1. This time it’s personal
To my mind, being wrong is nowhere near as disheartening as being boring, so I am encouraged by the fact that, in the four chapters immediately preceding this one, four thinkers for whom I have nothing but the utmost intellectual respect have found my ongoing project to articulate the philosophical groundwork for a genuinely Heideggerian cognitive science interesting enough that they have taken the trouble to explain precisely why it is flawed. Just how deep the supposed flaws go depends on which set of criticisms one chooses to read. For Ratcliffe and Rehberg they go very deep indeed, since, for these thinkers, there is a sense in which the very idea of a Heideggerian cognitive science borders on the incoherent. Dreyfus and Rietveld, on the other hand, seem to agree with me that something worth calling a Heideggerian cognitive science is certainly possible; it’s just that my version of it is seriously defective.
Although being interesting and wrong is preferable to being boring and right, one aspires to be interesting and right. In what follows, then, I shall endeavour to resist what I take to be the most powerful (although admittedly not all) of the criticisms tabled in each of the chapters just mentioned. In setting up my contribution to the present volume in this way, I don’t for one moment mean to suggest that criticizing my position is all, or indeed the most important thing, that these chapters do. Far from it: the positive contributions they make in bringing the relations between Heideggerian philosophy and cognitive science into better view — the multiply elusive ‘and’ in the identifier ‘Heidegger and cognitive science’, as Rehberg (this volume) would have it — are a great deal more significant than their problematizations of my own view. Still, I am self-interested enough to spend my time here defending myself in the line of fire, which is why, in what follows, I shall be arguing that Ratcliffe, Rehberg, Dreyfus and Rietveld (in roughly that order) have further work to do before my letter of surrender arrives in their inboxes. That said, the goal of this chapter may also be expressed in a way that avoids the egocentric emphasis placed on it so far: that goal is to defend both the very idea of a Heideggerian cognitive science and a certain vision of what such a cognitive science will look like, at least in part. So, adopting something of a pantomime register, I shall suggest that the right response to Ratcliffe’s (this volume) strident claim that there can be no cognitive science of Dasein (where ‘Dasein’ is Heidegger’s term for the distinctive kind of entity that human beings as such are) is to shout back (with gusto) ‘oh yes there can!’.
2. Keeping Dasein out of the lab
Let’s begin with the arguments of Ratcliffe and Rehberg. It is important to record at the outset that neither of these thinkers hold cognitive science to be an intellectually worthless endeavour that is incapable of yielding important insights about its subject matter. Thus Rehberg (this volume, p. 173) stresses that “[w]hat is at stake… is not scientific practice, scientific achievements or the positive role the sciences play in modern life”, while Ratcliffe (this volume, p. 138) emphasizes that his intention “is not to dismiss cognitive science altogether but to suggest that there is a principled limit to its potential aspirations”. In their different ways, however, Ratcliffe and Rehberg each argue that there exists some sort of in-principle barrier to the proposal that cognitive science might be developed in a genuinely Heideggerian direction. Hence Ratcliffe’s aim, as he himself describes it, is “to raise some philosophical concerns about the very idea of a ‘Heideggerian cognitive science’” (this volume, p. 138). From this perspective, then, there is no need to examine the specific explanations that any so-called Heideggerian cognitive science might have offered — or at least if one does examine them one shouldn’t take their purported Heideggerian character seriously — because, in truth, the whole nascent paradigm is a kind of fiction.
The first volley in Ratcliffe’s broadside is a general argument to the effect that Heidegger’s philosophy is incompatible with the naturalism that, according to me (see e.g. Wheeler, 2005, pp. 4-7), ought to, and standardly does, accompany cognitive science. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that a healthy respect for the rich and diverse research programme that we call cognitive science requires a fundamental commitment to a thoroughgoing naturalism regarding human psychological phenomena. One can put this point another way: any philosophy of mind and cognition that rides shotgun with cognitive science must be naturalistic in form. So what is it for philosophy to be naturalistic in form? The guiding thought of naturalism is that philosophy should be continuous with empirical science. The question of just what this continuity might amount to will become an important issue for us soon. At present let’s simply note that the naturalist about some phenomenon X (e.g. about mind, cognition, sense-making or being-in-the-world) holds that the science related to X places constraints on our philosophical theorizing about X. Now, a genuinely Heideggerian cognitive science (as opposed to a cognitive science that occasionally borrows Heideggerian insights) will be a cognitive science that, to some significant degree, systematically integrates Heidegger’s philosophical framework with the foundational features of the cognitive-scientific approach to mind, intelligence, thought and action. So if, as I have suggested, taking cognitive science seriously requires a commitment to a naturalism about psychological phenomena, then the prospects for a Heideggerian cognitive science rest, in part, on whether or not Heideggerian philosophy is, or can be made, compatible with that naturalism.
It is at this point that Ratcliffe bares his teeth. According to Heideggerian philosophy, as interpreted by Ratcliffe, the distinctive manner in which empirical science, and so cognitive science in particular, reveals entities as the targets and the outcomes of its investigations tacitly presupposes a sense of belonging to the world on the part of Dasein. This sense of belonging to the world is, in effect, a dimension of the distinctive manner in which Dasein is essentially in the world, an ‘in-ness’ that Heidegger christens dwelling (see e.g. Heidegger, 1927, pp. 79-80). To dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it spatially in a physical sense. Rather, it is to belong there, to have a familiar place there. This belonging or familiarity is sometimes illuminated by Heidegger by way of the thought that entities ordinarily make sense (are intelligible) to us within culturally and historically determined contexts of practical activity that, so to speak, arrive with us. For example, my laptop currently makes sense to me in relation to a skilled activity of text-editing; that text-editing is involved in writing a document; that document-writing is involved in meeting a professional deadline; and that meeting of a professional deadline is involved in my project of being a good academic. In a fundamental sense (although see below for a qualification), it is these Dasein-relative structures of significance within which entities are found that, in Heidegger’s analysis, interconnect, combine and interweave to make up the meaningful structure of a world. And what this indicates is that, in practical encounters with entities — encounters in which, for Heidegger, entities are encountered principally as ready-to-hand (i.e., smoothly available for skilled activity; see below) — the world is something with which each of us (as Dasein) is always already familiar, and to which each of us (as Dasein) has a sense of belonging (see e.g. Heidegger, 1927, p.119).
As Ratcliffe understands things, Heidegger’s account of our belonging to the world generates a roughly transcendental case against naturalism, and so neatly places an in-principle barrier in the path of any proposal for a Heideggerian cognitive science. To see how this is supposed to work, we need to begin by reminding ourselves of Heidegger’s famous claim that science reveals entities in a mode of being (intelligibility) that he calls presence-at-hand. When revealed as present-at-hand, entities are encountered as removed from the familiar settings of everyday practical activity and thereby emerge as the kind of context-independent objects that populate science, that is, as the bearers of certain cross-contextual determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos, position in objective space etc.). With presence-at-hand brought into view, there are in truth two different ways in which a transcendental bulwark against naturalism might be erected, based on two different notions of worldliness that appear in Being and Time. (Although Ratcliffe doesn’t quite present things in this way, I do not think he would have any serious objections to my restaging, since, as I shall indicate, both of the resulting arguments appear in his text.) If one thinks of Dasein’s world as constituted by some global network of the kind of local contexts of practical activity highlighted above, then one might very well argue that the entities of science are “presented to us as stripped to varying degrees of the significance that they previously had, as having lost something” (Ratcliffe, this volume, p. 141). On this view, to experience an entity as present-at-hand is to encounter it precisely as having-been-removed-from-the-world, which is of course a possible style of encounter only if the world itself (the network of Dasein-relative contexts of practical activity with which we are familiar) is presupposed (cf. Wheeler, 2005, p.165). Alternatively (and this is the aforementioned qualification to the Heideggerian notion of ‘world’), if one thinks of Dasein’s world not as a network of interconnected contexts of practical activity, but as the very structure of intelligibility itself (what Heidegger sometimes calls the worldhood of the world; see e.g. Heidegger, 1927, p.119), and if one thinks of scientific practice as itself a kind of sense-making, then one might very well argue that “both present-at-hand and ready-to-hand entities presuppose a world, within which it is possible to encounter entities in these ways” (Ratcliffe, this volume, p. 140, my emphasis). And then it appears that the sense of familiarity and belonging that characterizes our distinctive world-embeddedness will inevitably accompany scientific sense-making. Either way, then, it seems eminently arguable that Dasein’s sense of belonging to the world is a transcendental condition of the distinctive mode of sense-making that is characteristic of cognitive science, and so, one might think, cannot be brought within the explanatory reach of that science.
Like Ratcliffe, Rehberg argues that, from a Heideggerian perspective, there is something about the fundamental philosophical profile of cognitive science, construed as a local dimension of modern scientific thinking in general, that renders it incapable in principle of reaching its explanatory goal. Once again the Heideggerian claim, that it is of the essence of modern science to reveal entities as present-at-hand, is to the fore, but now that claim takes on a form more readily associated with the later Heidegger (e.g. Heidegger, 1954) than the Heidegger of Being and Time. Articulated in this later modulation, the objectification of entities on which modern science depends — realized as a process of mathematization that renders entities apt for measuring and technical manipulation — is not only itself only a partial understanding of entities (one mode of sense-making or being among others), it also obscures first, the entity as a site of multiple alternative dimensions of sense-making (what Rehberg calls the self-differing nature of entities), and second, the essential revealing-concealing dynamic of that sense-making. In other words, modern science has the property of obscuring the fact that any way of making sense of entities (including its own) involves, as its concomitant flip-side, a necessary concealing of the plenitude of other (e.g. cultural, religious) ways in which those entities may have become intelligible. It is through this doubly obscuring character, based on the reduction of entities to objects and of intelligibility to the measurable and the manipulable, that scientific thinking comes to present itself as the one dominant account of reality, excluding all others.
If Heidegger is right, then the philosophical irony, of course, is that science, as a mode of revealing, depends ultimately on the revealing-concealing dynamic of being, so science obscures the fundamental structure of its own functioning. But in the present context it is perhaps more telling to stress the related point that the scientific reduction of entities to mere objects ultimately obscures the fundamental self-differing character of entities. Thus “the more vigorously a science pursues its object, the more does the being, which it thus attempts to capture as object, withdraw itself” (Rehberg, this volume, p. 171). The explanatory ‘object’ of a Heideggerian cognitive science would, of course, be Dasein as being-in-the-world, which generates the following, local application of the more general claim:
[…] the more comprehensively cognitive science tries to secure Dasein as its object, the more surely will Dasein escape objectification. But if ‘cognitive science’ were capable of… giving up its essence — it would be able to approach Dasein without reducing it to the status of an object, but then it would not be a science, and it would not focus on human cognition — but perhaps on its ways of being. (Rehberg, this volume, p. 171)According to Rehberg, then, a genuinely Heideggerian perspective is committed to the principle that Dasein (human being-in-the-world) may be understood only if we refrain from reducing it to a mere object. Since Dasein is the explanatory target of a Heideggerian cognitive science, for such a cognitive science to succeed, it would need to adopt a non-objectifying mode of sense-making. But the objectifying mode of sense-making is an essential characteristic of modern science and thus of cognitive science. So a cognitive ‘science’ that adopted a nonobjectifying mode of sense-making, and thereby managed to approach its explanatory target in a potentially fruitful way, would simultaneously cease to be a science. Doubt is thus cast on the very possibility of a genuinely Heideggerian cognitive science.
The observant reader will have noticed that there is a second aspect to Rehberg’s argument, as summarized in the quotation just above, namely that a cognitive ‘science’ that adopted a non-objectifying mode of sense-making would, in that process, shift its focus so as to concentrate not on human cognition but on Dasein’s situated ways of being. Although I do not have the space in the present treatment to pursue this thought in detail, it seems to me that, to the extent that there is an issue to be addressed here, it turns on the already-highlighted point about what is essential to cognitive science as a science. After all, the Heideggerian cognitive scientist is going to want to eschew narrow or Cartesian delineations of the domain of the cognitive, and to include Dasein’s situated ways of being within that domain, thereby agreeing to the shift in focus. So there is only a problem here if the Heideggerian cognitive scientist is somehow prevented from making that transition. One might argue that this would be the case, if the transition in question is impossible without Heideggerian cognitive science surrendering its commitment to objectification (mathematization, measurability) and thus its status as a science. In a more indirect, but correspondingly richer way, Rehberg herself makes something like this point (see e.g. Rehberg, this volume, pp. 171-2).
That, then, is the in-principle case against a Heideggerian cognitive science that I shall consider here. If Ratcliffe and Rehberg are right, the very idea of a Heideggerian cognitive science is fundamentally flawed. But are they right?