Cognition wars
Introduction
In case you missed it, there is a war going on over what counts as cognition. Luckily, it is a war among academics, so likely no one will get hurt, but it is a war nonetheless. It started with challenges to the traditional conception of human cognition holding that cognition takes place in the brain after perception and before motor processing.1 On the traditional view, perception was to get information into the brain, then concepts and reasoning take over, and finally the motor system is employed to do the mind's bidding. Embodied cognitivists have been challenging this view of cognition at least since the late 1990s and probably since long before among continental philosophers. On the embodied view, cognition literally takes place in, is realized in, the perceptual and motor systems. On the traditional view, that was never believed to be the case. On the embodied view, the body itself plays a much larger and more constitutive role in the realization of cognition than on the traditional view of cognition.2
The war spread to include theories of extended cognition. These theories claim that the boundary of the body and brain is an arbitrary one and there is no principled reason why cognition is not realized out into the environment in the form of perceptual-motor interaction, tool uses, and other forms of cognitive off-loading or scaffolding. This view too started in the late 1990s, but has continued to pick up steam ever since. On this view, cognition is not a process that is realized only inside the brain anymore (well, it never was really on this view, but this only became an issue recently).3 So for example, if cognition extends, then physically rotating a jigsaw puzzle piece might count as a realization of cognizing. In addition, when using pencil and paper to do a long division problem, the manipulation of numerals on the paper would count as realization of cognizing (and not just an aid to cognizing) on the extended view.
Finally, plant scientists and bacteriologists (Ben-Jacob, 2009, Garzon and Keijzer, 2009 Garzon, 2007, Lyon and Keijzer, 2007, Trewavas, 2003) now are telling us that cognition is realized in plants and in bacteria.4 As I have addressed the issues with respect to embodied and extended cognition before, in this paper I turn our attention to the claims that cognition is realized in plants and in bacteria. I hope to get to the bottom of this and understand why people are saying these things and to evaluate the plausibility of the claims.
Section snippets
Cognition in plants
Garzon (2007) attributes cognition to plants. On what basis does he attribute cognition to plants? He seems to think that plants engage in behavior that can only (or best) be explained by attribution of cognitive states. He says they “learn,” “decide,” “anticipate,” and have “memory,” among other cognitive states, but the basis for these attributions is the behavior that they display. What behavior? He discusses the behavior of leaf laimnas of Lavatera Cretica. It turns out that these plants
Cognition in bacteria
Like some plant scientists, some bacteriologists think cognition goes as far down the biological scale as bacteria. Ben-Jacob (2009) attributes to bacteria faculties that “represent the origin of cognition” or what he also calls the “precursors” of cognition or cognition's “fundamental elements” (79).
In a section describing the chemotaxis involved in the tumbling behavior of bacteria (which tumble along a gradient to a food source or away from a toxic substance), Ben-Jacob uses the term
The anthropogenic & the biogenic: a tale of two approaches?
Lyon (2006) argues that there are two approaches to cognition: one from humans downward and the other from biological organisms upward. She puts it this way:
Do we start from the human case and work our way ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept, or do we start from the facts of biology and work our way ‘up’ to the human case? I call the tradition that takes the human case as its starting point for the study of cognition the anthropogenic approach (from the Greek; literally, human + birth,
Information processing does not equal cognition
The authors we've discussed have moved away from the view that life is cognition. They do not agree that just any biological process is a cognitive process. So which biological processes, from their “biogenic” perspective (this perspective would include Garzon and Ben-Jacob) are the cognitive ones, in their view? They are the ones that involve information-driven biological processes—processes that are not just the result of chemical interaction or mere cell metabolism. They are interested in
A unified theory of cognition: Lyon & Keijzer
If cognitive science splits the terms as one may think Lyon is suggesting with her “anthropogenic” vs. “biogenic” notions of cognition, then the two terms don't mean the same thing. They can't explain the same things, and it takes the surprise out of their claims. Who cares if bacteria think if ‘think’ means something different when applied to bacteria than when applied to animals or humans?
So if Lyon & Keijzer are not advocating a split in the term ‘cognition’ into one applying to the biogenic
Conclusion
Cognition and cognitive processing is not mere computation or information processing. Cognition alters the information processed and structures or formats it in a novel way. It adds meaning and thus much information is either lost or made dependent upon the information highlighted in the semantic content of a cognitive representation.
The use of cognitive terms by plant scientists and biologists who study plant and bacterial behavior, is likely being used because there is no better term for what
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were given at Macquarie University, Duke University, and the Realization Workshop in Paris. I would especially like to thank the following people for useful questions, comments, and feedback: Alex Manafu, Cameron Buckner, Nicolas Bullot, Fred Dretske, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Fred Keijzer, Richard Menary, Elliott Sober, and John Sutton.
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Cited by (38)
Externalized memory in slime mould and the extended (non-neuronal) mind
2022, Cognitive Systems ResearchCitation Excerpt :What is distinctive of cognition is “whole-organism motility” (Ibid.).24 An obvious objection to such a biogenic approach is to question whether sensorimotor coordination is sufficient for cognition (see e.g., Adams, 2018). To deal with this objection, we devote this section to justifying our claim that memory making of the kind found in slime moulds should be thought of as cognitive.
Learning in single cell organisms
2021, Biochemical and Biophysical Research CommunicationsCitation Excerpt :However, despite evidence for learning in single cell organisms, few attempts have been made in the last 30 years to investigate this process further. This might be due in part to numerous controversies surrounding some experiments that heaped opprobrium on the whole research program but also to a form of reluctance to acknowledge learning in non-neuronal systems [44]. It is interesting to remember that learning in invertebrates was also highly debated but is now well accepted.
Science fosters ongoing reassessments of plant capabilities
2024, Theoretical and Experimental Plant PhysiologyEnacting Practices: Perception, Expertise and Enlanguaged Affordances
2024, Social EpistemologyConnecting Unconventional Cognition to Humans Unification and Generativity
2023, Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the ArtsMinimal model explanations of cognition
2023, European Journal for Philosophy of Science