Cognitive capacities as functional natural kinds

Abstract

In this paper, we articulate a functional approach to cognitive capacities. It is a restricted functionalism for various reasons, but especially because it does not claim that all cognitive (and/or mental) entities and processes are functional in the sense of a systemic capacities approach. One of the central aims of a cognitive theory consists in providing explanations of behavioral phenomena of (human and nonhuman) animals, and of the phenomena that are involved in those explanations. We accept that part of what lies at the heart of these explanations are certain functional entities –we call them “cognitive functional systems” –which in our view stand for most of the cognitive capacities of an organism; that is, systems that are individuated primarily by the main cognitive functions they undertake. Additionally, in the paper, we go into further detail concerning these functional systems, their internal organization, the nature of their causal interactions, etc. We also argue that some of these classes of cognitive functional systems (i.e., cognitive capacities) can be construed as “natural kinds” whenever their kinds of functional organizations are understood as kinds of hierarchically ordered classes of information processing events that are related among each other in regular (often complex) ways.