Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel

Abstract

see into minds, you see, robot continued, you have no idea how complicated are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them--but I try, and your novels help. --Isaac Asimov, Liar! No one literary form has a proprietary stake in but as genres go novel has since its inception taken remarkable interest in mental states. Among other things, eighteenth-century fiction is so much writing about mind: about how thoughts represent things, cause other thoughts to happen, or lead to actions. The same might be said for empiricism. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy paid unusual attention to content of minds and nature of ideas, to human understanding as Locke and Hume put it. While connection between empiricism and rise of novel is a touchstone of literary studies, with a venerable tradition of scholarship dating back to beginnings of profession, only recently have critics drawn upon philosophy of mind and cognitive science to talk about way in which thinking takes shape in particular works from period. (1) This is of course not so much of a surprise, since criticism is as a rule skeptical of framing older texts with present-day models. The risk is one of anachronism or universalism, either shoehorning recalcitrant descriptions of mind into our current language of cognition or locating both within a timeless and unchanging account of psyche. Needless to say, my intention in this essay is to do neither; it is rather to consider what kind of insights can be gained by placing description of thinking in fiction and philosophy of eighteenth century alongside certain tendencies within contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science--alongside, that is, way in which we now talk about mind. I'll begin with a comparison between empiricist and computational accounts of mental architecture and look how each describes shape and process of cognition. I'll then turn to of mind, a line of work in cognitive science that has proven especially attractive to literary studies because it concerns way in which thinking about thoughts of other people can be modeled or provoked by works of fiction. 1. MENTAL ARCHITECTURE: FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS TO THE LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT Despite their many differences, there is an important sense in which empiricism is compatible with cognitive science. (2) Most but not all philosophers of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had some sort of representational theory of mind; most but not all cognitivists do too. (3) On this view, mind works by forming representations of objects and events and then implementing them in various processes of thought. Concerning thoughts of man, Hobbes writes in first sentence of Leviathan, they every one a Representation or Appearance, of some quality or accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an object. (4) Slide ahead a few hundred years and things not so different. Mental processes, writes Jerry Fodor, one of more influential and controversial philosophers of mind and cognitive science today, are computations, that is, defined on syntax of mental representations. (5) For Hobbes as for Fodor, work of mind is to have thoughts about or of some distal entity or state of affairs and then to put thoughts together in such a way that leads to behavior. Thoughts intentional in sense coined by Franz Brentano: one has a belief about one thing or wants and unless those things other minds, object of belief or desire does not have intentionality itself. (6) Hobbes found this point to be worth some emphasis; the thing we see is in one place; appearance, in another and between two lies some sort of reference or allusion (14). When at some certain distance, reall and very object seem invested with fancy it begets in us, we ought to remember that the object is one thing, image or fancy is another, and we ought to recognize that images and fancies matters of thinking, while objects and events matters which thoughts directed (14). …