The Boxology of Self-Knowledge

Fri, 03/19/2010 - 15:24 - Eric Schwitzgebel

It’s often helpful for cognitive scientists modeling psychological processes to describe the mind’s functional architecture using boxes and arrows, with the boxes indicating various functionally discrete processes or systems and the arrows indicating the causal or functional relationships among those discrete processes or systems.

By Eric Schwitzgebel

Figure 1 below expresses my view of self-knowledge, using the “boxology” of cognitive science. The model in that figure may be contrasted, for example, with the boxological models of self-knowledge on pages 162 and 165 of Nichols and Stich 2003, which feature tidy arrows in and out of the Belief Box, through a Monitoring Mechanism, a Percept-to-Belief Mediator, and a Theory of Mind Information store. You might also notice a resemblance between my model in Figure 1 and recent boxological models of visual processing, if the latter are squinted at.