Mechanization of the Mind On the Origins of Cognitive Science

by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, History, Nonfiction, Psychology, Neuroscience

Paperback

First published December 15, 2000

About the author

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) and Professor of Political Science. Dupuy also has served as chair of the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security, and was inducted as an Academician into the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences.

Reviews

[Jelle Bruineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerry Fodor said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science." After having read this book, one might without much exaggeration add to this that in between philosophy and cognitive science, everything happened at the Macy conferences, the regular meetings of the cyberneticians from 1946 to 1953.

I started reading the book to find out what `the viewpoint of the cyberneticians' was, but while reading it became clear to me that this viewpoint itself evolved considerably during the years and that the only common ground between the group's members seemed to be an interest in the mechanization of the mind. The book makes it strikingly clear that the major strands of 20th century cognitive science: cognitivism, connectionism and enactivism developed out of the internal disagreements between this select group of thinkers.

The book is pretty dense, puts the intellectual development of the cybernetics group on the foreground and complements it with a sociological perspective. It will be a very interesting read for anyone interested in how cognitive science came to be as it is today. This book left me with a lot of "what if's", first and foremost what would have happened if cybernetics had left aside the analytic linguistic view of intentionality but accepted Brentano/Husserl style intentionality form the start. In the end, Dupuy convinces that the history of cybernetics is a history of missed encounters. Hopefully, modern cognitive science, built upon the foundations of this small group of thinkers, will not miss these encounters a second time. Having read this book might help a bit.

[Ben Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

How is it that cognitivism is everywhere in modern science, and yet its history is so understudied? How did the minds and machines analogy (e.g. memory, true-false statements, computation) arise in the first place? Tackling a fish-unaware-of-the-water-they-swim-in problem, Dupuy's book reads like a wonderful Sherlock Holmes story for the reader who is already looking for a good detective story. A bit uneven or over-detailed for the passing reader, Dupuy's book does a really wonderful thing for those who care: he covers the early years of cognitive science (i.e. the postwar cybernetics of N. Wiener, Warren McCulloch [his hero], W. Pitts, etc.) and in the process weds a philosopher's ease with the big ideas at stake in scientific methods with a historian's eye for real, grounded events. Like his cast of characters, Dupuy has a synthetic vision of how big ideas combine in ways that can matter. Things happen, and they matter--he gets both. And the way cognitive science forms matters, according to Dupuy, for how we make sense of the world and how our sense of natural laws, in turn, make sense of us and machines, language and symbols, functionalism and philosophy, etc. But he matches his celebration of their largely forgotten intellectual vision with a honest critique of the love of theory that led cybernetics to be forgotten in the first place. Pretty good stuff.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today, "cognitive science" is taken for granted as the way to understand the mind and human behavior. Dupuy traces the history of this modern-day research program back to its origins in cybernetics, following on from the logical and mathematical innovations of Tarski, Turing, Godel and von Neumann around the second world war. There is as much philosophical as historical to chew on here. Besides the cybernetic lineage of cognitive science, we see that a great many interpretive choices stand between an uncritical acceptance of materialist theories of mind and the phenomenon itself. The concepts and categories we use to speak of mind, consciousness, subjectivity -- the whole ontology of mind and action -- are not there to be discovered. They are the interpretations of a human observer. This fact provides the seed for the whole whorl of contemporary problems in the sciences of mind.