Review of Michael Wheeler: Reconstructing the cognitive world: the next step. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)

Marsh, Leslie

English

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

BOOK REVIEW
Michael Wheeler: Reconstructing the cognitive world:
The next step
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005, 340 pages, $35 hard
Leslie Marsh
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007
Michael Wheeler is the latest in a new wave of philosophical theorists that fall within a
loose coalition of anti-representationalism (or anti-Cartesianism): Dynamical –,
Embodied –, Extended –, Distributed –, and Situated –, theories of cognition
(DEEDS an apt acronym). Against this background, cognition for Wheeler is, or
should be, a more ecumenical concept. This ecumenical approach would still be
amenable to making theoretical distinctions, the central one being the notion of
offline and online styles of intelligence, a distinction that makes conceptual space for
another closely related notion, that of propositional knowledge (knowing that) and
tacit knowledge (knowing how).
Wheeler’s book comprises 11 chapters and, informally, 3 sections. Beyond the
introduction, chapters 2 to 4 offer a close-grained analysis of cognitive science’s
Cartesian inheritance; chapters 5 to 9 present Wheeler’s deployment of Heideggerian
ideas in the service of four central DEEDS claims (pp.11–14):
1. That online intelligence (OI) is the primary kind of intelligence;
2. That OI is causally woven within an extended brain–body–environment system;
3. That cognitive science needs to be more cognisant of the biological dimension;
4. That cognitive science should adopt a dynamical systems perspective.
Chapter 10 is dedicated to the frame problem and chapter 11 is a brief epilogue.
The Descartes that Wheeler presents is what he terms a “generic Cartesianism.”
The intention here is twofold, one a primary reason, the other a derivative reason.
First, Wheeler wants to see for himself exactly what Descartes said, as opposed to
what has historically been attributed to him. Second, as a Heideggerian, Wheeler feels
his position is further strengthened if he does not rely upon Heidegger’s Descartes.
Wheeler very bravely makes no appeal to a Heideggerian understanding of
Cartesianism and therefore feels that he is not vulnerable to its idiosyncrasies
Phenom Cogn Sci
DOI 10.1007/s11097-007-9062-2
L. Marsh (*)
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
e-mail: l.marsh@sussex.ac.uk
(pp. 184–185). Wheeler, unlike many DEEDS theorists is not content to use
Descartes as the philosophical whipping boy: he is of the view that an extreme
mind–body dualism has been unfairly pinned on the historical Descartes. This has,
perhaps inadvertently, given rise to, despite their endorsement of physicalism,
covert Cartesians. They are committed to a specific notion of Cartesian
representationalism: a physical rather than immaterial ontology. This is what
Dennett has disparagingly termed Cartesian materialism. Wheeler sets out eight
Cartesian principles that comprise Cartesian psychology. They divide into two
interpretations: the narrow and the broad. The former identifies the faculty of reason
as a wholly mental capacity with the upshot that there is a denial of non-intellectual
psychological processes, typically sensory experiences. The latter has a place for
both the intellectual and non-intellectual (non-conceptual content) psychological
phenomena.
In much the same way as he approaches Descartes, Wheeler approaches
Heidegger. The reasons here are somewhat more complicated. First, interpretation
of Heidegger has been notoriously divergent: though there is no such thing as a
“definitive” commentary on Heidegger, there are less contentious ones (Taylor
Carman and Richard Polt are two commentators that spring to mind but are not at all
referenced by Wheeler.) Second, Heidegger is a philosopher that has been (mis?)
appropriated in areas where there is no philosophical culture. This has given rise to a
caricatured Heidegger: the paradigmatic anti-realist, anti-naturalist, relativist and
social constructivist pressed into service for those promoting some ideological sub-
text (pp. 152, 156). This does no favors for Heidegger in particular and so-called
Continental philosophy in general – more on this later. Last but by means not least,
Wheeler has the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus to negotiate (pp. 166–191),
again a very distinctive Heideggerian on offer.
Wheeler’s overall task is to reject the view that Heidegger’s philosophy is
incompatible with or irrelevant to a science of the mind. Heideggerian smooth coping,
real-time environmental interplay constitutes a form of knowledge, namely embodied
knowledge-how. Embodied know-how emerges as our primary way of gaining
epistemic access to the world and takes epistemic primacy over knowing-that
(propositional knowledge). Whereas the Cartesian cognizer is a fully decontextualized
entity, for Heidegger it would seem to be an essential fact about human cognition that it
always operates within a context of activity. Wheeler concedes that Heidegger’s pure
circumspective know-how is rarely operative. (I would have liked more discussion on
contrasting cognitive and philosophical notions of skill-based rationality.)
The key to a generic Heideggerian response to orthodox cognitive science,
Wheeler believes, lies within the conceptual picture offered by the Heideggerian
philosophy–science nexus. Being and Time is primarily an investigation into
intelligibility (Reality). The scientific mode reveals the mathematically describable
causal properties of entities, properties that are the present-at-hand abstracted from
everyday significance, what the “The English Heidegger,” Michael Oakeshott, has
termed sub specie quantitatis. For Wheeler there is no Heideggerian reason why
phenomena that are ready-to-hand in an everyday context cannot constitute the
present-at-hand subject matter of a scientific investigation (p. 157).
Wheeler is in accord with much of Dreyfus’s work but feels that Dreyfus runs the
risk of over-playing his Heideggerian hand (p. 185). Wheeler suggests that for the
L. Marsh
Heideggerian there is a tactical advantage to moving away from a Dreyfus-style
negative assessment of empirical achievement. Rather, the Heideggerian should
engage with the concrete empirical success of a Heideggerian position in cognitive
science. This leaves such work vulnerable to the criticism that philosophy then loses
its sui generis status. Wheeler seems to sidestep this by interpreting Heidegger as
taking the view “that science need not wait for philosophy, not that philosophy must
wait for science.” (p. 127)
Wheeler is not suggesting that a Heideggerian phenomenological approach is a
panacea for the problems faced by cognitive science “but rather as a way of
articulating what it is, to a large extent, an independent and already happening
transition in the fundamental character of the discipline ...” (p. 124) Wheeler feels
that recent cognitive science can be construed as Heideggerian, not so much an
engagement with Heideggerian ideas, but as response to empirical questions faced
within science itself (p. 188). These two observations suggest then that the sub-title
of Wheeler’s book “The Next Step” is redundant – conceived thus we are all already
Heideggerians! On a related issue there is a tension in Wheeler’s avowed approach
in his so-called generic presentation of the two titans – Descartes and Heidegger.
Wheeler’s own reading of these thinkers, ostensibly to present an unvarnished
interpretation is a misnomer. If by “generic” he intends an impressionistic Cartesian
and Heideggerian approach, then though perfectly legitimate, it is hardly any more
“reliable” than Heidegger or Dreyfus.
The frame problem looms large; discussion of this issue Wheeler judiciously defers
towards the end (chapter 10). Wheeler presents an ambitious three-step strategy that
assimilates both Cartesian and Heideggerian insights, the critical third step being the
highly speculative invocation of a dynamical open-ended “continuous reciprocal
causation” or “adaptive plasticity or flexibility” of agents to negotiate new contexts.
This sets up the “research question of how do action-orientated representation and
continuous reciprocal causation combine to produce online intelligence?” (p. 280).
Perhaps this should, as Wheeler here implies, be “The Next Step.”
If ever there were a book that meets the central aims and scope of this journal, i.e.
addressing the confluence of phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic
philosophy of mind, then this book fits the bill perfectly. It speaks to the health of
Anglophonic philosophy, at least as practiced under the aegis of cognitive science, that
Wheeler brings an analytical sensibility to ostensibly “obscure” Continental thought.
This should not be taken as chauvinistic – Wheeler is merely someone trained in one
“style” of philosophising and who deeply appreciates another – there is no
incompatibility. Those who insist on maintaining the “continental (hermeneutic)/
analytical” divide are ideological, rather than philosophical: subscribing to this
fault-line is as perverse as “dividing America into Business and Kansas.”1
I have barely scratched the surface of Wheeler’s concerns. Despite a residual
doctoral denseness, he excels in making difficult notions clear without ever
vulgarising them. Wheeler is a theorist to watch: there is the promise that his best
is yet to come.
1Attributed to John Searle.
We are all Heideggerians now


Review of Michael Wheeler: Reconstructing the cognitive world: the next step. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

CogPrints Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive