Mani Tajaddini

Cogs517 #1 Essay 11/3/2016

Naturalism (metaphysical naturalism) seems to have gone through some

phases of transformation as science has strived to explain more and
more of our world. After the Copernican revolution which started natural
sciences (Vervaeke, 1997), clear regulations in nature discovered by
scientists like Newton not only did not cast doubt on creationism, quite
to the contrary, as it is famously quoted often from Newton who said
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only
proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful
being”, it has aided the argument that this level of regulation and order
unequivocally should have a wise creator. In this first phase the border
between science and naturalism seems to be blurred.
However, in those days, due to the ramifications of the clear cut
regulations, like Newton’s laws, “The universe as a clockwork” world
view, as Laplace famously put it, became prominent which led to craving
to extend this view to realms that were previously reserved for the
creator. In this phase science becomes completely naturalistic and
scientists tend to identify themselves as naturalists. This being said, the
flavor of naturalism in our day seems to be somehow different.
Until recent times, it was strongly held that nature is perfectly ordered
and because it acts in a completely regulated way, it is predictable in
principal and can be modeled mathematically. One cannot help but feel
that this view in particular captured the essence of naturalistic prospect
then, however, nowadays, with the invent of chaos theory and the like,
we are quite sure that the nature is not as ordered or as deterministic as
we thought it was, even in principal. This does not cast doubt on the
principals of naturalistic view in anyways but it gives a different flavor to
it, one of the consequences of which could be that some of the times
when you, as a naturalist, are debating with someone who is not a
proponent of naturalism, you can convince him/her that you are talking
about the same thing.
Naturalism strives to connect everything to the whole of nature. Every
scientific field is trying to explain its observations in terms of natural
laws. This is why there is always a naturalistic imperative in every field
and cognitive science is no exception. This is one of the reasons cognitive
scientists try to simulate cognitive phenomena in computational
machines (Vervaeke, 1997). However, as mentioned previously, it may
be fruitful for cognitive scientists to take into account the new flavor of
naturalistic view. There may be no strict and clear laws for some
phenomena and a mere statistical explanation may be all there is to it,
meteorology being a close example in another field.
The naturalist view is an imperative in cognitive science but issues like
consciousness which are very ripe for creating non-naturalistic
perspectives, may not be explainable with a classic naturalistic stance
which aims to describe everything with a computational attitude. Maybe
the type of explanation that makes a scientist contented with his/her
findings should be reconsidered in our time.

References
Vervaeke, J. A. (1997). The naturalistic imperative in cognitive science.
Newton, I., Motte, A., & Cajori, F. (1987). Mathematical principles of
natural philosophy (pp. xvii-xvii). W. Benton: Encyclopaedia Britannica.