https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9KC1nX-TFj4
What is the larger cultural relevance of cognitive science? Well, cognitive science is trying to fulfill the scientific revolution in a very important way. There’s a hole in our scientific worldview. One of the things we can’t offer a scientific explanation of is the processes by which we generate scientific explanations. There’s this hole, this gap right at the center of our scientific worldview. And cognitive science has taken upon itself the noble enterprise, the noble task of trying to close that goal by doing synoptic integration through these high- plausibility constructs. How do we fulfill the scientific revolution? We’re going to try and offer a naturalistic explanation of the mind. We’re going to take the lessons from the previous scientific revolutions and use them to try and explain the mind. So what are those three revolutions? The first is in ancient Greece, at the time of Thales. So Thales did something very radical. He transformed explanations of the worlds. So I can give you a couple of fragments from what Thales said. We don’t have very much. But two very famous ones are, all is the moist and the lodestone has suke. This is one of the first times when the word that’s in part of psychology is used in the scientific explanatory manner. So this is important. What does this mean? He means that everything is made out of water. Now he’s wrong, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not the conclusion that matters. It’s the new way of thinking. What he’s saying is everything’s made out of water because if I dig into the earth, I find water. Water falls from the sky. Greece is surrounded by water. Every living thing seems to need water. Water can take the shape of anything. It’s a really plausible idea that everything is made out of water. But notice what he’s doing. He’s trying to analyze complex phenomena into more basic substances. So rather than explaining things in terms of supernatural agents and their motives, he’s analyzing things into their more basic substances. What does the lodestone have suke means? The lodestone is a natural form of magnet. So you know, magnet can attract things or it can move itself. So the idea is this originally doesn’t mean mind. It has a more broad sense of right. It can move itself. To have psyche, to have suke is you can move yourself. And this is what Thales is thinking. He’s thinking, oh, so living things can move themselves and magnets can move themselves. So they must share the same underlying basic force. Suke. Now he’s wrong. But again, the conclusion being wrong doesn’t matter. The way of thinking is really profound. He’s offering a plausible construct that allows him to analyze more complex phenomena into more basic forces. So here he’s looking for more basic substances. Here he’s looking for more basic forces. So he’s replaced mythological thinking with this naturalistic analysis in terms of more basic substances and forces. The second revolution is not a revolution so much of analysis like here. It’s a revolution of formalization. This is made famous by Descartes. This is the idea that we’re going to get good explanations in science when we can offer mathematical explanations. So this is typified by mathematical formula. The reason why this is so important is because this is again a really highly plausible construct because there’s a lot of evidence that converges on this. But this is a way of representing things. Look, when I talk about force as mass times acceleration, I can apply it to how bricks are moving, how rocks are moving, how apples are famously falling out of trees. This applies to all of them broadly but powerfully. So math really ramps this all up. So you want to after analyzing, you want to try and explain all your basic processes and forces in mathematical terms. You want to try and formalize them. And in cognitive science, a lot of the formalization, it does take place through various kinds of logical theories, mathematical theories, information processing theories. The third revolution is important because as Ian Hacking has famously argued here at U of T, science isn’t just about explaining the world. Science is about intervening in the world, being able to change the world, being able to make things. We believe in science more when it allows us to change the world, to achieve the socially relevant goals we’re pursuing. And what happened with Turing in the 1940s and 50s was the revolution of mechanization. Turing came up with a proposal that said we can go from just representing the mind to actually intervening in reality, to creating the mind, to creating artificial intelligence. We can create machines that take the analysis, take the formalization and then give those machines causal power. We can actually make the mind. And this means that these kinds of computational metaphors are again highly plausible. A lot of ideas converge on them, but they were powerfully insightful. That’s the whole computer revolution. So what cognitive science is doing is it’s saying we’re going to do synoptic integration by creating very highly plausible constructs that allow us to extend this naturalistic process of analyzing, formalizing and mechanizing. But now we’re going to do that with respect to the mind. And hopefully what we can do is complete the scientific revolution and fill that hole. We’ll be able to offer a scientific explanation of how our minds and brains create scientific explanations. That’s what cognitive science is all about.