if you do have questions here are some
places you can ask your questions after
the talking outside after lunch she's
going to be on the fourth floor across
all around the philosophy department
probably around three to four o'clock
you can ask your questions from for 15
to 6 o'clock that's going to be at da
Vinci's with a lot be clubbin there's
reception for faculty to tonight at 8:17
hello to those of you interested in
asking any questions
Patricia Kuchar is currently a full
professor of philosophy at the
University of California at San Diego
she is held various positions at the
University of Vermont University of
Michigan MIT and Minnesota she's written
important articles in philosophy of
psychology history of philosophy and
various other fields she completed a
1990 book called Kant's transcendental
psychology and she has a book that's
just recently come out with MIT press
called Freud's dream a complete
interdisciplinary science of mind
please welcome Patricia pitcher she's
going to talk to us today
I have been able to find the microphone
so please let me know if you can't hear
me up at the top I let me just before I
start reading at you tell you what I
want to try to do I don't know how many
of you have views about Freud and I
don't know how many of you have views
about my other topic which is
interdisciplinary cognitive science but
let me just say a little bit about the
relation between these two and then I'll
get on to the paper many many
universities have come around to the
view that all of the mental sciences
ought to be treated together and so what
you ought to have are interdisciplinary
programs and in some places for example
at the University of California San
Diego actually an interdisciplinary
department of cognitive science will you
bring together all of the different
sciences that relate to mental things so
you bring together brain physiology and
psychology and anthropology and
philosophy of psychology which has been
concerned with traditional questions
about the nature of the mind and you put
all these people together and let them
learn from each other and that is the
way we are at last going to make some
progress on trying to understand this
very difficult and complex thing the
human mind almost everybody has
supported this view that the way to
really conquer the mind is for all the
disciplines to get together and work
together and share information so that
we can understand the mind in terms of
its implications for philosophy in terms
of its social relations we can
understand it psychologically we can
understand it physiologically I agree
with this idea that we ought to sort of
get together and study the mind from all
these different aspects but what my
paper is about is some of the dangers of
an interdisciplinary approach as I said
I don't know how aware you are of all
this
interdisciplinary approach these days is
for example a great way to get a grant
all you have to do is put
interdisciplinary on your grant
application and Washington will throw
money at you because everybody is
convinced that this is the way to go I
to think it is the way to go but I think
there are a lot of dangers of doing
things this way and what I try to do is
use lloyd as a historical example so
that we can look back and see when this
same thing was attempted before because
what I will argue is that Freud too
tried to put all of these things
together he tried to use biological
knowledge anthropological knowledge
psychiatric knowledge put all this
together and come and come up with a
sort of complete theory of human
mentality the Freud I will present to
you is very different from the Freud you
were probably used to I'm not going to
talk about dreams I am going to talk
about sex but you'll see I'm going to
talk about sex in such a way that it
presents sex as a sort of theoretical
matter that Freud was certainly not a
dirty old man worried about sex he was
worried about sex for highly theoretical
reasons and I want to try to show you
sort of the structure of his theory how
all these different disciplines work
together to present really a very strong
theory it's not for nothing that
Freudianism was one of the dominant
theories of the 20th century it was a
very good theory that drew strength from
many different areas so I'm going to try
to present the interdisciplinary
foundations of psychoanalysis
as first of all what made the theory
good but then in the second half of my
paper I'm going to suggest that this
particular interdisciplinary approach
that Freud used was actually the source
of his downfall this is why this is
supposed to have some lessons for the
way we do interdisciplinary theories
today that because Freud's theory was
interdisciplinary he got into all sorts
of problems with it okay so the
who really has two points wanted to
present a reinterpretation of food I
think it's a sympathetic interpretation
of Farid although I'll end up arguing
that for its theory really is defunct at
this point because the theories on which
he built it collapsed but the second
point is just to stand back and look at
what happens when you try to integrate
wood from lots of different areas what
are some of the dangers that are
involved they would sort of understand
what I'm going to try to do ok let me
get started a bit because we haven't got
a lot of time most afraid's contemporary
critics and admirers share a common
picture of the evidential structure of
psychoanalysis the support for this
theory came from dream and patient data
for it developed his theories by trying
to understand and relieve neurotic
symptoms so neuroses were sort of
foundation and by interpreting his own
and patient dreams further the general
consensus --is insofar as his theories
could be confirmed could be established
the confirmation came in the form of
cures of neuroses and insights into the
otherwise unintelligible material of
dreams this interpretive consensus is
hardly surprising
Freud faulted this picture that he just
took it from the patients and just took
it from the dreams is that an empiricist
view of theory construction about as
often as George Bush pays homage to the
principles of conservatism and with
exactly the same level of commitment
Bush is a pragmatist and a conciliator
but he believes that he ought to be a
conservative and so declares that he
holds the true faith Freud was a
speculative theorist and a master system
builder as I will argue but he believed
that scientific theories ought to be
simply a matter of inference from the
data so he claimed preposterous Lee I
think that the whole edifice of
psychoanalysis was simply built on what
he learned from his patients
the truth is almost exactly the opposite
Freud did not develop his doctrines from
the couch or the bed he constructed
psychoanalysis by synthesizing a large
number of diverse but fundamentally
compatible theories from different
biological and social sciences in a
simple coherent and comprehensive
account of mental life this was why his
theory was so successful because it held
out the promise of a unified theory of
mentality one that ranged from the
highest intellectual attainments
including art socialization and morality
social organization and morality to the
most bizarre phenomena of dreaming and
madness all grounded in an apparently
firm biological foundation if Boyd's
bold synthesis of nineteenth-century
social and biological science was the
secret of his success it was also a
major cause of his spectacular failure
now given current efforts to construct
interdisciplinary theories in cognitive
science the time seems apt for examining
this first attempt to integrate the
mental and the biological sciences we
can learn from Freud's mistakes because
although some of them were foolish a
number was subtle and are much easier to
spot with the advantage of hindsight I
have two goals in this talk first I will
briefly explain how psychoanalysis
integrated results and approaches from
different disciplines in order to
convince you that this really was an
instance of interdisciplinary Theory
construction he built it out of all
these different pieces then I will take
up three of Freud's more instructive and
costly errors actually given the time I
may have to cut that to two in each case
I will try to present examples of
contemporary work in cognitive science
where these contemporary theorists
appear to be following in Freud's
missteps I'm going to take a couple of
examples from different schools within
cognitive science but
then the main example I want to use at
the end is a fault and interdisciplinary
reasoning that I think actually
encompasses everybody in the
interdisciplinary cognitive science
community all right let me just talk
about how psychoanalysis was put
together out of different disciplines
Freud developed the major hypotheses of
psychoanalysis by integrating results
and approaches of at least eight
different fields I am NOT going to talk
about all of these what I'm going to do
is just present a couple of relevant
results from some of these fields simply
to illustrate how Freud incorporated and
related work in various disciplines in a
general theory of the development and
functioning of mental life from
neuroanatomy and neurophysiology he
borrowed two discoveries during the
1890s it became apparent that the
nervous system was made up of discrete
neurons which passed some form of
electrical or chemical energy among them
second he also borrowed from
neurophysiology the idea that neural
matter was reflexive reflexive means
energy comes in it runs around it and
then it has to get discharged in some
sort of motor activity okay all right so
he followed the idea that neurons were
discrete and that neural matter just
acted as a reflex Freud also adopted two
leading methodological assumptions from
psychology the first will be probably
familiar to a lot of you associationism
this is the view that many mental
phenomena can be explained by appeal to
associations formed between ideas when
they are experienced together so the
idea is that if you experience two ideas
together then they will be somehow
cemented together in your mind an
association ism has been a very standard
principle of explanation in psychology
for several hundred years but there was
also a second and very
different psychological approach that he
used and this was that the best way to
understand this very complicated mental
apparatus was to decompose it into
separate functional units these units
didn't necessarily have any particular
location in the brain but you wanted to
talk about a unit for example that dealt
with speech a unit that dealt with
comprehension and so forth so this idea
was that you decompose the the brain
into functional sorry the mind into
functional units and you didn't claim
necessarily that these had a specific
biological location there you certainly
hoped eventually you could find that by
the way that's exactly the status that
Freud claimed for the ego the eard and
the super-ego these were functional
divisions who knew exactly where they
were in the brain might not be able to
say let me now turn to psychiatry for it
was of course a practicing psychiatrist
and psychiatry contributed three crucial
hypotheses to psychoanalysis most
importantly the view that neurotic
behavior could be the product of ideas
of which the subject was unaware Freud
was not the first person to say this
many psychiatrists believed that what
was wrong with neurotics was that they
were bugged by unconscious ideas besides
making a connection between neuroses and
unconscious ideas many psychiatrists
believe that disorders such as hysteria
had a sexual origin of course Asteria
comes from the womb right there's no
secret about the link between hysteria
and sexuality finally there was work on
aphasia you'll note aphasia is that sort
of inability to speak caused by mental
reasons and we're going to face a song
which by the way Freud did himself
implied that ideas were represented in
the brain in a complex way let me show
you
that we do representing 12 you can
recognize the word and pronounce it then
you have to store this sort of
information somewhere
now what aphasia studies show and this
turns out to be critical in fruits
theory of how we have unconscious ideas
let me now turn to a much less familiar
science and one that you're not going to
be able to take seriously because you
think this just aku's these days in
Cosmopolitan magazine but this was the
science of sexology which was a serious
science in the 19th century at the end
of the 19th century in the beginning of
the 20th many gifted naturalist sand
theoreticians made a very serious effort
to fathom the varieties and foundations
of sexual behavior by the way as far as
I know the descriptions of sort of as
was called in those days sexual
deviations that has never been rejected
and this is very good
scientific work before he borrowed an
enormous amount from these guys and
never acknowledged which is why Freud is
thought to be the guy who introduced sex
into psychiatrist not true at all he
borrowed from people like Kraft
everything and Havelock Ellis and and
just didn't say so I want to and and
they had done a vast amount of work on
sexuality I want to mention just three
contributions of the sexologist and
you'll recognize these as Freudian okay
but they aren't Freudian they come from
these other guys the discovery of
infantile sexuality this was quite a
broadly accepted hypothesis there was
also the view of that there were stages
of sexual development this was again
widely held
wasn't just Freud's idea finally there
was this idea that there was no one
sexual instinct rather what you had was
human beings and also from animals and
that we get some of our instincts from
the animals and so just to give you one
example the idea was you could explain
some odd sexual practices by noting that
in animals from when we get all these
instincts that sex is sometimes followed
by cannibalism and this was supposed to
explain some of the odd sexual things
that were okay you had this notion of
component instincts and then there was
supposed to be all a happy ending is
what you've got all these really odd
components going on in you but
miraculously through maturation and
social conditioning all of this works
out they all kind of get knitted
together into standard adult
heterosexual behavior that's when
everything goes correctly okay it goes
to come out like this all right let me
now turn to anthropology and sociology
just very briefly anthropology's
contribution to psychoanalysis was not
any particular result but a sort of
research program something that they
thought was very important 19th century
anthropologists assumed that the human
mind could be adequately understood only
by going back to the minds of primitive
ancestors and tracing lines of
development now how are you going to get
back to the minds of ancient ancestors
we're going to do this by studying
artifacts of old civilizations also
contemporary savages that is people who
were outside the loop of Western culture
and children why did you study so-called
savages the idea was that since they
were outside of Western culture they'd
actually be very like the first humans
that they tell you what primitive humans
were like why did you study children
because everybody at this time was a
recapitulation estreet capitulation
it says that ontogeny is the rapid
recapitulation of phylogeny just in case
that didn't make any sense to you what
that means is as a child is growing up
that's what I'm talking is he or she
goes through all the stages that the
whole human race went through through
history that's phylogeny so ontogeny
each individual lifetime we capitulate
phylogeny the lifetime of the human race
and so the idea is if you look at kids
you can find out what primitive people
would like having two sons I think
that's actually more to this theory than
people say anymore but anyway this was
why children was so important all right
the final major contributor to
psychoanalytic theory I will discuss is
evolutionary evolutionary biology is
everywhere one of the reasons that it
was so important in the developments of
Kurds thought was that it contributed to
everything else evolutionary thinking
was what led psychologists to look at
four different stages of development
it's what led anthropologists by the way
19th century anthropology has always
been called since the 19th century
evolutionary anthropology because it was
so convinced that the only way to
understand people is to go back to the
origins and see how it all happened
I should say sociology also adopted the
evolutionary mode of explanation to
account for some fancy social behavior
you trace that back to its origin
allegedly so something like religion we
tried to trace that back to how
primitive humans came to have religious
beliefs and eventually you wanted to try
to trace that all back to animals those
are some funny genealogies of morality
and religion produced as a result of
this but this was a standard
intellectual project the theory of
evolution also entered psychoanalysis
directly Roy believed that although
other theorists might posit instincts at
will you could just kind of talk about
this instinct or that instinct that
evolutionary biology really only
sanctioned
to self preservative and sexual
instincts that's what he gets out of
Darwin that there are really two
instincts self-preservation and sex and
that's why he's always got two forces
going in his theory besides that he was
a committed recapitulation us to the end
of his life even after the theory was
gone and a committed Lamarckian you know
what Lamarckian ism is it's the idea
that a quieted characteristics can be
inherited you probably heard about
LaMarcus the villain in the debate
between Darwin and Lamarque I about the
giraffes who keeps stretching night and
then they somehow all that stretching
during their lifetime allowed their
their kids to their little chew asked to
have bigger necks longer necks and Freud
accepted all of this all right what I
want now I want to do is try to
illustrate how far it actually
constructed his theories by putting all
this stuff together by drawing
connections among these various results
and approaches one of the most
attractive features of psychoanalysis
was it's apparently firm biological
foundations Freud assumed that neural
matter functioned as a reflex now you
all remember what a reflex is right
energy comes in it goes whirring around
and out it goes through some kind of
motor discharge but notice on the reflex
model of the neural system you need
something to supply the juice where are
you getting the stimulus that is then
activating the mind and then getting
discharged until you acquire energy
either externally or internally to
propel the system now his second
biological assumption was that the
internal sources of the energy to drive
the nervous system were either self
preservative or sexual instincts and
largely sexual problem is that the self
preservative instincts don't do anything
interesting they just leave you behave
normally okay so the ones he focused on
with the sexual instincts all right as
you get libido theory libido theory is
simply the claim that the neural system
was partly driven and largely influenced
by instinctual sexual drives
now notice that this theory did not
simply borrow results from
neurophysiology and evolutionary biology
it showed how seemingly distinct and
well-established facts could be related
in an elegant and simple story a
reflexive nervous system needed sources
of energy sexual selection was a crucial
force in evolution you needed sex in
evolution all psychological forces had
to have a physiological basis so Freud
reasoned that gonads and other internal
organs secreted a substance into the
nervous system libido that both provided
the nervous energy and constituted the
physiological mechanism by which
sexuality influenced behavior and so
ultimately the course of evolution so he
puts this together in a way that really
works now let me turn to Freud's central
so called clinical hypothesis which was
sexual content what I want to argue
about this as well he didn't get this by
looking at patients he got this because
everybody was saying the same thing all
the different Sciences were pointing
towards this all right now as already
noted psychiatry had actually suggested
both halves of these of this thing that
is that it linked neuroses with
unconscious ideas and it had linked
neuroses with sex okay so he gets this
out of psychiatry but then he actually
can increase the plausibility of it by
drawing on other Sciences so this is how
the aphasia work sort of influences and
led him to a much more elegant theory
Freud assumed that in order for
something to become conscious it had to
be associated with speech but now
aphasia had told you that words could be
cut off that that this that the word
part of an idea could be simply cut off
from the idea it would lose the idea
would lose its word representation so he
appealed to aphasia to actually explain
how ideas could be
unconscious then he appealed to sexology
which had pointed out that sex was not
just forbidden indeed it was forbidden
in thought and word as well he puts
these two theoretical support to this
basic idea and reflexes to actually
explaining how this unconscious sexual
idea is going to produce a neurotic
symptom he borrows Association ism like
simply this idea that two things which
you experience together get linked up
then he borrows the reflex hypothesis
all right energy comes in and it's got
to go someplace but if you if the word
is if the idea is unconscious it can't
issue in a word which is also a motor
activity like say the word
it just gets bottled up in there so by
drawing
a very elegant account of why this was
true let me show you this in one simple
example in the Doric case history he
explained why Dora had a sort of
hysterical cough like she coughed all
the time she's I was clearing her throat
he said all right I can explain this
what happened was once when she was out
walking she experienced a sexual trauma
at the time when she was very short of
breath and coughing what happens is that
then set up an association all right
whenever she then has a sexual idea and
libido is flowing into the system the
idea cannot result in behavior or speech
because it's kind of cut off okay and
now you've got this energy sitting there
in the system what's it going to do well
it flows to the Associated idea of
coughing she then coughs and that
discharges the energy this is not wild
speculation that should be true so what
I'm trying to suggest is even the
so-called clinical hypotheses he
actually has a very theoretical story to
tell and the way to understand this is
that he just puts all this stuff
together all right let me just skip
ahead here a little bit the idea that
neurotic behavior was caused by
unconscious ideas with sexual content
may have entered psychiatry as a sort of
humble clinical hypothesis but by the
time Freud gets through with it
you've got this elaborate theory of how
all this is actually working
and the point I really wanted to make
with all this is he doesn't just grab
stuff willy-nilly from different
theories he shows how all of this can be
integrated and so try to produce a
coherent and complete theory of the
causes of abnormal
and normal mental processing now I want
to try to give some account of what his
global theory looked like how all of
this comes out in a total theory and to
do this I want to end this sort of first
part of my talk by taking up the oldest
question about psychoanalysis why sex
why is sex at the center of this we've
already actually considered a major
reason the elegant fit between the needs
of a reflexive nervous system and the
idea that there are sexual instincts
which was offered by evolutionary
biology beyond psychiatry and
evolutionary biology anthropology and
sociology also testified to the
importance of sex in human life both
assumed that marriage was the central
social institution and as one well-known
sociologist put it marriage itself is
rooted in the family or dropping the
euphemism marriage is rooted in sex all
right so you've got marriage as the
pivotal social institution but marriage
itself depends on sex so all of your
explanations of social phenomena are
going to try to tie back to this further
sexual factors convincingly met the
methodological standard of the 19th
century social sciences which was any
explanation you had these kind of fancy
mental achievements had to be tied back
down to something that we were we shared
with animals and sex was the obvious
sort of idea and that finally Ford was
led to see the advantages of sexual
theories by work in sexology itself
like many 19th century theorists
sexologists debated whether sexual
behavior was a matter of heredity or
environment everybody talked about this
is it just heredity or is it the
environment but Freud did not choose
sides in this rather he synthesized the
best work in both traditions those who
claimed he was heredity those who
claimed it was environment as a result
he accumulated a huge body of material
relating sex to an impressive variety of
human conditions when he considered this
material in light of the ideas of ever
Neri biology psychiatry sociology and
anthropology just considered he reached
his grand unifying theory of human
mentality all mental phenomena from
dreams and madness to religion art and
social mores could be understood as the
expression of sexual instincts as
modified by human history on one hand it
would have we've changed and passed all
these things on and individual heredity
and environment on the other so
absolutely everything is going to be
explained by going back to sex
however Freud did not how did he get
there he did not get to this theory by
extrapolating from his patient sexual
difficulties to a pervasive role through
sexuality in human life he focused on
the sexual aspects of his patients lives
and dreams because many different
Sciences had stressed the importance of
sex sex became the keystone of
psychoanalysis let me just show you how
I think this okay so sex is at the
center because this was the most
promising bridge between the biological
and the mental sciences and food yearned
for what he called metaphysical
knowledge that is a complete
understanding of human mentality from
its biological basis to these these most
abstract things about art and morality
alright so this is what Freud's picture
looked like besides illustrating the
introduced Oakland era character of
psychoanalysis I hope that this diagram
and the preceding discussion also
provides some sense of why Freud
believed he was on the threshold of a
major advance you know all of Ford's
critics complain that this guy was an
egomaniac
just believed he was right he had to be
right and he never could face the idea
that he was wrong well you know if
you've got this many different Sciences
agreeing with you we might all think we
were right and if he could show how they
all fit together in a sort of unified
picture it is enough to make you think
that you were right all right this is
why he believed that he he was gonna be
right and it was or we were finally
going to get a theory of human mentality
by forging connections among recent
developments in the various relevant
Sciences psychoanalysis opened up the
possibility of a systematic theory of
mentality that did away with
scientifically dubious distinctions
between mind and body humans and other
animals all right so far I've talked
about the positive role of
interdisciplinary thinking and for its
theory I now want to turn to the darker
side of the story the mistakes that have
helped to make psychoanalysis the sort
of textbook case with philosophy of
science of a pseudoscience I'm gonna
start with the biological foundations
let me just tell the story briefly look
the problem is everything goes wrong
okay
he's got libido theory and so he's
waiting for endocrinologist to find
libido where is it and he waits and he
waits and what endocrinologist people
who study hormonal systems tell him is
hormones don't work that way they do not
supply energy to the body they do not
supply it to the nervous system he kind
of ignores this but the mistake I want
to talk about is that he ignores
developments in neurophysiology Freud
had developed this reflex model of the
mind by extrapolating each little neuron
according to neurophysiology took on
energy and discharged it to the next
neuron he extrapolated from that picture
to the entire nervous system the nervous
system took on energy and then it had to
get rid of it okay
this picture turned out to be wrong and
he was told it was wrong
in 1906 a very famous physiologist Col
Charles Sherrington published a book
called the integrative action of the
nervous system in this book what he
argued was well you may have thought
nineteenth-century physiology got us a
very long way but it didn't solve any of
the hard problems fine we got reflexes
what we want to understand is how all
these little reflexes get integrated
into smooth physical and mental behavior
what you had to understand was not the
individual reflexes but how they were
integrated as the title of the book
suggests in other words what Sherrington
was saying to Freud was look you think
you can just go from the reflex
character of an individual neuron to the
reflex character the whole mental system
but you can't one of the hardest
problems facing neurophysiology today is
to try to understand how starting with
reflexes we actually get integrated
action Freud simply ignored this warning
and what happened was in the next twenty
years people simply didn't really
abandon reflexes but they took on a
fundamentally different approach to the
nervous system and by 1930 it was clear
that Freud's basic assumption the
nervous system could only function by
having something flow into it was wrong
that in fact the nervous system had its
own sources of energy it didn't have to
sit around waiting for libido to drive
it now what I want you to realize is
that this was a disaster it it led him
to all sorts of problems
look Freud's central explanations with
the existence of dreams and for neuroses
why did we dream well because all this
libidos
who's coming into the nervous system
causing an overload of energy and at
night when you you go what's it done God
this energy just kind of wild around the
brain okay and let you have all sorts of
dreams why was it neurotics had tics and
paralysis
well libido is dumping all this stuff
into the nervous system the ideas are
unconscious so you can't talk about them
you don't act get all this excess newest
energy in there and that's what leads to
paralysis final blow to discharge or
leads to neurotic symptoms
now if the nervous system doesn't get
this stuff from the outside then it
hasn't got a discharge it what I want
you to realize is once the reflex model
of the nervous system was questioned his
central theories fell apart because you
his explanation of dreams and madness
which would you know his to start of
cases of what he could explain created
on the idea that the nervous system was
burdened by all this extra energy coming
in but if the nervous system doesn't
work that way if it's just got its own
energy and just goes along then he's got
no explanations for dreams or madness
and he's in bad shape
he cannot explain two things he claimed
he could explain all right now Freud
continued to do this what I want to
suggest is that these very same mistakes
are going on today I'm not going to talk
in detail about this example but what I
want you to show you is that what's
going on in this example of fluoride
taking this very seriously is that what
keep going it's all that workout he's
got more faith than the experts
Sherrington is telling him look you know
there are really a lot of problems here
yes we found reflexes Bo but the whole
system can't possibly operate that way
so just happily goes on leaving this one
of the major problems I think for any
interdisciplinary research program is
that you borrow results from somebody
else and then you sure that those guys
are going to keep going programming
right and they don't always they shift
courses and then you're left high and
dry right you'd assume that this is all
gonna work out you go on assuming this
if problems come up you just say oh well
that's just a little problem it'll all
work out someday I'm not gonna worry
about it but it doesn't it's just too
easy to have more faith that another
discipline that's not your home
discipline is going to get it right that
whatever little problems there on
physiology they'll all just be worked
out and that just doesn't happen and I
think this was a mistake that Freud made
and I think it's a mistake that others
have made because of the shortness of
kind of want to skip another mistake
that I think is another problem and get
to what I think is the worst problem for
interdisciplinary theory construction
and indeed the worst problem that Freud
ran into because I think this is sort of
the most important lesson for
interdisciplinary theory construction
that I want to draw this is Freud's most
pervasive error and this is what led to
the real disaster I think as Freud was
coming to intellectual maturity a number
of diverse Sciences agreed on what an
ideal theory of the human mind or brain
should look like the mind
was the brain and the human mind brain
like those of other animals came to have
its current properties through a long
process of evolution involving both
physical
and social environments through these
sort of interactions with the physical
and social environment the lowly human
animal endowment came evolved and was
changed in two fundamental ways the
organs of thought would you actually
think with evolved and the experiences
of previous humans were passed on to
their descendants either by some unknown
process of social evolution we don't
quite know how one society passes on to
their children their past customs but
through some unknown process of this or
by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics through Lamarckian
inheritance if ancient ancestors learned
to fear fire because you know because
they got burned then we would just start
feeling fire without actually having
having experience if ancient ancestors
got involved with incest and had all
sorts of problems with incest then
current people would just feel incest
automatically because they would inherit
that experience okay so that what you
what you had here was a general view
about how to understand current human
mentality understand how the organs of
thought evolved and understand how
social life civilization evolved
hence it seemed growth fruitful and
necessary to approach the study of the
mind brain into sort of complimentary
ways anatomy and physiology wood fat on
the current neural wiring and
evolutionary biology sociology child
psychology anthropology historical
linguistics would trace the lengthy
history of human mentality given this
dramatic agreement among the sciences
and their potential for mutual
enlightenment that one of these guys can
enlighten the other it was I think
natural for Freud to hope that a unified
and tolerably complete story of the
origins of human mentality could be told
you actually the faculty well we started
you know
and then we learned from one thing after
another we we get more and more
sophisticated and then you know finally
you can do the field on your show right
because you've got all these social
accoutrements and you can handle
anything that comes up I'm not quite
sure that they would have believed that
your ancient ancestors could have given
you automatic answers to silly questions
but still they gave you lots and lots of
stuff right and so now you know you're
this wonderfully sophisticated creature
and now we understand why human
mentality works I hope you can see it
there was some sense to this project I
mean human social life is very
complicated and it's not at all crazy to
think that the way to understand it is
by tracing it back from the origins to
present day however the problem is this
whole picture of agreement among the
science is all trooping along in the
same direction all mutually enlightening
each other all presenting this complete
theory of human mentality the problem is
that this agreement among the sciences
had a peculiar source to see the issue
clearly let me just talk about a more
limited set of disciplines than the
eight that I showed you before the
agreement in approach among evolutionary
sociology evolutionary anthropology and
evolutionary biology was no accident
the former disciplines sociology and
anthropology began with the assumption
that the biological theory of evolution
was correct and ought to be the
benchmark for work in the social
sciences further even though historical
linguistics predated both Lamarck and
Darwin like the theory of evolution
itself it was very much a product of
19th century historicism all the
theories in the 19th century were
historical this is actually one of the
reasons why Darwin's theory of evolution
caught on because people expected that
kind of explanation how you understand
something is you look at it historically
trace things back to its origins that's
not at all the way science is conducting
that is conducted now so it seems
strange - it's not at all a crazy idea
biological evolution then seemed
attractive in part because it was a
historical doctrine when it emerged as a
major scientific achievement it
reinforced the pre-existing historical
predilections of contemporary theorists
and also created a much tighter
correspondence among the sciences among
the social and the biological sciences
towards the end of the 19th century
different Sciences appeared to be
converging on a unified approach to the
problem of mentality because they were
all being guided by the same dominant
intellectual force basic historicism
dramatically invigorated by and made
specific is that their agreement that
they're all pointing in the same
direction doesn't matter for anything
you cannot assume as Freud plainly did
that the fact that biology under these
circumstances agreements of the sign
among the sciences could not be credited
to their correct but independent
depictions of a common reality they all
agreed not because they were all giving
you pictures of the same reality they
all agreed because they were all being
led by the same intellectual force
understandably Freud did not appreciate
this point a devout evolutionist and
system builder when he looked for ways
of integrating the disciplines and when
he found them he did not ask about he
didn't recognize their common ancestry
or questioned their source but rather
took the agreement among the different
disciplines as evidence that a unified
theory of the mental was possible along
basic evolutionary lines now the quick
moral here for cognitive science is that
as the predominance of evolutionary
explanations led Freud to believe that
the time was ripe to integrate the
different disciplines so the
proliferation of computational
approaches is exactly
what is driving cognitive science today
it's that all of these disciplines agree
on computational approaches it is that
which has led to the contemporary ideal
of a unified cognitive science let me
just skip here the story of the rise of
computationalism you've had very
important formal results in the thirties
with touring in church then you actually
built computers and everyone could see
the computers could solve incredibly
difficult problems at great speed
what happened historically is that
various disciplines then went over to a
computational approach first psychology
in the early 60s became computation list
then various other disciplines followed
the same route 30 years later right now
the proliferation of computational
approaches in the mental sciences is as
obvious as your nearest University
catalog I didn't look at Iowa State's
catalog I'll tell you about UCS DS
catalog we offer courses in
computational psychology computational
anthropology computational linguistics
and computational neuroscience I'm not
making this up I've taken this right out
of the catalog now look the parallel
with psychoanalysis is obvious and
painful Lloyd was confident that a
complete interdisciplinary theory of
mind was within his grasp because he was
fooled by this sort of spurious
agreement of evidence produced by El
evolutionary historicism all the
sciences are green but they're not
agreeing because they're all looking at
the same reality they're all agreeing
because roughly they're all drinking at
the same bars right they're all agreeing
on Darwinian evolutionary theories and
the problem is that's just what we're
doing today all right that we all have
the same intellectual heritage and we
all do drink at the same bars all right
and so the worry is that contemporary
cognitive science all of us in the
cognitive science community are making
exactly the same mistake for the
agreement in results and the agreement
in approach
is not a matter of independent sciences
converging on a common reality but of
all of them sharing a common belief in
computationalism even when you get
fights within the cognitive science
community they're all basically assuming
computationalism now the danger in miss
reading a site-geist
for a agreement among the sciences is
not just an unseemly overconfidence that
you now think AHA we're ready it's a lot
worse than that
a dominant zeitgeist encourages an
interdisciplinary approach because when
there is substantial agreement among the
disciplines about the important
questions to ask and the range of
acceptable answers namely get a
computational theory or get an origin
Skype theory then collaboration appears
more fruitful however all right so once
you've got a zeitgeist going like this
then it looks like we should all work
together because we're all after all
working in the same direction however an
interdisciplinary approach also lends to
a greater commonality of beliefs and
attitudes we all work together then we
all course come to share these beliefs
all the more
thus the adoption of an
interdisciplinary research strategy
increases the strength of a zeitgeist
and which then furthers integrates
interdisciplinary integration and so
forth ok like the danger in adopting and
introduced a primary research strategy
then when you've got this tremendous
commonality of view when everybody
already believes the computationalism is
the way to go is that you sacrifice
important mechanisms for change as work
in related but independent disciplines
can offer important confirmation work in
related but independent disciplines can
also cost doubts on existing theories
and offer hints about new approaches the
great danger in utilizing an
interdisciplinary research strategy in
the presence of a dominant zeitgeist is
theoretical stagnation everybody's going
to be doing exactly the same
thing and you cut off all your sources
of divergent views or like and put this
in a way that computation list might
find more appealing because I'll put it
in their language given a dominant
zeitgeist and interdisciplinary approach
runs the risk of forcing research into a
local minimum if you're familiar with
this that you can't climb out of because
you haven't got any sources of energy
right let me just briefly conclude look
give them a negative tone of this paper
where I've been pointing out all the
problems and interdisciplinary research
let me just conclude by saying that I
believe in interdisciplinary research I
think that it is a fruitful way to
approach these very very complicated
problems of understanding the mind what
I've tried to do both here in the book I
just wrote it on Freud is use Freud as
an example so that we can sort of see
the mistakes that an introducer planaria
research program gets into the point is
not to avoid interdisciplinary research
but to do it better and that's what I
want to use Freud for to try to look at
the mistakes he made things like getting
very excited about the agreement and the
disciplines to think that you know just
tomorrow we're going to get this right
that that's not true this is a very
dangerous thing of just saying well you
know everything's really going on fine
and the other disciplines and they all
get it all worked out right so I'm not
gonna worry about that
I think the point of looking at Freud is
not to discourage interdisciplinary
research but to try to do it in such a
way that 80 years from now or 100 years
from now people don't look back at
interdisciplinary cognitive science and
use that as the paradigm of a bad
science pursuit of science as Freud is
used today
