Philosophy Facing Cognitive Studies

Abstract

The stage of world civilization, into which humankind entered and within which it is developing today, was called the information society, then the knowledge society. Today, more and more people are talking about digital civilization. Of course, there are differences between information and knowledge, and digitaliza­tion speaks not about the information itself but about the ways of encoding it. However, it must be admitted that all these names are essentially related to one phenomenon. The point is that the production, dissemination, and use of knowl­edge (and it is, of course, information, although not every information is knowl­edge) began to play a new and exclusive role in all forms of human life.
The author has analyzed three types of relations between philosophical and sci­entific study of cognition and mind: 1. Philosophy ignores the results of cogni­tive disciplines, as it deals with meanings and norms of cognition in distinction from cognitive sciences which study the mechanisms of cognitive processes;
2. Philosophy is considered as a general part of cognitive science: “naturaliza­tion” of philosophy; 3. Philosophy and cognitive sciences are in a constant dia­logue which presupposes cross-fertilization and mutual criticism. Philosophy holds its normative role, as it analyzes the presuppositions of conceptions in cog­nitive sciences and evaluates them. The author argues the thesis that it is
the third type of such relations that is the most fruitful.