Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Provenances
- 1 Catching Consciousness in a Recurrent Net
- 2 Functionalism at Forty: A Critical Retrospective
- 3 Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues
- 4 Rules, Know-How, and the Future of Moral Cognition
- 5 Science, Religion, and American Educational Policy
- 6 What Happens to Reliabilism When It Is Liberated from the Propositional Attitudes?
- 7 On the Nature of Intelligence: Turing, Church, von Neumann, and the Brain
- 8 Neurosemantics: On the Mapping of Minds and the Portrayal of Worlds
- 9 Chimerical Colors: Some Phenomenological Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience
- 10 On the Reality (and Diversity) of Objective Colors: How Color-Qualia Space Is a Map of Reflectance-Profile Space
- 11 Into the Brain: Where Philosophy Should Go from Here
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Rules, Know-How, and the Future of Moral Cognition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Provenances
- 1 Catching Consciousness in a Recurrent Net
- 2 Functionalism at Forty: A Critical Retrospective
- 3 Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues
- 4 Rules, Know-How, and the Future of Moral Cognition
- 5 Science, Religion, and American Educational Policy
- 6 What Happens to Reliabilism When It Is Liberated from the Propositional Attitudes?
- 7 On the Nature of Intelligence: Turing, Church, von Neumann, and the Brain
- 8 Neurosemantics: On the Mapping of Minds and the Portrayal of Worlds
- 9 Chimerical Colors: Some Phenomenological Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience
- 10 On the Reality (and Diversity) of Objective Colors: How Color-Qualia Space Is a Map of Reflectance-Profile Space
- 11 Into the Brain: Where Philosophy Should Go from Here
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Professor Andy Clark's splendid essay represents a step forward from which there should be no retreat. Our de facto moral cognition involves a complex and evolving interplay between, on the one hand, the nondiscursive cognitive mechanisms of the biological brain, and on the other, the often highly discursive extrapersonal “scaffolding” that structures the social world in which our brains are normally situated, a world that has been, to a large extent, created by our own moral and political activity. That interplay extends the reach and elevates the quality of the original nondiscursive cognition, and thus any adequate account of moral cognition must address both of these contributing dimensions. An account that focuses only on brain mechanisms will be missing something vital.
I endorse these claims, so compellingly argued by Clark, for much the same reasons that I also endorse the following claims. Our de facto scientific cognition involves a complex and evolving interplay between, on the one hand, the nondiscursive cognitive mechanisms of the biological brain, and on the other, the often highly discursive extrapersonal “scaffolding” that structures the social-scientific world in which the brains of scientists are normally situated, a technologically and institutionally intricate world that has been, to a large extent, created by our own scientific activities. That interplay extends the reach and elevates the quality of the original nondiscursive cognition, and thus any adequate account of scientific cognition must address both of these contributing dimensions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Neurophilosophy at Work , pp. 61 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007