Human cognition is the ‘full range of processes and activities through which,
as embodied creatures,
we, like other organisms, interact more or less effectively with our continuously changing environments,
thereby ourselves changing more or less continuously’
Source: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
About knowledge she says:
What we come to call the truth or validity of some statement – historical report, scientific explanation, cosmological theory and so forth – is best seen not as its objective correspondence to an autonomously determinate external state of affairs but, rather, as our experience of its consonance with a system composed of already accepted ideas, already interpreted and classified observations, and, no less significantly, the embodied perceptual and behavioural dispositions that are thereby engendered and constrained.
The veridicality of any creature’s, including any individual human’s, cognitive processes can be seen not as the accuracy of its perceptions of a presumptively objective reality (‘what’s really there’) but as the relative effectiveness of that creature’s ongoing interactions with its particular environment, given its particular structure and modes of operation. The ‘real’, under such a conception, would be understood as the more or less stable and more or less pragmatically workable cognitive constructs produced by that creature through those more or less effective interactions – which, in the case of humans, would include verbal interactions with other humans and the effects of ongoing and past experiences of the cultural and social environment more generally.The gulf between Smith’s conception of reality and the theoretical outlook she is criticising is profound. She believes that scientists who think they are investigating objective reality are deluded, and that the same kind of scrutiny that the new naturalists have turned on religion, when applied to science itself, reveals science also to be at bottom a human construction that facilitates our interactions with our environment. This, she says, does not undermine the authority of science.
The scientific response goes: science investigates a reality that would exist even if there were no science
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