title: Constructing a philosophy of science of cognitive science.
abstract: Philosophy of science is positioned to make distinctive contributions to cognitive science by providing perspective on its conceptual foundations and by advancing normative recommendations. The philosophy of science I embrace is naturalistic in that it is grounded in the study of actual science. Focusing on explanation, I describe the recent development of a mechanistic philosophy of science from which I draw three normative consequences for cognitive science. First, insofar as cognitive mechanisms are information-processing mechanisms, cognitive science needs an account of how the representations invoked in cognitive mechanisms carry information about contents, and I suggest that control theory offers the needed perspective on the relation of representations to contents. Second, I argue that cognitive science requires, but is still in search of, a catalog of cognitive operations that researchers can draw upon in explaining cognitive mechanisms. Last, I provide a new perspective on the relation of cognitive science to brain sciences, one which embraces both reductive research on neural components that figure in cognitive mechanisms and a concern with recomposing higher-level mechanisms from their components and situating them in their environments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Programs in Cognitive Science and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bechtel
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D019336:Cognitive Science; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy
keywords: Control theory; Explanation; Mechanism; Philosophy of science; Recomposition; Reduction; Representation