Levels of description and explanation in cognitive science

Abstract

Abstract. The notion of levels has been widely used in discussions of cognitive science, especially in discussions of the relation of connectionism to symbolic modeling of cognition. I argue that many of the notions of levels employed are problematic for this purpose, and develop an alternative notion grounded in the framework of mechanistic explanation. By considering the source of the analogies underlying both symbolic modeling and connectionist modeling, I argue that neither is likely to provide an adequate analysis of processes at the level at which cognitive theories attempt to function: One is drawn from too low a level, the other from too high a level. If there is a distinctly cognitive level, then we still need to determine what are the basic organizational principles at that level.Key words. Connectionism, symbol processing, levels of organization, reduction, mechanistic explanation.The recent attention given to connectionist, parallel distributed processing, or neural network models of cognition has raised a fundamental question about how these inquiries relate to other attempts to explain cognitive phenomenon. The use of the three different names sometimes interchangeably and sometimes distinctively revels that there is a fair amount of disagreement as to how to answer this question. The name neural networks suggests that these are models of actual neural systems. For some theorists, this implies that these models are, at best, tangentially relevant to the business of cognitive science. They may be useful for studying how structures in the brain function, and since cognitive activities are realized in the brain, they may be relevant for studying how cognitive activities are realized in the brain, but that is all. Some neuroscientists, especially those who adopt the term cognitive neuroscience for their pursuit, however, would insist that neuroscience is in the business of explaining cognitive functions. Thus, there are some investigators who would employ the term neural networks who take themselves to be engaged in explaining cognitive functions. For many of these theorists it is important to develop models of how the brain performs cognitive functions, and they are therefore quite skeptical of the research programs commonly associated with the term cognitive science which have not made faithfulness to neural mechanism primary.Other theorists, who are more likely to have come to such network models by way of psychology or artificial intelligence, tend to prefer the labels connectionism or parallel distributed processing 2. This choice of names reflects a different conception of the enterprise. For these theorists, network models are attractive only in part because of their similarity to networks of neurons. The attraction is more due to the fact that such networks provide useful frameworks for modeling

Mechanisms and psychological explanation

“…One reason is that the various conceptions of levels are rarely analyzed in any sustained, substantive detail despite there being a large litany of literature on the subject (for an attempt to rectify this problem, see Wilson & Craver, this volume, chapter XX). A second reason is that levels are ambiguously construed as both ontic levels of mechanistic organization and as epistemic levels of analysis (Bechtel, 1994).…”

Levels and building blocks—towards a domain granularity framework for the life sciences

“…In other words, the term 'mechanism' describes "non-aggregative compositional systems in which the parts interact and collectively realize the behavior or property of the whole" (Craver, 2015, p. 16). This approach to levels is based on component-mechanism relations (Bechtel, 1994(Bechtel, , 2008Craver, 2001Craver, , 2002Craver, , 2007 and is obviously intended to reflect and represent causally grounded features of the organization of reality (see levels of nature, Craver, 2007).…”

The Grain of Domains: The Evolutionary‐Psychological Case Against Domain‐General Cognition

“…Mainstream evolutionary-psychological theorizing is predicated on Marr's (1982) tripartite conceptual framework for analysing an information-processing system (Cosmides and Tooby, 1987, 1994a, 1994b. The first of these levels of analysis is the 'computational' level, at which information-processing capacities are broadly characterized in terms of what a system can do-what problems it can solve and how it can solve them.…”

“…The first moral is that Marr's levels of analysis do not demarcate particular or proprietary levels of organization, but rather crosscut them (see also Bechtel, 1994b;McClamrock, 1991). One can ask questions at a number of different levels of organization about (i) the function of a given architectural feature, which might include its adaptive function, (ii) how those features work, and (iii) how they are physically realized.…”

“…Buss, 1999;Cosmides and Tooby, 1987, 1994a, 1994bPinker, 1994Pinker, , 1997Sperber, 1996;Symons, 1992;Tooby and Cosmides, 1992; for reviews, see Bloom, 1999;Cummins and Cummins, 1999;Kenrick, Sadalla and Keefe, 1998).…”