Extending the Concept of Cognition and Meta‑Theoretical Anthropomorphism

Abstract

How to deal with the controversies surrounding applying the concept of COGNITION to non-humans? I suggest a bottom-up approach that makes room for the pluralistic perspectives of non-human cognition researchers without disregarding philosophers’ worries about overextending the concept. My proposal is that COGNITION should be a holistic story, in which no part can be understood without the context of the whole. If such a project is to succeed, however, we need to deal with anthropomorphism – not of the well-known, superficial kind, but understood as a deeply embedded framework determining how we understand cognitive life in general. After explaining what this kind of meta-theoretical anthropomorphism is, I argue that investigating non-human cognition is the best way to make explicit many of our hidden assumptions and re-examine them. In the second section of the paper, I present how this approach can be effective in reconsidering Brandom’s proposal of how to define levels of concept use for the purposes of empirical research on non-humans.