Abstract
The “systematicity argument” has been used to argue for a classical cognitive architecture (Fodor in The Language of Thought. Harvester Press, London, 1975, Why there still has to be a language of thought? In Psychosemantics, appendix. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 135–154, 1987; Fodor and Pylyshyn in Cognition 28:3–71, 1988; Aizawa in The systematicity arguments. Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, 2003). From the premises that cognition is systematic and that the best/only explanation of systematicity is compositional structure, it concludes that cognition is to be explained in terms of symbols (in a language of thought) and formal rules. The debate, with connectionism, has mostly centered on the second premise-whether an explanation of systematicity requires compositional structure, which neural networks do not to exhibit (for example, Hadley and Hayward, in Minds and Machines, 7:1–37). In this paper, I will take issue with the first premise. Several arguments will be deployed that show that cognition is not systematic in general; that, in fact, systematicity seems to be related to language. I will argue that it is just verbal minds that are systematic, and they are so because of the structuring role of language in cognition. A dual-process theory of cognition will be defended as the best explanation of the facts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aizawa, K. (2003). The systematicity arguments. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
Anderson, J. (1993). Rules of the mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Barceló, L. L., Coromines-Murtra, B., & Gomila, A. (2012). Syntactic trees and small-world networks. The ontogeny of syntactic networks of three different first languages. Dutch, German and Spanish. Submitted.
Berry, D., & Dienes, Z. (1993). Implicit learning: Theoretical and empirical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Broadbent, D. E. (1971). Decision and stress. New York: Academic Press.
Carruthers, P. (2005). The architecture of the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheng, K. (1986). A purely geometric module in the rat’s spatial representation. Cognition, 23, 149–178.
Costello, F., & Keane, M. T. (2000). Efficient creativity: Constraints on conceptual combination. Cognitive Science, 24, 299–349.
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, J. G. (2009). Complements enable representation of the contents of false beliefs: The evolution of a theory of a theory of mind. In S. Foster-Cohen (Ed.), Language acquisition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dennett, D. (1993). Learning and labeling. Mind and Language, 8, 540–548.
Dienes, Z., & Perner, J. (1999). A Theory of implicit and explicit knowledge. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 735–808.
Estes, Z., & Gluksberg, S. (2000). Interactive property attribution in concept combination. Memory & Cognition, 28, 28–34.
Evans, J., & Frankish, K. (Eds.). (2009). In two minds: Dual processes and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. New York: Psychology Press.
Fodor, J. (1975). The language of thought. Linden: Harvester Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Why there still has to be a language of thought? In Psychosemantics, appendix (pp. 135–154). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts. Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fodor, J. (2008). LOT2. The language of thought revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J., & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture. Cognition, 28, 3–71.
Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gentner, D. (2003). Why are we so smart. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gómez, J. C. (2004). Apes, monkeys, children, and the growth of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gomila, A. (2001). La perspectiva de segunda persona: Mecanismos mentales de la intersubjetividad. Contrastes, 6, 65–86.
Gomila, A. (2011). The language of thought: Still a “game in town”? Teorema, 30, 145–155.
Gomila, A. (2012). Verbal Minds: Language and the Architecture of Cognition. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Gomila, A., & Calvo, P. (2008). Directions for an embodied cognitive science: Towards an integrated approach. In P. Calvo & A. Gomila (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach (pp. 1–25). London: Elsevier.
Hadley, R. F., & Hayward, M. B. (1997). Strong semantic systematicity from Hebbian connectionist learning. Minds and Machines, 7, 1–37.
Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1994). A geometric process for spatial reorientation in young children. Nature, 370, 57–59.
Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity and development: The case of spatial reorientation. Cognition, 61, 195–232.
Hermer-Vázquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual-task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3–36.
Kahneman. (2002). Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. Nobel laureate acceptance speech. http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-lecture.html.
Karmiloff, K., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2002). Pathways to language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kello, C., Brown, G., Ferrer i Cancho, R., Holden, J., Linkenkaer-Hansen, K., Rhodes, T., et al. (2010). Scaling laws in cognitive sciences. Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 14(5), 223–232.
Lupyan, G. (2008a). The conceptual grouping effect: Categories matter (and named categories matter more). Cognition, 108, 566–577.
Lupyan, G. (2008b). From chair to “chair”: A representational shift account of object labeling effects on memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 348–369.
Lupyan, G., Rakison, D. H., & McClelland, J. L. (2007). Language is not just for talking: Redundant labels facilitate learning of novel categories. Psychological Science, 18, 1077–1083.
Lupyan, G., Thompson-Schill, S. L., & Swingley, D. (2010). Conceptual penetration of visual processing. Psychological Science, 21, 682–691.
McLaughlin, B. (2009). Systematicity Redux. Synthèse, 170, 251–274.
Miller, G. (1956). The magical number 7, plus or minus 2: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
O’Keefe, J., & Burgess, N. (1996). Geometric determinants of the place fields of hippocampal neurons. Nature, 381, 425–428.
Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K., & Povinelli, D. J. (2008). Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 109–178.
Premack, D. (2004). Is language the key to human intelligence? Science, 303, 318–320.
Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 219–235.
Reddy, V. (2008). How infants know minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schacter, D. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 501–518.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3–22.
Sloman, S. A. (2002). Two systems of reasoning. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases (pp. 379–396). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spelke, E. (2003). What makes us smart? Core knowledge and natural language. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind. Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 277–312). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Spivey, M. (2007). The continuity of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanovich, K. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project FFI2009-13416-C02, and by Fundación Séneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia-II PCTRM 2007-10 (Proy. 11944/PHCS/09). Special thanks go to Paco Calvo for making possible the San José meeting where all this began.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gomila, A., Travieso, D. & Lobo, L. Wherein is Human Cognition Systematic?. Minds & Machines 22, 101–115 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9277-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9277-z