Thinking about thinking: a phenomenological look

A distinction can be drawn between (1) linguistic descriptions of the mental events and processes that we use to refer to firsthand experience of our own thinking, or of others thinking inferred from their behavior.

(2) The actual events/processes as they occur as phenomenological or biological realities.

I should say from the outset that, especially in light of the title of this blog, I am not making a point about the "map and the territory" in a simplistic sense. That is, I am not pointing out that a linguistic description of an event is different from the phenomenological/biological reality of that event. I am looking at a deeper form of this distinction which is commonly unrecognized between (1) the mental events that we claim are occurring when we try to reflect on our thoughts (to ourselves or others) and (2) the mental events that are actually occurring.

This can be shown best with an example. As a student, I have a password for my computer account at school, and I have a separate password for the blackboard website (an online forum for class discussions, document postings, etc). These passwords are arbitrary strings of numbers/letters and are identical except that the last character of my computer password is 5, versus 3 for the blackboard password. Because I use the computer password significantly more than the BB password, I am used to typing in that password, and the BB password is more of an exception. This means that when I go to type that password in, I must remember that it is not the normal computer password, but something else (I frequently type in the computer pword by mistake).

Today, I was logging onto blackboard and the user/pword box came up, and I managed to remember to type in the correct (BB) password. When I reflected on this, I was struck to discover that my inner linguistic representation of the mental events that had transpired differed from my actual perception of these mental events. This is how I would describe the process of what happened:

The password box came up, and I remembered that the pword for BB is not my normal computer password, and that I should remember to type in the correct password.

In contrast to this, the actual sequence of experience was more like this:

Password box comes up>generic experience of caution connected with typing in password>correct typing in of password.

In other words, the mental event that I would have described as having occurred in a specific, explicit, meaningful form instead occurred as the enactment of an undefined and generic cautious attitude. This attitude was not self-directed towards the situation, but instead occurred within my consciousness of the situation, and by virtue of this could only have been directed towards the situation, that being the only relevant context to which its meaning could apply.

In addition to lacking an inherent reference towards the situation that it ended up aiding, the attitude also lacked the specific meaning that I attributed to it in my verbal reflection. What went through my head was not "you need to remember that your password is wdfg3 not wdfg5," but only a generic attitude of cautious meaningfulness. This attitude was sufficient to bring about the effect of writing the correct password, but that's only because of the way that my attention was focused. My attention gave a specific form to a generic attitude that could have taken other forms in other contexts.

If realizations have the generic form that I am claiming, why do people describe them as ungeneric and as having a meaning of their own? My answer would by people speak about the mind in a way that doesn't accurately reflect the underlying structures and processes. This has been shown in a variety of instances, particularly over the last 50 years. For example, people commonly make a sharp distinction between perception and action that doesn't reflect their actual deep interrelation. In a somewhat similar way, we apply a structure to our thoughts and actions that is not necessarily reflective of their actual nature. The fact that these practices exist is proof of their utility in the situations where they have been developed. Unfortunately, the practices may not work when they're applied to new situations which may demand that our characterizations of thought processes bear a closer resemblance to the underlying structure of biological/phenomenological events.

Any sophisticated study of cognition is a situation in which our "common sense" way of talking about thought processes is detrimental to our attempts of understanding. We may observe people's activity and describe their thought processes in commonsense terms, but these descriptions do not match what's actually going on. The commonsense characterization of thought processes does not reflect the systemic nature of the mind in which certain realizations (or as cog dev researchers like to say, "principles" may be embedded within contexts of activity, and don't necessarily exist as independent, linguistic principles. This may be the case, or it may become the case, later in life. But it does not have to be the case, and I am arguing that it often isn't.

To go beyond this, cognitive scientists must find a way to characterize cognition as something that contains both linguistic/propositional and non-propositional knowledge. The distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge is not sufficient because even there, implicit knowledge is conceptualized as "hidden propositions."

One could object to this by saying "Yes, but the linguistic representation is a convenient way of making sense of the knowledge. A representation cannot be the thing represented. A little corruption (or artistic license) is only the result of the inherently metaphorical nature of all representations." I agree with this in principle, but would argue that it doesn't apply here. If we fail to make the distinction between propositional/implict knowledge a truly important one, then we have no conception of what language is with regards to the mind. To cast implicit (non-propositional) knowledge in propositional terms is to ignore its defining characteristic, and to blur the distinction between cultural and non-cultural ways of thinking. Metaphorical, artistic license is likely to be a necessity, but it cannot be done in a way that prevents the most central aspect of a given concept from showing through.

To restate this in terms specific to the problem at hand: We tend to describe the component thought processes that comprise the cognitive portion of any activity as being individually coherent, propositional entities. To do so is to overlook the fact that human cognition is coherent and propositional in terms of its totality, not in terms of its component parts. The component parts each interact to generate activity that may be described in totality with propositional linguistic terms. This does not mean that the individual parts have these characteristics.