The mark of the cognitive

Abstract

Several philosophical debates in the philosophy of mind and of the cognitive sciences seem to require the elaboration of a mark of the cognitive (MOC). Some proposals for individually necessary and/or jointly sufficient conditions for cognition are already available, but each of them is not entirely satisfactory for different reasons. I start by drawing on some of the extant proposals, and I advance a possible candidate necessary condition for cognition. I motivate the claim that cognition requires the existence of a first-person perspective (1PP) associated with it. However, while reasonable, I argue that we should not ultimately accept this claim. Moreover, some of the reasons that I provide for not accepting it also apply to the broader methodological family of approaches to cognition that has been labelled by Lyon (2006) the “anthropogenic” family. As a result, it is not just the 1PP condition that needs to be dismissed, it is the entire anthropogenic approach to cognition that should not be pursued in attempting to elaborate a MOC. Luckily, the other broad methodological family, the one of the “biogenic” approaches to cognition, is not vulnerable to the same issues that arise in the case of anthropogenic approaches. We should therefore adopt a biogenic approach to the issue of finding a mark of the cognitive. Nevertheless, elaborating a MOC within a biogenic framework may not prove as beneficial as one may hope. In fact, what appears to be the most promising and positively received product of a biogenic approach, namely the Free-Energy Principle and the accounts of cognition based on it, needs to be understood in instrumentalist terms. Consequently, while we may still be able to achieve an understanding of what cognition is, some of the debates meant to be settled by the elaboration of a MOC may remain unsettled.