Questions about Functionalism in Kant’s Philosophy
of Mind: Lessons for Cognitive Science
Dr. Matt McCormick
Department of Philosophy
California State University
Sacramento, CA 95819-6033
mccormick@csus.edu
In the recent revival of interest in Kant’s philosophy of mind, it has become
more and more common for commentators to call Kant a functionalist of some
sort. Patricia Kitcher, Andrew Brook, Ralf Meerbote, Wilfred Sellars,
and C. Thomas Powell are among this group. There appear to be at least
two threads of functionalist thought in Kant. First, Kant frequently
treats concepts, both the categories and ordinary empirical concepts, as
functions that make it possible to transform the raw content of experience
into judgments. Second, and perhaps more relevant to contemporary philosophy
of mind, Kant organizes the mind into modules that are responsible for different
phases of the constructive process that takes undifferentiated intuitions
as its input and produces thoughts or judgments as its output. Functionalist
readings of Kant have focused their attention on the theory of synthesis
that contains Kant’s division of mental labor into more rudimentary tasks
that are necessary for consciousness to occur. So these Kant commentators
have argued that Kant’s views are compatible with contemporary functionalist
theories that allow consciousness to be characterized on a high level of
abstraction that would allow instantiation into any number of physically
realizable systems, and that seek to describe the causal dependencies and
relationships between various mental states, as well as system inputs and
outputs.
I am sympathetic with the functionalist reading to the
extent that it allows us to better understand and isolate Kant’s theory of
mind from the notoriously complicated arguments of the Transcendental Deduction.
And the functionalist reading also helps to rescue Kant’s theory of mind
from the ravages of positivist and anti-internalist readings like Strawson’s
that dismiss Kant’s analyses of the processes that produce consciousness
as speculative and unverifiable. The functionalist reading gives Kant’s
theory of synthesis a degree of legitimacy that was not possible in the era
of behaviorism and positivism about the mind.
But to read Kant’s theory of mind as functionalist does
him several injustices. Kant’s transcendental method for analysis of
the mind’s activities is importantly different from the methods of contemporary
functionalism in several regards. And just as it has been argued that
modern cognitive science can benefit from the depth of Kant’s insights on
the functionalist reading, at least some of the differences evident in his
transcendental method can provide guidance to cognitive science that was
obscured by the functionalist reading.