Critical analysis of the construction of conceptual frameworks in cognitive science

Ela Praznik (2022) Critical analysis of the construction of conceptual frameworks in cognitive science. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

The master's thesis deals with the question of how to place conceptual activity into a naturalistic image of the world which is in the process of being produced by modern natural science. As the framework for my thesis, I take the philosophical system of Wilfrid Sellars and his articulation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of man-in-the-world. I start by focusing on Sellars' defense of scientific realism and the paradox which we encounter when we try to reduce conceptual activity to mere causal descriptions. In the second part I articulate the possibility of resolving the paradox with an understanding of the double-faced nature of intentional phenomena as belonging both to the realm of normativity as well as to the causal realm. Focusing on the normativity of linguistic behavior, I show that using a functional theory of meaning conceptual thinking and self-awareness can be successfully located within a naturalistic ontology of the world. The third part concerns the question of how our conceptual frameworks are constrained by a world that we discover and not merely create. I invoke Sellars' elaboration of prelinguistic representational systems, which I reconceptualize with the help of enactivism and predictive processing. I finish with the idea, that the externalization of our representational capacities into a distributed linguistic system formed at the level of community, is what allows the reformatting of sentience into sapience. From this I derive the elusiveness of providing a final naturalistic description of human conceptual nature in an ideal scientific image.

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