Claim
Cognitive closure (philosophy)
Overview
In philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, cognitive closure is the view that human cognitive faculties are fundamentally incapable of solving certain philosophical problems. These problems, which have persisted throughout the history of philosophy, are considered beyond the reach of human understanding, not because of insufficient data or research, but due to inherent limits in the structure or capabilities of the mind.
Philosopher Colin McGinn, a proponent of cognitive closure, argues that certain philosophical problems, such as the mind–body problem, personal identity, the foundations of meaning, knowledge, both a priori and empirical, and free will, may be fundamentally unknowable by humans. He refers to this viewpoint as transcendental naturalism. Philosopher Owen Flanagan has referred to this stance as "anti-constructive naturalism" or "new mysterianism", and like McGinn, he posits that the limitations are intrinsic to the human brain’s design.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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All rational cognition is, again, based either on conceptions, or on the construction of conceptions. The former is termed philosophical, the latter mathematical. I have already shown the essential difference of these two methods of cognition in the first chapter.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Cognitive closure is; the author is tied to Cognitive closure in the knowledge graph.
In the latter case the concept is a _transcendent_ one, which is different from a concept of the Understanding, to which an adequately corresponding experience can always be supplied, and which therefore is called _immanent_. An _aesthetical Idea_ cannot become a cognition, because it is an _intuition_ (of the Imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Cognitive closure is; the author is tied to Cognitive closure in the knowledge graph.
Thought in such circumstances means no more than an act of abstraction or of formal identity. That is the sense in which thought is understood by Locke and all empiricists. Cognition, it is often said, can never do more than separate the given concrete objects into their abstract elements, and then consider these elements in their isolation. It is, however, at once apparent that this turns things upside down, and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Cognitive closure is.
Philosophers who discussed Cognitive closure (philosophy)
Related ideas
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
- Empiricism
- Austrian school of economics
- Mind–body problem
- Friedrich Hayek
- Immanuel Kant
- Thomas Nagel
- Mind
- Matter
- Noam Chomsky
- Personal identity
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Philosophy of science
- Causality
- Reality
- Free will
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems
- Colin McGinn
- A priori and a posteriori
- Philosophy of mind
- MIT Press
- Epistemology
- Existence
- Emergent materialism
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of mind.
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