The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein

Abstract

Cognitive science, the attempt to provide an account of human intelligence and behavior by reference to physical “mechanisms” in the alleged neural control center of human beings, is one of the dominant philosophical projects of our time. The paper argues that Wittgenstein in para. 608 of Zettel develops an alternative to this almost universally accepted modern paradigm. However, his efforts have been widely misunderstood, in a fashion clarified by Kuhn, because scholars read competing paradigms in the light of their own cognitive science paradigm. In the present case, scholars have assumed that the words in Zettel (para. 608), especially “the center” and “chaos,” must have the same meanings that they would naturally be assigned in cognitive science. The result is, inevitably, that Zettel (para. 608) either looks like it anticipates one of the various cognitive science paradigms or it looks absurd. In opposition to this, the paper argues that the language in Zettel (para. 608) is not the language of modern cognitive science, but, rather, is the language of the emergence of order from chaos by virtue of a stabilizing center with which the Western intellectual tradition began in ancient Greek cosmology. When read against this background, it becomes clear that Zettel (para. 608) is an attempt to formulates an alternative to the cognitive science paradigm by retrieving a paradigm found in ancient Greek philosophy and literature. The idea that the brain is not the control center of the human organism is in Plato. The idea that the order in language and thought may arise out of “chaos” is prefigured in Hesiod. It is also argued that the core spirit of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is summed up in the ancient Socratic virtue, for which there is no precise modern equivalent, of sophrosyne. The “new” alternative to the paradigms of modern cognitive science that Wittgenstein sketches in Zettel (para. 608) is rooted in ancient Greek paradigms for thinking about the cosmos - and the human microcosm.