Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

In the fallout of the replication crisis, several authors have pointed to an underlying "theory crisis" in the cognitive sciences, which are argued to lack a core set of shared principles, assumptions, and methodologies. In this essay, I contend that one major barrier to an integrated field stems from a widespread, often implicit ontological commitment among scientists to substance ontology: the metaphysical view that reality is composed of one or more fundamental, static, independent entities. I argue that this metaphysical assumption contributes to the impression that alternative theoretical decompositions of systems are logically incompatible. I consider cognitive, cultural, and historical reasons for the little-challenged dominance of substance thinking in scientific thought, but suggest that the philosophical foundations are shaky. As such, the field may benefit from engaging more deeply with alternative metaphysical traditions that can be grouped as "process ontologies": the family of views that tend to deny the idea of a fundamental level, take existence to be inherently relational, and emphasize that nature is inherently dynamic. I offer a brief survey of Western philosophical traditions that speak to one or more aspects of process thought, but shine a spotlight in particular on useful concepts from Buddhist and Daoist philosophical traditions. I consider three necessary aspects of all living systems that cannot be accounted for within substance ontology, but can by process: (1) fuzzy boundaries, (2) causal loops, and (3) change. I conclude by suggesting that process ontology may help the field of cognitive science progress by dissolving ill-founded debates regarding the fundamental level of analysis, opening a path for a rigorous meta-theory of cognition.

Translating Time: Modelling the (Re)Processing of Emerging Meaning

The choice between substance ontology and process ontology has been haunting our thinking since, at least, Ancient Greek philosophy. The assumption seems that things are the way they are and that one has to put work into changing them. Constancy or substance, in this view, is primary and change (or process) secondary. In translation studies, this plays out in the source text as the stable starting point that has to be transformed into a target text. Based on Peirce’s process semiotics and other process thinkers, I inverse the above argument, arguing that change or process is primary and constancy or substance secondary. Because the universe is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is a process taking form rather than a form changing. Any text is a process that has been constrained materially to be relatively stable, but the stability is not original; it is the effect of semiotic work, translation. My interest is in the semiotic work done to constrain the semiotic process into some form of stability and how one can get to know or understand these constraints. Part of this paper explores some of the implications of process thinking for translation studies. However, this reversal of ground and figure also challenges the modeling of translation. If translation is a process, how do we model it in a static medium such as print? Therefore, I explore the affordances that new computational technology offers for translating static models into dynamic ones.

Phenomenology and the Problem of Universals

This paper argues that the Problem of Universals as derived from Plato, i.e. the question of how abstract universal knowledge is possible and what that knowledge is of, is at the center of Phenomenology. It will be shown how Husserl’s answer to this question, via phenomenological epoche and eidetic variation, orients him primarily within the field of modern philosophy and is open to the standard criticisms of universal knowledge and abstraction offered by Hume and Berkeley. Heidegger, in more overtly recognizing the origin of the problem in Plato and orienting phenomenology directly in relation to the Platonic answer to that problem, is able to achieve a clarity about the modern prejudices of philosophy and so is able to reinvent phenomenology free from the distortions of an unquestioned metaphysics of presence and assumption of the necessity of structure grounded in an unrecognized substance ontology.

The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Xici and Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

This paper, unlike scholars who ascribe to it a copy theory of meaning, argues that the logic of the Xici is best described through “philosophy’s linguistic turn,” specifically Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Cassirer’s concept of the symbol as a pluralistic, constitutive, and functional yet concrete and observable form, is comparable to the symbolic system in the Xici 系辭: xiang 象, gua 卦, yao 爻, and yi 易. Their similarity is due to a shared philosophical orientation: humanism. The characteristics of the Xici—the part-whole (structuralist) relationship typical of correlative cosmology, the simultaneously sensuous and conceptual nature of its symbols, the stress on order as opposed to unity, and the importance of symbols per se—for Cassirer are characteristics that were only possible in European intellectual history after a substance ontology was replaced by a functional one. For Cassirer, a functional ontology is closely associated with a humanism that celebrates creations (i.e., language) of the human mind in determining reality. This humanism is coherent with the intellectual context—Confucian humanism—contemporary with the period of the Xici’s composition. It would thus be inconsistent to concede this humanism to the Xici without also conceding that its understanding of the symbols is akin to that of the linguistic turn. Finally, even regardless of this comparative framework, the Xici runs into a paradox if we read it through a copy theory of meaning, paradoxes that immediately dissolve if we read it through the paradigm of the linguistic turn.

Can Thomism and Pragmatism Cooperate?

The paper explores the possibility of philosophical cooperation between Thomism and American Pragmatism by resurrecting a largely forgotten debate between Wilmon Henry Sheldon and Jacques Maritain. The discussion focuses primarily on two topics: the compatibility between a substance ontology and a pragmatist-evolutionary ontology, and the compatibility between the scholastic and the pragmatist theories of truth. The paper claims that, if we bring Peirce’s version of pragmatism into the picture, cooperation is not only possible but likely to be fruitful.

A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend.