Cognitive Pluralism

The following is a description of philosopher Steven Horst’s model of cognitive pluralism: The human mind is ultimately a product of evolution in which different phylogenetic parts, or modules, of the mind-brain evolved in a semi-autonomous fashion. A similar process of specialization occurs within the ontogenic learning history of the individual organism. These lead to various, independent ways of representing and modeling the world cognitively. Hence we should not expect for our efforts at knowledge to make up a grand unified theory or model.

This applies across the epistemological board, from common sense knowledge to formal scientific models. In some instances, we can reason across domains, but in some areas, the different idealizations that we create are incompatible with each other simply because of the ways we set them up. Indeed, they are just that, idealizations, which pick out certain features of the world and abstract away from others. The ways in which these idealizations are built are not based on a priori considerations of ultimate truth and the global integration of all knowledge, but rather they come about by other processes of selection, i.e. practical utility, experimental evidence, local theoretical consistency, etc. On this view, we should consider knowledge and truth as pragmatically driven and context-dependent.