Cognitive Science, Reason and Emotion Some Consequences for Education
Daniel Fisherman and Mark Weinstein
Montclair State University
While many recent philosophers have abandoned the enlightenment ideal of human thought
and action as paradigmatically rational, education continues to promulgate rational thinking and
behavior as an essential endgame of child development. Perhaps such a state is simply indicative of the
toothless bite of philosophical argument in the domain of contemporary educational policy, especially
given the impact of empirical - and specifically, quantitative - research. Or perhaps the Cartesian image
of the rational self has proven powerful enough to educators to make it resilient to challenges from both
philosophy and other domains. Yet as we hope to show, the revolution in cognitive science, especially
the recent advances in cognitive neuroscience, lends strong backing to the post-enlightenment
philosophical position by offering empirically based claims to the effect that deliberate and conscious
thought is inherently tied to both social and environmental conditions as well as the individual’s internal
emotional state. Such a view, we argue, suggests that educators and policymakers reassess their image
of the rational adult as the culmination of liberal education.
This raises two philosophical issues. The first: why should we take cognitive science seriously?
The second: the problem of the impotence of relativism. If reason is corrupted by bias in some general
sense the reasoning in support of cognitive science and the reasoning of this paper is corrupt as well.
We will first turn to the first problem and give an outline of an argument that places cognitive science
within a general meta-scientific perspective. Then we move to an over view of some recent papers in
cognitive science and finally, briefly sketch a solution to the problem of relativism and indicate its
educational implications.
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Why cognitive science?
The images of the child in recent psychology has been dominated by experimental psychologists
who represent the cognitivist revolution against behaviorism and, as such, offered a rich and nuanced
picture that includes stage development and the essential influence of social and cultural constructions
in the formation of children’s minds. But whatever the theoretic power of such explanatory structures,
like earlier psychologists, Piaget and Vygotsky and those who worked in the their traditions could offer
little beyond generalizations of the experimental situations as they understood them This limitation
characteristic of psychology since its inception fell short of the dream of one of giants of the field,
Sigmund Freud, who in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895), envisioned a deep
connection between the physiology of the brain and his models of the unconscious only to admit the
defeat of the project in the face of the vast ignorance of the relevant functions with which the human
brain performed the myriad of tasks associated with cognition and emotion (Schore, 1997, p. 811).
Freud’s dream reflected two deep philosophical principles. The first is ontological; the second is
epistemological. Ontologically the connection with neurophysiology reflected the deep commitment to
ontological monism, the materialism that is characteristic of the scientific age. If mind could be reduced
to brain, one of the founding puzzles of modern philosophy would achieve its most satisfying answer.
The problem of the relationship between mind and brain would be solved since there is no relation; they
are the same entity under two descriptions. Ontology is, however, essentially connected to
epistemology, since the real is what determines the truth. And it is only through true descriptions and
explanations that we can know and understand the real. For the gain in ontological simplicity is, if
anything, overwhelmed by the increase in epistemological strength.
As a natural science, neurophysiology offers the potential for a level of warrant that is
characteristic of the most deeply entrenched theories that inquiry has produced, the branching
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structure of interlocking explanations, grounded in physical chemistry that connects through
explanatory relationships scientific understanding that ranges from micro-physics to organic chemistry,
from the material sciences through which we build our bridges to the micro-chemistry through which
we biopsy suspicious moles. The physical and chemical understanding of the living brain offers a
foundation for psychology that has enormous potential for explanatory power, even if confronting the
formidable complexity the bio-chemical structures that the current understanding of the nervous
system increasingly exposes. The explanatory power of a physicalist account of the mind is apparent in
the epistemological structures upon which physical chemistry is based.
Physical chemistry exhibits an explanatory structure that includes three highly intuitive
epistemological properties: consilience breadth and depth (Weinstein, 2011). These three are the core
of the epistemological power of scientific theorizing seen as productive of emerging truth. The first,
consilience, requires that theories are increasingly supported by a body of evidence that is improving in
scope and detail. Breadth requires that a theory explains an increasing number of diverse phenomena,
and depth requires that a theory is explained by higher-order explanatory frameworks that connect it to
other theories of increasing breadth and increasing evidentiary adequacy. These epistemological
characteristics, were first exemplified by physical chemistry in the mid 1800’s. And despite a history of
false starts, misleading empirical data and over-stated arguments, with the elaboration of the Periodic
Table in first decade of the 20th century, physical chemists offered a unified and highly coherent body of
branching explanatory structures, that ranges from micro-physics to cosmology, from the basic
properties of matter to the complexity of the living cell (Scerri, 2007). Cognitive science, viewed through
the epistemological perspective that looks to consilience, breadth and depth seems, even in its infancy,
to exhibit similar potential for explanatory power (Weinstein, forthcoming).
Cognitive science begins with a level of theoretic articulation exemplified by Chomsky (1957)
and called on the resources of logic and computer science that reflected the key epistemological context
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of early atomic theory. It had a clear theory that permitted of mathematical articulation. This placed
cognitive science in a position of indefinite growth, and the promise is the increasingly sophisticated
computer simulations of mind coupled with complex descriptions that require computer modeling for
their articulation offers a test of consilience unlike anything in the prior history of psychology. We do not
know whether theories in cognitive science are corrects, but if they can be developed consistent with
the available evidence they have the potential to grow in scope and detail as theoretic predictions everfiner models of complex systems. Thus like early physical chemistry, we don’t know which theories in
cognitive science are true, but if a theory continues to yield important explanations, the potential for a
growing and all-encompassing theoretic structure of psychology becomes plausible.
In the history of physical chemistry increasing degree of articulation of a theory, consilience was
combined with breadth, with the scope of a theory. Cognitive science is if nothing else, exceptionally
broad in the scope of its concerns. The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science (Frankish and Ramsey,
2012) lists 8 related research areas that reflect different aspects of cognition, including perception,
action, learning and memory, reasoning and decision making, concepts, language, emotion and
consciousness. In addition, they list 4 broad area that extend the reach of cognitive science from human
cognition standardly construed to include animal cognition, evolutionary psychology, the relation of
cognition to social entities and artifacts and most essential, the bridge between cognitive science and
the rest of physical science: cognitive neuroscience. Each of these is a going concern, and none of them
is free of difficulties. Yet in all cases there is a sense of advance, of wider and more thoughtful
articulation of theoretical perspectives that address a growing range of cognitive concerns. But as
compelling as these characteristics are it is depth that cognitive science shares with physical science,
that is, an explanatory structure that permits of micro-explanation that may be seen to yield an overarching ontology (Weinstein, 2002).
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The key to the epistemological power of cognitive science is it foundation in neuro-science.
Speculations as to the neural mechanisms have systemic power much greater than their evidentiary
weights. Such speculations offer an image of enormous potential warrant. For their enterprise, bridging
between fundamental pre-cognitive processes such as physiological control and emotions to build the
functional potential for memory and cognition, offers deep structural warrants supported by reliable
evidence and accepted theories. Moreover their materialist assumptions point to the deep reduction to
physiology, neurobiology, biochemistry and electrochemistry that an adequate theory of brain function
would depend on.
In what follows we will look at a variety of authors to give indications of the breadth and
connectivity of the concerns cognitive science brings to the fore. We will be looking at authors both as
an indicator of the power of cognitive science and for their relevance to issues in education that reflect
upon our image of the child. These implications are relative of the authors we select, and we offer no
complete image of the child. But they are an indication of how cognitive science may inform our
understanding of children.
We begin our task with a discussion about belief bias, the ineffectiveness of public retractions of
misinformation, and the value of distrust and skepticism. We then review some key findings in the
realm of automaticity in everyday life, with an eye toward the ramifications for thinking. After arguing
that these findings suggest a number of substantive problems for the idea of the rational adult, we
explore a number of neurocognitive models that rely on the tight integration of cognition with emotion.
We argue that these models offer the physical basis for understanding the findings of belief bias and
automaticity research, and thus explain why the ideal of the rational human has proven illusory. We
conclude with the ramifications for education, as stated above.
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Misinformation and Belief Bias
The persistence of misinformation in the face of repeated and widespread public retractions,
particularly in the political arena, presents a telling phenomenon of cognitive behavior. A classic
example concerns the infamous claim by the Bush administration that Iraq harbored weapons of mass
destruction in the period leading up to the 2003 Iraq war. In this case, United States citizens continued
to reference the claim to justify the country’s invasion of Iraq even after the administration conceded
the inability to find any such weapons and admitted that the claim was based on what was found to be
erroneous data (Lewandowsky, G.K., Stritzke, & Morales, 2005). A similar example concerns the ongoing
belief that Barak Obama is not a United States citizen even after public presentation of his authentic
birth certificate should have put the issue to rest. Were it not for the ubiquity of such phenomena, we
might be tempted to treat the commitment to patently false belief as aberrations of human cognition,
either episodes of brain malfunctioning or symptoms of some neurological condition. However, as
Lewandowsky et al. note, research “has consistently found that retractions rarely, if ever, have the
intended effect of eliminating reliance on misinformation, even when people believe, understand, and
later remember the retraction” (2012, p. 114). As such, the persistence of misinformation might better
be understood as characteristic of human thinking.
In exploring the phenomenon, Lewandowsky et al. offer four characteristics of misinformation
that make it particularly recalcitrant once it has been encoded in memory – internal coherence, source
credibility, perceived social consensus and compatibility with existing belief. While each of these factors
is subject to conscious cognitive evaluation, Lewandowsky emphasizes the affective influence of two
components of mentation, fluidity of thought and familiarity.
Individuals do consciously assess
compatibility of data with existing belief, but as the research indicates, “a less demanding indicator of
compatibility is provided by one’s meta-cognitive experience and affective response to new
information” (Lewandowsky, G.K., Stritzke, & Morales, 2005, p. 112). Thus, information that “feels right”
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tends to be assimilated fluidly without much conscious concern, while information inconsistent with
existing belief elicits a felt dissonance that prompts conscious scrutiny (Song & Schwarz, 2008). Such
affective response predisposes an individual to uncritically accept information consonant with their
adopted worldview while fostering a natural skepticism toward information that threatens that view.
Similarly, familiarity with information tends to encourage its acceptance.
As noted by
Lewandowsky, familiarity is seen as indicative of social consensus regardless whether such consensus
actually exists. And mere repetition of information has been shown to encourage a feeling of familiarity,
even to the point of lending credibility to sources initially perceived as questionable (Jacoby, Kelley,
Brown, & Jaseschko, 1989).
Such effects, which would again seem to operate on the affective
dimension, are particularly relevant in the realm of social media, where it has been shown that
misinformation propagates online at a rate that dwarfs attempts at correction (Nyhan, 2014). Indeed,
Lewandowsky suggests that the familiarity effect may be strong enough to render retractions
counterproductive, serving to reinforce belief by “directly or indirectly repeat[ing] false information in
order to correct it, thus further enhancing its familiarity” (Lewandowsky, H., Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook,
2012, p. 115) Such a phenomenon highlights the small cognitive jump from familiarity to perceived
truth as well as the intuitive predilection for the familiar over the justified.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from research concerning belief bias, where numerous studies
have found that existing belief interferes with the ability to correctly evaluate argument validity (Evans,
2008). Valid syllogisms with unbelievable conclusions are more often incorrectly evaluated than valid
syllogisms with believable conclusions. Inversely, acceptance of invalid syllogisms is more likely when
their conclusions are themselves believable. Conditional inference is also subject to the influence of
belief, with studies demonstrating that individuals are more likely to draw valid inferences from
statements they believe to be true than those understood to be false (Evans, 2008). Cognitive models
that seek to explain both phenomena often describe competitive cognitive systems, with a non-
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conscious, heuristic-based system often winning-out over the conscious analytic one, especially under
conditions of duress (Evans, 2008). Again, we are presented with a picture of cognition where nonrational factors influence the everyday functioning of reasoned cognition.
Automaticity and Dual Cognition
Perhaps the most telling findings, however, come from the arena of social cognition, where
Bargh’s theory of automaticity of higher mental functions characterizes everyday cognition as wholly
dependent on environmental and social factors (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Though Bargh accepts the
need for cognitive constructs, his project ascribes to the behaviorist goal of articulating systematic
relations between environmental stimuli and human behavior. Specifically, the theory of automaticity
postulates that the pre-conscious causal interaction of brain states with environmental and social
information forms a base psychological state that informs all conscious experience and much ostensibly
intentional action (Bargh, 1997). As such, the brain engages in a causally determinate interpretive
process that precedes any act of conscious deliberation, one that creates meaning, executes judgment
and evaluation, and specifies goals. Bargh argues that such processes render conscious choice a wishful
delusion, a mere rationalization of decisions already executed.
It should be noted, however, that Bargh’s fully determinist stance has little bearing on the
evidence for automaticity.
Even social cognition theorists who have balked at taking a purely
epiphenomenal stance on conscious deliberation have acknowledged the need to reconsider the extent
to which thought and action can be explained by lawful interactions between actors and their
environments (see Baumeister & Sommer, 1997). As Banaji, Blair & Glaser note, “however distant their
action and microscopic their influence, [these interactions] play a ubiquitous role in the magnitude of
the responsibilities we have and the ease with which we procure our achievements” (1997, p. 73).
Indeed, the empirical data is both extensive and compelling. Bargh systematically presents dozens of
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studies, each supportive of perceptual, evaluative, or motivational automaticity.
These studies
document, for example, how perceived personal traits such as honesty and meanness can be
surreptitiously primed by researchers so that subjects in an experimental group attribute such traits to a
target person while those in an unprimed control group do not. Primed activation of stereotypes results
in similar attribution of stereotyped traits to targets engaging in behavior not otherwise perceived as
such. As for evaluative judgments, Bargh documents numerous studies that support automaticity,
stating that “most if not all stimuli (objects and events, social and non-social alike)” are automatically
judged as good or bad “within a fraction of a second after [their] presentation (250 ms or less) and [such
judgment] does not depend on the individual having the intention to evaluate or the awareness that he
or she is doing so” (2000, p. 931). The implication is that absent conscious judgment, such evaluation
must be determined by cognitive states resulting from interaction with the environment.
Bargh’s most intriguing claim, however, concerns auto-motivity - the automaticity of motivation.
Here, he references numerous studies that indicate that goals for cognitive-intensive activities such as
information processing, memory storage, social behavior, and task performance can themselves be
unobtrusively primed. He notes that brain imaging studies consistently indicate the same neural
activation pattern for both researcher-triggered and subject-intended goals, indicating that automotivity activates the same mental processes as ostensibly agentic goals. And in a final coup-de-grace,
he describes studies where goal-primed subjects evaluate their performance differently and hold
different short-term self-efficacy beliefs than non-primed subjects. Thus, Bargh concludes that the
entire behavioral path, from motivation through evaluation, is subject to external determination. Such
comprehensive auto-motivity presents yet another potential source of cognitive bias, for in toeing the
line between behaviorism and cognitive mediation, Bargh states that “how information is processed,
stored, and later remembered…is not a straight function of the information itself but an interaction
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between it and the current purposes of the perceiver” (2000, p. 933). Put simply, environmental
variables determine goals, and goals influence cognition.
Indeed, Bargh expects that research will ultimately explain consciously triggered motivation in
terms of deterministic environmental variables. As previously mentioned though, some extent of
automaticity is not incompatible with autonomous deliberation. That external conditions can dictate
thought and action requires less of a commitment than claiming that such conditions always do so. And
there is no shortage of theories compatible with this weaker claim. Baumeister and Sommer, for
example, propose that
the role of consciousness is to override automatic, habitual, or standard responses on
the infrequent occasions when such intervention is needed. Consciousness thus
undermines the lawful, predictable nature of human behavior and produces a situation
of relative indeterminacy (1997, p. 75).
Evans, in reviewing the diversity of extant dual cognition theories, labels this position defaultinterventionist, and describes another category of theories as parallel-competitive, where the two
cognitive systems operate independently of each other, each seeking to exert behavioral influence
(Evans, 2008). Both types of theories, of which there are numerous variants, can accommodate a first
cause conception of conscious deliberation, and hence maintain a stance agnostic to Bargh’s fully
deterministic claims.
Evans (2008), himself, paints a more complex picture of the interaction between what he terms
Type 1 (unconscious) and Type 2 (conscious) cognition. Instead of committing to two cognitive systems,
he argues that the plethora of empirically backed models suggests that there must be multiple Type 1
systems, each with distinct and sometimes incompatible features. He proposes that such systems likely
interact with Type 2 cognition in three ways – habitually, where repetitive cognitive tasks get
appropriated by Type 1 systems; pragmatically, where Type 1 information is continually supplied to the
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Type 2 process(es); and associatively, where a connectionist architecture causally processes external
information without any Type 2 interaction. And though he takes no explicit stance on Type 2
autonomy, he offers a Bargh-like warning to its proponents: it is unreasonable to think that an
ostensibly autonomous Type 2 cognitive system must itself be independent of deterministic unconscious
processes simply because unconscious Type 1 cognitive systems are causally determined. It is possible –
Bargh would say likely – that both types are subject to external determination, regardless of perceived
autonomy.
Neurocognitive Models
Whatever one thinks of the fully determinative stance, it is difficult to maintain the ideal of
everyday rational cognition in light of the discussion above. Even when one grants the viability of willful
deliberation, belief bias and the inefficacy of misinformation retractions suggest an affective component
to both belief acquisition and reasoning, where familiarity of information and fluidity of thought make it
“feel right” to adopt a particular belief. The empirical results of automaticity studies suggest a base
experience available to conscious cognition that is already pregnant with interpretation, one that is itself
dependent on environmentally manipulable individual goals. The ubiquitous preconscious ascription of
positive and negative valence to experience and the perceptual attribution of social traits further stack
the deck against a purely rational ideal of deliberation. Indeed, even if one does accept a dual cognition
model amenable to the complete autonomy of conscious cognition, the problem of what mediates
between deliberative and automatic cognition points back to non-deliberative factors. For in a defaultinterventionist model, for example, what determines when deliberative intervention occurs?
To
postulate a deliberative process would start a recursive loop that would eventually have to point back to
non-deliberative initiation. The same might be said about parallel-competitive models, where a nondeliberative mechanism would be needed to determine which of the competing processes win out for
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cognitive control. Either way, it seems that we are forced to accept the primacy of non-deliberative
factors.
Contemporary neurocognitive models of emotion may, for the first time, provide viable
explanations of the physical and evolutionary basis for such a view. While programs in mainstream
cognitive science have long made progress in the areas of reasoning and decision making, it is only
recently that theorists have presented neural models that emphasize the tight integration of cognition
and emotion (see Abrahamsen, 2012). Indeed, for much of the past century, the relation between the
two has been viewed as either independent or unidirectional, with cognitive processes, at best,
factoring into the genesis of affect (Panksepp, 2005). Recent models, however speculative they are,
hypothesize a tighter integration, presenting cognition as inherently tied to affective state. And as I
argue below, they suggest a compelling evolutionary reason why such is the case.
Perhaps the tightest possible integration is offered by Thagard & Aubie, whose model of
emotional consciousness, EMOCON, seeks to explain both the diversity of emotion as well as its ability
to vary in intensity, exhibit positive or negative valence, change over time, and integrate with cognitive
and perceptual aspects of personal experience (Thagard & Aubie, 2008). As an adaptation of earlier
neurocomputational models, EMOCON both specifies the macro relations among contributing brain
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Figure 1 – Thagard and Aubie’s EMOCON model of
emotional consciousness
structures and offers a connectionist-based micro architecture that accounts for the distinct
phenomenal character of diverse emotions. For our purposes, though, the model’s most salient feature
is its incorporation of the dorsolateral, orbitofrontal, and ventromedial components of the prefrontal
cortex, structures known to serve essential cognitive functions, especially with regard to decisionmaking, planning, working memory, and valenced-based object evaluation. Of particular import are the
numerous neural pathways that deliver emotional processing output to these cognitive structures (see
figure 1 below). The clear implication here is that not only does cognition affect emotional response,
but that emotional response influences cognition. Indeed, the integration between cognition and
emotion is so extensive that Thagard & Aubie commit to a monistic ontology of emotional affect that
transcends the traditional opposition between somatic perception theories and those of cognitive
appraisal. As they state, emotional consciousness “is not just a perception of bodily states, nor is it just
a cognitive appraisal…. [It] is the overall neural process that takes place in the interacting brain areas”
(2008, pp. 817-818).
In decentralizing the source of emotional feels, the EMOCON model implicitly distinguishes
between emotional processing, which targets somatic alteration, and the phenomenal character of
emotion. This distinction is made explicit in Antonio Damasio’s theory of emotion, which is presented as
part of a comprehensive theory of conscious self (Damasio, Self comes to mind: Constructing the
conscious brain., 2012).
While Damasio’s commitment to cognition-free primordial feels and
characterization of affect as the phenomenal expression of a body state representation in the brainstem
align well with somatic perception theories, he elaborates a number of characteristics that make clear
the extensive bidirectional integration with cognition.
First, he distinguishes between primordial
feelings, which “are the primitive for all other feelings,” (2012, p. 108) and cognition-infused feelings,
which “provide a more differentiated version of those feelings” (2012, p. 83) Further, in distinguishing
between somatically defined emotions and mentally defined emotional feels, his theory highlights the
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cognitive aspect of a perceptual entity. For in this case, affective states are representations of somatic
states that themselves develop, in part, from the output of cortical cognitive processes. As such, the
model defines a “tight two-way, resonant loop between body states and brain states” (2012, p. 107)
where cognitive factors help effect somatic changes that bring it in line with stored representations of
ideal physiological functioning.
The substantive link in the reverse direction – from affect to cognition – is articulated by
Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, Everitt, & Bishop, 1996). Originally designed to explain
the poor social and personal decisions of individuals with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,
the hypothesis postulates the existence of associative neural structures, or “markers,” that map
previously executed decisions to the emotional states they elicited. In being activated by experiences
that present decision options similar to those stored by the marker, somatic markers provide heuristic
decision-making guidance by enabling the reconstruction of the affectively valenced brain
representation of the previously experienced emotional state. Decisions that resulted in desirable
states (e.g. pleasure, pride) thus become incentivized while those brought about undesirable states (e.g.
pain, shame) do not. By affectively “alerting you to the goodness or badness of a certain optionoutcome pair,” somatic markers act as “biasing signals,” bringing emotion to bear upon cognitive
processes (Damasio, Everitt, & Bishop, 1996, p. 1415).
The somatic marker hypothesis is particularly well-suited to explain belief bias, as it presents a
neurocognitive mechanism that articulates how non-rational factors influence, and at times overwhelm,
thinking. It brings explanatory power to automaticity as well, particularly as it concerns Bargh’s claim
that preconscious evaluative judgments are rendered ubiquitously. It demonstrates how conscious
deliberation already begins in a state of bias, a state better aligned with the individual’s previous
experience than with impartial rationality. Such alignment is, for Damasio, directly related to the
essential role emotion and its attendant feels play in maintaining quality of life, a role that he describes
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as “the dutiful executors and servants of biological value” (2012, p. 115). Stated differently, emotion is
the guardian of physiological well-being, the set of bodily responses that seeks to maintain homeostatic
equilibrium in the face of changing environmental conditions.
In this way, emotions are the
fundamental determinants of evaluative judgment – they assign attractive or avoidant valence to all
experience and offer non-rational justification for executed decision and adopted belief. This is not to
reject all roles for deliberative rationality as Bargh would have it, but rather to provide an evolutionary
foundation for biased and “feel good” cognition. Indeed, the manifestation of irrationality is not
necessarily indicative of cognition gone awry. It is, instead, an acknowledgement of emotion and its
characteristic feels as the most basic knowledge of the relation between the biological organism and the
world, evolution’s rough and ready way to incentivize cognitive and behavioral decisions that align well
with successful previous experience.
A fallibilist solution to relativism
In the remainder of the paper we will sketch two responses to the relativist challenge that
taking cognitive science seriously raises. Both of these have implications for education that will,
hopefully, be addressed in the discussion that follows. The first response is a positive one, it draws on
the earlier discussion of meta-science, which like all human inquiry shows a history of stops and starts,
of false hopes and surprising achievements. The lesson to be learned from, for example, the history of
physical chemistry, is that no argument, however persuasive, no body of evidence, however compelling,
settles that question. Rather it is the ongoing history of inquiry and its progress as evidenced by metascientific criteria, such as consilience, breadth and depth that serve as an indication of adequacy. This
requires us to take seriously the process of inquiry. If we are to help students develop their cognitive
capacities we must look to process, to ongoing dialogue and increasing awareness of assumptions and
implications. Inquiry does not end; rather it becomes enriched by the interaction of the community, by
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the articulation of shared goals and expectations, by openness to challenge and sensitivity to context. To
help students develop is to make them aware of plausible criteria of adequacy, relative to the subject at
hand, and especially to the need for self-correction. Students must embrace the fallible nature of human
reason. The ideal of development is not the rational adult, but a reasonable one, an adult who is aware
of the precariousness of the human cognitive process.
This leads to our second, negative response: wariness, which we describe as a general skeptical
attitude toward information. While the process of inquiry suggests a proactive critical stance toward
belief adoption and the development of worldview, wariness presents a reactive stance, one that opens
the door to questioning that which “feels right” or “appears to be correct” in situations not initially
thought to require questioning (Fisherman, 2014). We might present this distinction as a matter of
context. Where inquiry occurs in a context primed for questioning – what we might term a demanding
context – wariness is that degree of unfocused skepticism that one brings to non-demanding contexts,
contexts where the need to be sensitive to questionability is not readily apparent. It is this skepticism
that we suggest is required to confront claims of weapons of mass destruction and presidents that are
not U.S. citizens. Indeed, Lewandowsky puts “skepticism at the point of contact” at the top of his list of
effective antidotes to misinformation. Similarly, Schul et al. conclude, after researching the effects of
distrust on cognitive task performance, that an attitude of unfocused distrust encourages the critical
evaluation of experience, prompting individuals “to search for non-obvious alternative interpretations of
the given information” (Schul et al., p.1294).
In phenomenological terms, wariness can be described along the lines of Heideggerean mood,
as the affectively tinged background character of experience. From a neurocognitive perspective,
wariness may be implemented as the Type 1 cognitive process that determines when intervention
occurs in a default-interventionist dual cognition arrangement (see above). Under either description, it
seems clear that social, biological, and environmental factors all contribute to developing wariness. This
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would suggest an important normative role for education, one that could help calibrate the appropriate
degree of wariness that individuals bring to the table. The big questions, of course, are “What is the
appropriate degree?” and “How do we engage such development?” But we will leave these questions
to subsequent discourse. For now, it should suffice to say that unless we are willing to dismiss
neurocognitive models like those of Damasio and Thagard & Aubie, and consider the findings of belief
bias and automaticity correctable errors of everyday thought, it becomes important to foster ongoing
inquiry prompted by a wariness toward experience, whether that experience concerns the information
presented by others or our own answers to questions. Such is not a call to dismiss the value of abstract
reasoning skills, which to the degree they can be assimilated into everyday thinking clearly provide a
means to better decision making and belief acquisition. Rather, it is to acknowledge the physiologicallydefined limits of everyday cognition while affirming the integral role of deliberation in bettering the
cognitive output of beings whose thinking serves to promote affectively expressed physiological wellbeing.
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