The category of a person in the context of cognitive science

Paweł POCZOBUT

Zakład Epistemologii i Kognitywistyki, Wydział Historyczno-Socjologiczny, Uniwersytet w Białymstoku, Plac Uniwersytecki 1, 15-420 Białystok, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The category of ‘person’ is one of the fundamental notions of ethics and philosophical anthropology. In recent years, works in broadly construed cognitive science have also been published which take up the topic of the personal dimension of man. This raises a number of questions: Do the research methods of cognitive science allow us to analyze the personal level of organization of cognitive systems? And if so, what concept of a person do these methods imply? Do research results in cognitive science confirm ‘the death of the person’? In this article, I try to show that although the progress in cognitive science compels us to revise some basic commonsensical and philosophical categories, such as those of the mind, consciousness, cognition and free will, it does not lead to a straightforward elimination of the notion of a person. However, cognitive science does enable us to discover the subpersonal (neurocomputational) mechanisms underlying the processes characteristic of the personal dimension, which in a sense leads to the naturalization of the concept of a person.

Keywords:

person, cognitive science, consciousness, cognitive mechanisms, emergence, reduction, eliminationism