Cognisance and cognitive science. Part two: Towards an empirical psychology of cognisance

Abstract

Abstract In the first part of this essay (Russell, 1988a) I argued that ‘cognisance’ (roughly: a subject's knowledge of his relation to the physical world as an experiencer of it) cannot be explained in terms of a syntactic theory of mind, due to the ‘referential’ and ‘holistic’ nature of this knowledge. The syntactic account of the higher mental functions is immediately intelligible to us due to its derivation from computer technology, so this would not appear to be a happy result for scientific psychology. In this paper I outline a strategy for developing a scientific psychology of cognisance, beginning from the assumption that such a theory should have a similar status to Chomsky's competence theory of human grammar, whilst diverging from Chomsky on the question of how such a theory should be answerable to data. Most of the paper is taken up with illustrating the way in which Jean Piaget's theory of mental development in humans is at least a first approximation to such a theory.