Cognition, Content And The Inner Code

this paper I argue that this confuses what is cognitive with what is not. More specifically, it confuses cognitive states with the content of cognitive states, and tries to generate cognition by internalising the public, communicable symbolisms that express that content. In one sense, the belief that the earth is round is a cognitive state, but in another it is a proposition that can be written down and that expresses not only the content of my belief, but (I assume) the content of yours as well. Frege put this cryptically when he said `A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; never confuse these things.' He added `We must remind ourselves, it seems, that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it than the sun ceases to exist when I shut my eyes' (Frege, 1967). The confusion is an old one. In the nineteenth century it gave rise to psychologism, especially to psychologism in logic and mathematics. This is the belief that these disciplines are branches of empirical psychology, so that we can do logic and mathematics by looking at the mind. The official story is that psychologism was exorcised by Frege and Husserl and buried at the crossroads of intellectual history. Be that as it may, the confusion that underlies psychologism---the confusion between state and content---lives on in what I call `reverse psychologism'. Psychologism tries to find out about the content of thought by studying cognitive states. Reverse psychologism tries to study cognition by examining the symbol structures that express the content of thought. In the first part of this paper I elaborate on these distinctions, examine the intellectual history, and provide case studies from cognitive science, linguistic theory and AI. 2 TERRY DARTNAL

Minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence

Even without technology, we are, what Terry Dartnall would call, \u27bioborgs\u27, with modular brains and onboard robot-like devices (let\u27s call them \u27biobots\u27) that we launch to do our bidding. This leaves us well placed for mechanical augmentation, for a seamless meshing between our onboard abilities and technologies in the world. Dartnall explores these ideas in a talk to the BrisScience Forum