Cognition and Learning: Theory and Practice 

October 5-7, 2007

Abstract

When reflecting intuitively about learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, we have empiricist and externalist intuitions about this process: learning is the transfer of knowledge from the outside (the mind of the teacher or the community, say), to the inside, the mind of the child or learner. The external world, the teacher, and the social community mould a plastic mind, whose contents therefore also reflect the structures of what is external to it and what happened to it. It is rarely denied that the mind is not wholly unstructured to start with. But all that is often conceded in this regard is a ‘general capacity to learn’. But this empiricist epistemology is likely very far removed from the truth - so far that its prevalence in both ordinary intuition and academic circles cries for a sustained sociological investigation. It is possible that learning in the above sense does not exist altogether: the term ‘learning’, in that sense, may not denote any natural process that actually takes place in the mind/brain of a human being. The mind seems to be much more structured than the above view suggests. Human knowledge, like much animal knowledge, falls into a number of core knowledge domains that are of a highly abstract, essentially mathematical form, which, while not deriving from experience, actively structure or organize it, as Kant suggested 200 years ago. The relevant structures, depicting what we may call our ‘algebraic mind’, are subject to empirical investigation. This is an investigation in the design of our mind, which, like other natural objects, simply comes with whatever inherent (as opposed to relational) structures it has. After laying out this rationalist epistemology, which essentially continues a very radical project begun by Descartes, I will, in the second half of the talk, develop some more specific views on the foundational abstractions that do actually structure our experience, reporting on some insights from an ongoing, Amsterdam-based project on the origins of alethic competence in humans. Of particular interest is the language-dependence of the abstractions in question. There is strong evidence that representations of time, space, and number are not unique to humans. A more controversial claim is that the architecture of the human clause directly incorporates some of these core systems of knowledge that we share with non-humans. Thus, the human clause pairs spatial and temporal information in its nominal and verbal layers, respectively. The question is what language has added to these core elements of knowledge, and I will suggest that the left periphery of the clause encodes elements that are likely specific to humans, namely the ability to supply a proposition with an assertoric force (truth value). More specifically, our ability to make judgements of truth directly depends on the build-up of structural complexity in the language faculty, and cannot be separated from it. When we discern constitutive elements, moreover, which flow into the construction of a judgement of truth, we find essential cuts in the architecture of the language faculty that I argue force us to re-direct our inquiry into the origins of truth and reference in language (or, technically speaking, of the syntax-semantics interface). In particular, we need to distinguish conceptual from intentional layers of information in the human clause, and see that the latter kind of information is mapped from the former. If so, reference, an intentional notion, is not the origin of our basic conceptual ability: we need to grasp meanings or concepts first, before we can refer or judge the truth. This has the philosophically interesting consequence that, contrary to what 100 years of externalist philosophies have suggested (and mainstream philosophy suggests today), reference is derivative. It does not lie at the beginning of the construction of meaning, but at the end. What notion of linguistic meaning this leaves us with, and which metaphysical consequences it entails, will be the subject of my final reflections.