Grazer Philosophische Studien

Volume 27, 1986

Thinking about Thinking

The general claim of the present paper is that there may be a very large variety of ways of thinking quite different from one another, not actually in violation of formal canons of consistency, that may vary historically, from community to community or even from context to context. In particular it is argued that, given the present state of theorizing in cognitive science, it is unlikely that any defensible version of the Representational Theory of Mind could preclude a strong or emergent form of concept learning. An argument is presented showing that a Nativist reading of the theory is either undermined by the implications of its own assumptions or is formulably defective with respect to them in a way that may be impossible to remedy — or can only be secured by the fiat of denying this novel sort of concept learning. To account for the puzzles discussed in the paper a new approach to the analysis of thinking is suggested taking as its basis Wittgenstein's notion of 'forms of life' instead of the models favored in current conceptions of cognitive science.