AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN
Early cognitive science — a challenge to analytic philosophy?
1. Introduction
In her masterful historical exposition, Liliana Albertazzi (2001) recently revealed a rich conceptual
repertoire and thematic complexity in early Central-European theories concerning the accounts of
cognitive science developed in 1870-1930. These theories, she argues, anticipated much of the content
of the contemporary cognitive sciences as well as many of the modes of research characteristic of
current mainstream research in cognitively-oriented sciences and philosophy.
I wish to substantiate and supplement these findings by pointing out that a revival of these early
endeavours in developing conceptual categories of the mind and psyche is currently underway at the
intersections of artificial intelligence (AI), logic and cognitive science. The cases in point are the
following. (i) Instead of predicates, many logical theories, especially computational ones dealing with
practical reasoning in rational agenthood, have preferred iconic — pictorial, visual, graphical and
spatial — modes of representation in order to capture different qualities associated with assertions and
objects. (ii) A related tendency to (i) is the dispensing with the traditional notion of logical constants
and the inclination to substitute an assortment of iconic, topological and similarly Gestalt-oriented
notions of dynamic theories of action and experimentation concerning the relations involved in the
representations. (iii) Instead of the accustomed vernacular that speaks of individuals, scientists have
resorted to the more phenomenological terminology of objects of cognition and consciousness across a
wide range of inquiry.
Largely as a result of investment in the philosophical foundations of the computational sciences,
early European theories are beginning to be discernible in embodied and enactive minds, open-systems
approaches to verification, the refinement and composition of computational processes and programs,
as well as in the interactive, emergent and synthetic notions of meaning entertained in cognitive
semantics and in evolutionary approaches to diachronic linguistics.
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This revival is, I shall maintain, due to two principal factors: the decline of the mainstream
logico-formal and analytic paradigm that dominated the better part of twentieth-century philosophy,
and revitalisation of the pragmatistic attitude, the origins of which coincide with those of the early
European contributions to cognitive science.
2. The intrusion of hardcore ideology
To understand the interplay between cognitive science and philosophy, one needs to be aware of the
development of their common intellectual ideas. For instance, characterising cognitive science as
‘naturalised philosophy’ or ‘naturalised epistemology’ suggests that it has long subsisted alongside
major philosophical theories, including Cartesian interactionism, empiricism, or their Kantian
synthesis.
Even more markedly, it seems that cognitive science tried to identify itself as a self-standing
scientific discipline long before the much-highlighted events that took place during the 1950s. Such
events were driven by ‘hardcore ideology’. Examples include the inauguration of AI — boasting the
new science of symbolic thought in the brain, the emergence of transformational grammar which
provided grounds for the intuitive judgement of grammaticality and processing by Turing machines,
and applications of Shannon’s information theory to human cognitive processes and experimental
psychology.
But there are also some recent examples in the cognitive and computing sciences that owe
nothing or very little to the tradition associated with hardcore ideology. These examples bear a closer
intellectual allegiance to developments that preceded the era than with those influenced by Minsky,
Chomsky or Shannon.
Accordingly, the landmarks of the 1950s may be re-read as signs of a relapsing state of affairs
that the alliance between science and philosophy, in the first instance the alliance of symbolic logic
and analytic philosophy, had reached after the mid-20th century. I need not venture into criticism of
what is dubious in such an alliance with regard to the aims of cognitive science, since my purpose is to
substantiate Albertazzi’s argument on the existence of a rich network of theories, mutual influences,
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conceptual repertoire and thematic complexity that by and large avoided the fate of first-generation AI
and its spin-offs.
This evasion succeeded because of the reluctance evinced in these theories to join forces with
some of the characteristic features of what may be conceived as ‘analytic’ philosophy. At the same
time, the early cognitive theories did not turn a blind eye to many of the virtues of the analytic
movement, including the rigour provided by mathematics and the use of well-identified scientific
methodology.
Many of the tools that these early-modern — pre-1950 — theories resorted to were inadequate
and underdeveloped to such an extent that they soon had to give way to the hardcore ideology welding
cognitive science and philosophy. But that welding also suffered from oversight, including the illicit
use of computer analogy and functional explanations. It is these, to some extent patchy, streams of
thoughts antedating hardcore ideology that might be identified as falling under the umbrella of ‘the
early cognitive sciences’, some key components of which Albertazzi has identified, linking them with
the Central-European tradition in philosophy.1
It is therefore the ambivalent relationship between the early scientific and conceptual issues in
the study of cognition and the analytic movement, together with the resumption of interest in those
issues under new guises, which define the senses in which the early cognitive sciences may be taken to
constitute a continuing challenge to analytic philosophy and the hardcore ideology.
Critics might hold that the reason for this challenge is simply that early European thought should
be seen as continental philosophy (Chrudzimski & Huemer 2004). While this is a self-appointed,
ideological claim, it holds a gist of truth. Early cognitive sciences are strongly grounded in the same
roots as phenomenology. It is hardly the case, however, that phenomenology is exclusively of
continental proprietary. It used to be rooted in the logical principles common to both continental and
analytic thought. A historical case in point is the conceptual repertoire of pragmatist philosophers.
Charles S. Peirce’s phenomenological concept of the “Phaneron” was “the collective total of all that is
in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real
thing or not” (CP 1.284, Adirondack Lectures, 1905).2 To analyse and understand Phaneron, however,
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one needs “logical analysis” (MS 283, The Basis of Pragmaticism, 1905).
Peirce’s programme of logical analysis was to uncover the essence of the mind in thought by
improving upon the logic used by Kant. That essence was expressed in both declarative and nondeclarative assertions. Peirce studied a whole range of different kinds of assertions, first in terms of his
algebraic logic of relatives via valental analysis, and later on by using diagrammatic logical systems
(Pietarinen 2003, 2005b,d). The role of the Phaneron was pivotal in providing universes of discourse
that were not confined to any objective part or situation about the world. A striking illustration of the
merger between phenomenological and semantic topics is Peirce’s proposal of how models are
constructed by two “collaborating” parties that undertake to build a Phaneron against which assertions
are then evaluated (CP 4.538; 4.552, Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism, 1905). On
balance, in Peirce’s approach both the seeds of phenomenology and those of analytic philosophy grew
in peaceful coexistence.
A caveat: the intention of the present article is not to characterise what analytic philosophy
actually is, or what it is not. The Hon. Rt. Lord Quinton thinks it began when Wittgenstein arrived in
Cambridge in 1912 to study with Bertrand Russell.3 Sir Michael Dummett prefers Frege and the
Context Principle. But we also know that Wittgenstein’s early encounters with Frege were, at best,
inconclusive, and that before Frege, many thinkers including Wilhelm Wundt expressed principles
similar to those expounded by Frege. Accordingly, Dummett’s characterisation amounts to the
anomalous position that both psychologism and anti-psychologism would have to be admitted by
analytic philosophers.
There are further historical curiosities, many of them vital both in biographical and systematic
terms. Wittgenstein soon associated with C. K. Ogden, who had been Victoria Welby’s assistant
during the ‘signific’ era in Cambridge. The purpose of significs was to analyse meaning and
signification in language in order to achieve better communication and understanding by using logical
methods and functional analysis of the ‘language strata’ (Pietarinen 2004c; Ogden 1911/1994).
Apparently, no requirement to confine this task to symbolic communication such as natural language
was felt at that time. Indeed, Otto Neurath’s later International System of TYpographic Picture
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Education (ISOTYPE) was an intrepid attempt towards genuinely iconic forms of communication, and
to provide a standard for such communication (Nemeth & Stadler 1996). Proposals of this type did not
bear fruit in the interwar atmosphere dominated by discrete-symbolic logic.4
As such, Peirce and his followers represented no drastic departure from the main ideals of early
analytic philosophy. The ideas of Welby and her correspondent Peirce converged. Excerpts from that
correspondence were reprinted in the first, 1923, edition of Ogden & Richard’s The Meaning of
Meaning, a work that was ready for print in the early 1910s. Wittgenstein repudiated the body of this
text, but not, apparently, its appendices.5 He might have approved the signific ideas about meaning.
(Pietarinen 2004b, 2004c). There were also some other, predominantly Dutch, philosophers and
cultural figures who were more or less following Peirce’s lead and came to influence Wittgenstein.6
One upshot of this historical interlude is simply that the origins of analytic philosophy are so
convoluted as to be unworthy of pursuing in isolation. One might characterise the situation by stating
that, rather than being identified with the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, analytic philosophy sympathised
with something akin to a ‘linguistic trap’, in other words replacing both functional analyses of
language and descriptive approaches to the categories of the mind and psyche with symbolic and
discrete studies of language and communication.
3. The resurgence of the early cognitive sciences
In a nutshell, my purpose in what follows is to argue that the revival of the early endeavour to develop
conceptual categories of the mind is discernible in several intersections of AI, logic and cognitive
science. Summaries of three cases will, I hope, serve to illustrate the point.
Firstly, instead of ‘predicates’, many logical theories, especially the computational ones that deal
with practical reasoning in rational agenthood have switched to non-symbolic — pictorial, visual,
graphical, spatial and indexical — modes of representation in order to capture different notions of the
‘qualities’ associated with assertions and objects. In particular, these methods articulate continuity in a
manner that is by and large ignored by the tradition of symbolic logic.
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The second, related tendency has been the dispensing with the traditional notion of ‘logical
constants’, substituting for it an assortment of iconic and topological notions of dynamic theories of
action and experimentation concerning the relations involved in the representations.
Thirdly, instead of ‘objects’, many scientists were accustomed to nominalistic talk about
‘individuals’, but have subsequently switched to phenomenological terminology, including the
involvement of modes of content in cognition and consciousness.
I will now elaborate on these three interconnected points using two examples. In Peirce’s logic,
predicates were understood in spatial terms, as bounded regions on a surface that differ in quality from
other bounded regions on that surface (CP 4.416, Existential Graphs, 1903). Moreover, one of the
grand mysteries in Peirce’s later logical writings has been what he may have meant when speaking
about “continuous predicates” in relation to his iconic logic of diagrams:
A predicate which can … be analyzed into parts all homogeneous with the whole I call a continuous predicate. It is
very important in logical analysis, because a continuous predicate obviously cannot be a compound except of
continuous predicates, and thus when we have carried analysis so far as to leave only a continuous predicate, we have
carried it to its ultimate elements. I wont lengthen this letter by easily furnished examples of the great utility of this
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rule. (SS: 71-72).
As far as I know, no explanation of what Peirce could have meant by continuous predicates is
forthcoming elsewhere in his writings. However, an enlightening possibility here is to think of
predicates as subsets A of X in the mappings from a space X to the set {0, 1}, where X is an arbitrary
topological space. Continuity of the predicate would now depend on the topology defined for {0, 1}.
Since suitable continuous functions from X to a two-element lattice would now correspond to open
sets of X, we have established a relationship between predicates and open sets. While this is a way to
derive continuous predicates, is it something that Peirce could have envisioned? The answer is yes,
because as Peirce stated in the above quotation, a continuous predicate is also “a predicate which can
… be analyzed into parts all homogeneous with the whole”. But this is simply another way of saying
that continuous predicates can be characterised as the set of all predicates consistent with it.
Moreover, the iconic, or diagrammatic, method of representing assertions and reasoning about
them is, as Peirce noted, best conducted by establishing logical principles upon topological,
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continuous principles. At that time, the state of these principles was fairly elementary, but also rich in
not being preoccupied with the set-theoretical continuum, unlike the events that occurred during the
early phases of the symbolic era in logic (Pietarinen 2005b).
This explication may appear somewhat cursory or overly specific for the overall purpose of
charting the propagation of wider intellectual ideas. But I believe it also illustrates that the early
contributors to cognitive science raised more general and serious concerns than the mere technicalities
would have us believe. In a nutshell, the point is that semantics could be based on principles which
have a continuous core. This may happen either in the semantic attributes (as in modal logics using
Bergson-Hamblin interval semantics) or in describing the parts of representations (as in diagrammatic
or metaphoric mental images) as being continuously connected (‘path-connected’).
To substantiate such associations, we may allude to claims such as that in Wolfgang Köhler’s
Field Semantics for the theory of perception dating back to the 1920s, namely that “neural functions
and processes with which the perceptual facts are associated … are located in a continuous medium”
(Köhler 1940: 55). A notable connexion here is with Peirce’s remark in his statement quoted above
that predicates, propositions and inferences are to be continuously connected with one another.
Topologically, this expresses connectivity between different parts of the surface, thus forming
propositions, and in terms of propositions being connected (in the equally topological sense) under
continuous transformations from one graph to another, thus forming inferential arguments.
The conceptualisation of a continuous predicate and, more generally, the continuous connections
between separate parts of the representations already carried the traces of later Gestalt or perceptive
schemes rather than anticipating anything such as the Tarski-type logical semantics that had an
inherently compositional and recursive nucleus. Peirce, however, did not make the connection with the
later truth-conditional and semantic issues an explicit one, since he was first and foremost striving to
account for what would count as necessary reasoning in terms of a dynamic understanding of ‘motion’
through continuous morphing from one diagram to another according to given rules of transformation.
These wider concerns were therefore easily sidestepped by the advocates of discrete-symbolic logic
who began to gain ground shortly after these early contributions.
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Related to the idea of continuity in topological semantics is the viewing of logical constants as
icons of some concrete perceptual processes. Instead of obeying some rules of inference, logical
constants obey what Peirce called ‘illative’ transformations, in other words transformations that,
besides being sound and complete for given diagrammatic theories, denote the locations, movement
and the spatial orientation that the inference is going to take (CP 4.505, On Existential Graphs, Euler’s
Diagrams, and Logical Algebra, c.1903). For example, conjunction is juxtaposition of graphs on a
topological (open-compact) manifold. Disjunction is derived by making cuts around graphs to iconise
negation. Introduction rules follow from the fact that in a negative area (an area enclosed within an
odd number of cuts) any assertion may be added (symbolically, e.g. A → A v B), while elimination
follows from the fact that from a positive area (an area enclosed within an even number of cuts) any
assertion may be erased (e.g., A & B → A). The standard quantifiers Any and Exists are identified with
continuous connections between predicates and outermost negative (Any) or positive (Exists) areas. In
this manner, concrete cognitive content is given to the meaning of logical constants.
Illative transformations also answer the question of what are the privileged logical constants. For
example, it is impossible to iconise the infamous connective tonk, defined by the two rules
A → A tonk B and A tonk B → B, on topological manifolds because of the different polarities
associated with the two rules. Since no conceivable illative transformation rule characterises such a
connective, it is not among the privileged logical constants at all.8
Congeniality between the early cognitive sciences and pragmatism is clearly evident. The
characteristically Central-European discipline, much of which evolved from Franz Brentano’s
‘experimental metaphysics’, was reflected in Alfred Whitehead’s process ontology that surpassed
many of the Gestalt theories on the mind and perception. In keeping events and processes distinct from
things that participate in those processes, even making them the primary ontological entities,
Whitehead was following Peirce.
Looked at from the contemporary point of view, one needs to recognise the extent to which
Whitehead’s dynamic ontology was successfully infused into the projects of designing knowledge-
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based computer systems and database and web technology — perhaps more comprehensively than any
other ontological system that has been proposed by a philosopher.
One should also be mindful of those physical theories that appeal to the idea of dynamical
processes rather than fixed space-time structures, concepts that highlight the evolutionary nature of the
universe with its changeable physical laws (Smolin 2001).
Many more contemporary links between early ideas concerning cognitive science and recent
developments exist than the space available to describe them permits. In summary, largely as a result
of investment in the philosophical foundations of computational sciences, early European theories are
beginning to flourish in the concepts of embodied and enactive minds, game-theoretic and opensystems approaches to computational tasks such as the verification, refinement and composition of
computational processes and computer programs, as well as in the interactive, emergent and synthetic
notions of meaning entertained in cognitive semantics and the allied dynamic, evolutionary approaches
to semantic change and diachronic linguistics.9
The early paradigm in the Gestalt theory of “thinking in images” therefore strikes back in the wake
of the storm triggered by the scornful attitude of the hardcore advocates of AI who viewed thinking
primarily as symbol-crunching. The key notion for representing linguistic meaning in the revised
agenda is an image schema which consists of abstract pictures constructed from elementary
topological and geometrical structures common to perception, memory and semantic meaning,
replacing uninterpreted symbols with iconic signs, namely images, diagrams and metaphors. It is my
belief that, for logically-oriented developments of such image schemas or cognitive spaces, the
diagrammatic representational system suggested by Peirce for the analysis of assertions will prove to
be ground-breaking.10
4. Conclusion
The revival of interest in the common themes in early cognitive science seems to follow the decline of
the mainstream logico-formal and analytic paradigm that dominated twentieth-century philosophy. It
is also a result of revitalisation of the pragmatistic attitude in logical philosophy. Significantly, the
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origins of the latter coincide, both in terms of their timing and the common network of influences, with
the origins of the early European contributors to cognitive science.
Under this spotlight, analytic philosophy may be seen as a wasted attempt at placing some a
priori constraints on the study of mind such as disembodiedness — a move that would not have been
approved by the foregoing pragmaticists. As far as some of the specific examples are concerned, the
emerging representational approaches to logical and mathematical problems in cognition and
computation are among the first in the long overdue resurgence of the idea of how the mind, as one
might say, leaks back into the world.
University of Helsinki
References
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Otto Neurath (1882-1945) (Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 4). Dordrecht: Kluwer
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Neurath, Otto, 1936/1980. International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype. London: Kegan
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Robin, Richard. 1967. Annotated catalogue of the papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst:
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Notes
1
‘Soft computing’ is another pet term for cognitively- or neuroscientifically-oriented computing sciences that derive
inspiration from the behaviour of the human mind and which might be seen as a counterbuff to hardcore ideology. Such
coinage is, however, much more recent.
2
The references CP are to Peirce (1931-58) by volume and paragraph number; the references MS are to Peirce (1967) by
manuscript number; the references SS are to Peirce (1977) by page number.
3
In Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 28 (Oxford University Press, 1995). The correct date for Wittgenstein’s arrival is
October 1911, not 1912.
4
Neurath (1936/1980) writes: “Pictures, whose details are clear to everybody, are free from the limits of language” (p. 18).
“The ISOTYPE system makes use of the connection of parts not only in one direction only, but in two, and the effect is a
language picture” (p. 62). Almost three decades earlier, in relation to his graphical logic, Peirce noted that, “Three
dimensions are necessary and sufficient for the expression of all assertions; so that, if man’s reason was originally limited
to the line of speech (which I do not affirm), it has now outgrown the limitation.” (MS 654: 6–7, 19 August 1910, Preface
to Essays on Meaning, 1st draft, cf. Pietarinen 2005b).
5
In addition to the Peirce/Welby correspondence, the appendices included Bronislaw Malinowski’s The problem of
meaning in primitive languages, which resulted in a lasting occupation with Wittgenstein (Pietarinen 2005a).
6
Pietarinen (2004b, 2005b) documents some of these connections in greater detail.
7
14 December 1908, A Letter to Welby. See also CP 4.438, On Existential Graphs, Euler’s Diagrams, and Logical Algebra
c.1903.
8
The tonk-connective was fabricated by Prior (1960) to argue against the inferential thesis according to which the
meanings of logical constants are completely determined by the rules of inference associated with them.
9
Pietarinen (2005c) addresses the evolutionary emergence of language in view of the philosophical aspects of evolutionary
game theory. See Pietarinen (2004d) on the history of the notion of the common ground, the particular intellectual idea that
is re-emerging in cognitive linguistics.
10
Peirce’s logical system is also illuminating in regard to neurophysiological research, for instance being relevant to the
Binding Problem (Pietarinen 2004a).
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