Cognition and Concepts: Revisiting the Rationalist Tradition

Application summary

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has made questions concerning the relation between computers and human thinkers increasingly pressing. The fundamental issue is whether AI is anything like human intelligence. But in order to even begin to address this question we first need to get about the nature of human intelligence itself. This project proposes to reexamine a fundamental assumption about human cognition—that the distinctive character of our thinking has to do with the use of concepts. This idea is pervasive, not only in philosophy, but in our intellectual culture at large. Talk of conceptual distinctions and calls for reconceptualizations or even new concepts are ubiquitous in both scientific and ordinary discourse. The project approaches this issue from an original and unexpected angle. I will focus on the so-called rationalist tradition in early modern philosophy—usually taken to find its purest expression in the thought of the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716). My conjecture is that Leibniz’s philosophy offers important resources for reconsidering the prevalent picture of human cognition. This may seem surprising, since Leibnizian rationalism is commonly presented as giving a fundamental, and even exaggerated, role to concepts. Yet, on the radical hypothesis to be investigated here, this conception of Leibniz is deeply mistaken: in fact, concepts do not play any central role in his account of cognition. In this way, a detailed examination of Leibniz’s position also promises to open up alternatives to some of our basic framing assumptions concerning human thinking. This ambition is embodied in the central methodological principle of the project. Taking past philosophers on their own terms helps us to critically reflect on what contemporary theories takes for granted, thereby broadening the space of philosophical possibilities.