end to their separate status. Progress has (on this view) been quite considerable in the disciplines in charge of the individual, while in the social sciences the outcome of the process is moot: the naturalistic social sciences are still in their infancy, and whether they will eventually engulf or at least profoundly transform the field of social science is unclear. The dichotomous conception pits two camps against one another. On the one hand, the advocates of the naturalistic social sciences maintain that they hold the key to the long-awaited realization of the unity of science program and are set to put the social sciences on equal footing with the natural sciences as we know them today. On the other, the mainstream in social science is strongly opposed to the very idea of naturalizing the field. The impartial observer is then asked to wait and see: either the current attempts at naturalization succeed, and the goals of unified science are attained; or they fail, in which case the prospect of developing a social science which is truly scientific recedes in the distant future. But this view is based on too narrow a concept of science, and thus fails to do justice to the situation, or so I’ll argue.

Federalism in science — complementarity vs perspectivism: Reply to Harré

Regarding the question of the unity of science, two stable and one unstable positionshave been held. Reductive unitarianism and regionalism are the stable positions.According to the first, defended among others by Poincare and by some, though notall, members of the Vienna circle, and their American disciples such as Nagel, naturebeing one, scientific knowledge can in principle achieve, and should aim towards, astate of theoretical unity. According to the second, because nature is heterogeneous(being composed, as Dupre and others believe, of an indefinite number of unrelatedpatterns, or, as Cournot for example held, of different though somehow connectedorders),sciencecanatbest,andshouldonlyaimto,constructregionalrepresentations.The unstable position seeks a middle ground, taking seriously, on the one hand, thestrive,constitutiveofmodernscience,toachieveunification,andthenotablesuccesseswhich this strategy has met, and, on the other hand, the no less notable failures of thestrategy as well as the fragility of the reasons advanced in favor of the inevitability ofits eventual triumph.Rom Harre’s paper is an inspiration to those who, like myself and my co-authorsin the work referenced below, seek to secure a tolerable degree of stability for theintermediate position, which, taking after Auyang, I will label ‘federalism’, a suitablyloose denomination.In this brief comment I shall not seek to do justice to the many challenging ideasand arresting examples presented in the paper, and will merely attempt to bring insharper contrast the two modes which, as I understand him, Harre sees as possibleways in which federalism is, or can be, achieved. I will also raise an issue regardingthe source and destination of the more strongly non-reductionist form of federalism.The first federalist mode, which I propose to call ‘perspectival’, appears, undervarious forms and names, in many accounts of the plurality of scientific disciplines.Some of the most familiar examples come from classical physics, as mentioned inthe text: ‘No one seriously doubts that gases are really swarms of molecules’, and

Is Social Constructivism Soluble in Critical Naturalism

Social constructivism and naturalism come in many varieties. Still, in the main, social constructivism combines a naturalistic component – it aims for a naturalistic, i.e., empirically warranted account of science as it is – with a rejection of the epistemic privilege claimed by natural science, based on its alleged success and on the alleged rationality of its method. In the main, scientific naturalism, the default position for contemporary rationalist philosophers, while espousing the Quinean strategy of adopting the scientific stance with respect to science itself, regards the epistemic superiority of natural science as an empirically well-supported tenet. Hence what is generally seen as an insoluble conflict. “Liberal” versions of naturalism have been recently proposed, however, which share an attitude of caution regarding the wholesale acceptance of natural science as sole provider of genuine knowledge. The question then arises whether social constructivism can be accommodated within some version of liberal naturalism. I argue that social constructivism must choose between renouncing its naturalistic component altogether, by rejecting the idea of a language- and practice independent world, and dissolving into liberal naturalism.