Review articleThe duality of human cognition: operations and intentionality in mental life and illness
Introduction
Among naïve popular beliefs about psychology is the idea that it is possible to “read” a person’s mind and through some amazing, but unspecified, procedure discover their innermost thoughts. What people think about is certainly of psychological interest and importance. Indeed, it is of extreme importance in fields ranging from psychotherapy to the study of racism. But the most tried, if not necessarily true, method of obtaining information about a person’s private thoughts requires no special discernment gained through an education in psychology. It simply requires asking them to share and describe their inner experience.
Now contrast the belief in mind reading with the less entertaining, but more realistic expectation that it is possible to evaluate a person’s ability to think. Not what they think about or why they think it, but how well they think: their skill level when engaged with tasks that require learning or analysis. This determination still requires a willing participant but, given the willingness, there are knowledge and tools that psychology is well equipped to supply and apply. There is little doubt that the accuracy and proficiency of a person’s thinking fall within the expertise of psychological science and practice.
This article argues that there are two basic modalities of human cognition that correspond to the distinction between mental contents and mental proficiency. Each modality associates with specific constructs, methods, research questions, practical and theoretical aims and objectives. Major advances in understanding individual, pathological and social aspects of mind and behavior may accrue from breakthroughs in making intentional cognition more accessible. But can it be done?
Cognition refers to both the processes involved in acquiring knowledge and to the products of those processes. Accordingly, the first modality is operational and comprises the procedures and mechanisms governing the acquisition, representation and utilization of knowledge. This is the cognition of experimental psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience: an information processing system with constituents that include perception and attention, learning and memory, language, visuospatial ability, reasoning and executive functions. Understanding how these component operations work, along with what facilitates or impedes their performance efficiency, is a primary concern of the cognitive science-related disciplines. However, operational cognition is also important in many clinical and applied fields. For example, impaired operations are a primary expression of certain brain disorders, especially dementia (Hugo and Ganguli, 2014), and associate frequently with others, including stroke (van der Flier et al. 2018) and head injury (Wood and Worthington, 2017). Conversely, proficiency in operational cognition has high social value and associates with academic and professional achievement (Hofer and Clouston, 2014) (Judge et al., 1999).
The second basic modality is intentional cognition, comprising the specific referents or meanings of our thoughts and what they “are about.” This includes the content of personal perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and images, internal monologues, remembered events, hopes, anticipations, fantasies and related mental states. Intentional cognition has long been a major concern of personality research, clinical psychology and psychiatry, notably in the fields of psychotherapy and descriptive psychopathology. But intentionality also runs through the broader social sciences (Table 1) and the humanities. Thus, specific kinds of thought contents (e.g. “I am evil and worthless,” “I will not survive being in an enclosed space,” “I am all-powerful and omniscient.”) occur in a range of mental disorders and are a primary focus of cognitively-oriented psychotherapies (Clark and Beck, 2010). Moreover, specific kinds of thought contents, especially those regarding whole groups of people (e.g. “They are inferior to me,” “They are dangerous”) are found in a range of social problems (Hadarics and Kende, 2018; Ito and Tomelleri, 2017; Lamont et al., 2015). Intentional cognition must play a role in racism, sexism, crime, classism, homophobia and related forms of prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination and anti-social behavior. Even more broadly, many works of art and literature are grounded in thought contents and hence intentional cognition as well as in the artist’s or author’s skill at communicating and expressing these contents (Aras, 2015).
Viewed from a computational theory of mind perspective, the brain provides the machinery and operational cognition constitutes its programing and symbol processing capabilities. Intentional cognition comprises the meaningful, consciously available product of this processing at a given point in time or the memory of such a product. The related concept of intentionality has a long tradition in philosophy, anchored in Brentano’s description and analysis (Brentano, 1955 (originally published 1874)). This concept has many more recent variations and revisions, and some are helpful in articulating and sketching an outline of intentional cognition. First, intentional cognition is not reducible to mental states in general and is distinguishable from consciousness in particular, although there is clearly overlap (Searle, 1983). For example, some mental states are defined by emotions like panic, sadness or elation and involve relatively little or only vague kinds of intentionality. The environment may be thought of as diffusely threatening, the future as generally hopeless or life as simply wonderful, but with little more specific content. In contrast, rich and highly particular and detailed thought contents are present and salient in post-traumatic stress experiences, specific phobias like fear of snakes, eating disorders or paranoid psychosis (Mendelovici, 2014). Intentionality derives from the “directedness” or “aboutness” of thought and may vary in degree across different mental states. Moreover, at least in philosophical traditions, thoughts are more than correlates of action: they cause and explain behavior (Crane, 2003). Thus, intense and persistent thoughts of weight gain may lead to extreme food restriction (anorexia nervosa) and thoughts of contamination may lead to excessive and repeated attempts at hygiene (obsessive compulsive) disorder.
In addition, intentional thinking may be unconscious as well as conscious. Freudian psychoanalysis (Freud, 1900) was grounded partly on the idea that conscious thought contents are both highly derivative and highly transformed versions of unconscious contents. For present purposes it is the thought content available, but not reducible, to consciousness that comprises intentional cognition. Moreover, this content and mental representation is distinguishable from its “phenomenal” or experiential properties (Nagel, 1974). In other words, echoing the notion of mind reading, even if it was possible to learn what another person is thinking, this would not be informative about “what it is like” to have those thoughts. A surgeon may disclose that she is thinking about where to make an operative incision, but the disclosure does not include her subjective “felt experience” of this thought content. Similarly, a psychotic patient may report that he controls all the world’s intelligence agents. However, this disclosure does not describe the experience of having such grandiose thoughts. Accordingly, intentional cognition is narrower than broad consciousness or the full spectrum of mental states and not equivalent to phenomenology.
The narrow versus broad scope of mental states and consciousness has a parallel in the methodology of introspection, a key access route to both intentional and operational cognition. Introspective reporting of mental experience can be “weak” or “strong” (Gallagher and Brosted Sorensen, 2006). Weak reports are unelaborated responses to prompts, often comprising simple “yes” or “no” statements to endorse or deny a specific experience. Strong introspective reports involve detailed phenomenological description and analysis of mental experience, echoing the approach described by Husserl (Dennett, 1991). Weak reports are commonly used in experimental psychology to index operational cognition. For example, a research participant may be asked to respond to a stimulus event like a light or sound or to repeat from memory a list of words that has been read out loud or presented visually. Weak reports are also used to index intentional cognition, but with some differences. They can be structured to index internal events by “front-loading” interview or questionnaire items with targeted information. Thus, a psychiatric interview question might be: “Have you been thinking about hurting yourself?” A racism questionnaire might ask: “Do you think that your ethnic group or race is superior to others?” Experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists use weak introspective reports to index the proficiency or impairment of an operation. In contrast, mental health clinicians and social scientists obtain endorsements or denials of highly specific personal thought contents that relate to the respondent’s own life experience, past and present.
However, the two modalities also diverge markedly in their study methods and in the security of data and knowledge these methods produce. Operational cognition is not limited to introspective self-disclosure. It can be inferred from behavioral performance and therefore lends itself to observation and objectification. Operations are quantified readily by error and accuracy rates or reaction times during structured tasks. Intentional cognition is different, resists objectification and is expressed most frequently in weak introspective reports but may include “strong” oral and written narratives, especially in qualitative research or in the humanities disciplines. Information about a person’s intentional cognition is not only difficult for a researcher to access, it is highly subject to editing and redaction at source. At best, thought contents can be quantified coarsely with scale ratings and checklists using arbitrary numeric values.
A major upshot of the access and validity challenges associated with intentional cognition is questionable data quality and hence epistemic insecurity. This insecurity has implications for all fields with subject matter defined wholly or in part by mental contents. According to Boulding (1980) a field of knowledge is likely to be insecure if it is both complex and poorly represented or captured by data. To be sure, the study and application of intentional cognition is not unique in having methodological and validity-related challenges. But it faces the special disadvantage of fundamental epistemic insecurity. The insecurity slows the progress of research and increases the uncertainty that seems to characterize fields where access to intentional cognition is obligatory. These fields encompass many aspects of the study and treatment of serious mental illness and are primary examples of complex, incremental-progress scientific problems afflicted with definitional arguments and validity disputes (Beijers et al., 2019; Jablensky, 2002, 2016; Kotov et al., 2017).
Section snippets
Intentional and operational cognition in mental disorders
Highly specific thought content contributes substantially to the symptomatic definition and treatment of the psychoses, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, eating and substance use and addiction disorders (see Table 1). Most conditions in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA, 2013) are syndromes defined at least in part by intentional cognition. Hence it is not surprising that these syndromes lack valid, reliable and objective markers and diagnostic
Intentional cognition, racism and prejudice
The epistemic insecurity of intentional cognition has consequences outside the clinical realm, extending to the study of social problems such as racial prejudice. Prior to the civil rights era discrimination against Black Americans was condoned, institutionalized, legislated and promoted in many regions. These social conditions fostered the relatively unedited expression of racist thinking. There were few negative consequences for racists and their thoughts were widely shared if not consensual
Reducing epistemic insecurity
The slow progress in understanding disorders defined at least in part by intentional cognition was an impetus behind recent attempts to reorient the mental health sciences away from a focus on biobehavioral correlates of diagnostic categories to a focus on cross-category abnormalities in brain circuitry. The Research Domain Criteria (RDC) project proposed a new organizing principle for these sciences. Instead of loose diagnostic syndromes, researchers should address objective and valid
The frontier: neuroimaging-based decoding and reconstruction of intentional states
In principle, any cognitive event or process will correlate with patterns of neural activity and must, in some way, be represented and encoded into this activity. There is little question that neuroimaging has advanced the understanding of operational cognition in line with these precepts. It is known, for example, that autobiographical memory tasks activate bilateral hippocampal, posterior cingulate and parietal cortical regions whereas retrieval of general knowledge activates a partly
Summary and conclusions
It is premature to specify with confidence the conceptual, technical and methodological pathways that will open the contents of thought to observation and rigorous investigation. Crucial advances and evidence are still missing. However, it is possible to specify the obstacles that such pathways must surmount and the most promising directions for success. First, accessing intentional thought must be taken on as a primary research goal and no longer viewed as a “soft” and inherently uncertain
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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