Removing the Brackets from Context and Advanced Cognitive Processes

World shaking intellectual projects have been rarely contained within the boundary lines of any solitary academic field. Nor did they all happen near the turn of the seventeenth century. From Copernicus, to Kant, to Leibniz, to Husserl, and to Einstein, some of these ideas and their originators were overlooked in their first published editions. Among the ten thousand or so academic books published initially in 2006, there will certainly be a few that will prove instrumental to the preparation of future specialists within their respective fields, specialists who will do their part, in turn, to push back the edge of the unknown in their own incremental ways. Perhaps the true measure of a great book is not the number of copies sold, but the number of scholars--external to the author's field--whose collective paradigm will be launched toward new productivity through the insights contained in that one book. Only time and future scholarship will tell if Philip N. Johnson-Laird has written "only" another book that will shake up the field of psychology, or if the insights he gleans from cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, logic, and Philosophy's "Theory of Knowledge" will be duly recognized as a founding document of something new, an experimental science of human understanding.

In How We Reason, Johnson-Laird offers up a menu of the four most probable ways humans might figure things out; and he explains why sometimes we goof up. First, our ability to reason might depend on an extraordinary memory; we might be remembering prior solutions--even innate ones learned by our species--and then applying them to contemporary problems. Second, there might be "formal rules" for discovery and learning, a logical structure of meaning that is a part of the world in which we live and around which our species evolved. Or, perhaps we are more like a competent crafts-person; we master the "content" of the problem, and use this context to devise solutions through trial, error, and improvisation. Finally, we may be creating "models of possibility." By starting with all of the possible solutions to a problem, we quickly cast out all of the unlikely and the inconsistent, leaving only the probable.

Johnson-Laird shows that inferences are not all the same, and therefore the ways we solve problems are also diverse. Our solutions can be combinations of these four possible approaches. But through an interesting argument, one with a surprise ending that I refuse to ruin in a review, Johnson-Laird challenges a century's phenomenological mistrust of context and advanced cognitive processes.   Much of human reason arises from models and skills (such as abduction, deduction, and induction). The implications of this theory will encourage a return to fashionable contextualization in analysis, and should change the way courses in logic, theory of knowledge, philosophy of history, and epistemology are taught. I shall leave the evaluation of the book's impact on psychology to another reviewer, hopefully a specialist in recent cognitive sciences.

Until recently, the projects undertaken in How We Reason would have been relegated to the Philosophy department, and turf intrusions would have been robustly repelled. With the development of this new experimental science of understanding, or whatever it turns out to be called, there will still be room for the philosopher and logistician, working elbow-to-elbow with physiologists, computer engineers, and psychologists. Historically, many of our greatest breakthroughs have resulted from the application of one "field's" problems, methods, and tools to another "field's" enigma. The application of optics to astronomy, as one example of this productive cross-fertilization, may now seem obvious in retrospect. Likewise, this joint venture between computer modeling, symbolic logic, Philosophy of Mind, and cognitive psychology, provides an experimental platform for Epistemology, the science. This may soon be ambient to the way we approach human reason. This book should be read in many halls of the academy, as there is a good chance that it will help trigger a rearrangement of some of the offices and desks therein.

The above review was contributed by: Joe Petrulionis:  Joe Petrulionis reads, writes, and teaches the history of ideas and he emphasizes the political and cultural context in which these philosophical, scientific, and artistic notions emerge. Joe has a recent Masters Degree in History and is in recovery from a previous career and graduate specialty in finance and economics. To read more of Joe's reviews CLICK HERE

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