Twisted Tales: Causal Complexity and Cognitive Scientific Explanation

• Authors: Andy Clark
• Venue: Minds and Machines
• Year: 1998

Recent work in biology and cognitive science depicts a variety of targetphenomena as the products of a tangled web of causal influences. Suchinfluences may include both internal and external factors as well ascomplex patterns of reciprocal causal interaction. Such twisted tales aresometimes seen as a threat to explanatory strategies that invoke notionssuch as ’inner programs‘, ’genes for‘ and sometimes even ’internalrepresentations‘. But the threat, I shall argue, is more apparent thanreal. Complex causal influence, in and of itself, provides no good reasonto reject these familiar explanatory notions. To believe otherwise, Isuggest, is generally to commit (at least) one of two seductive errors. Thefirst error is to think that the general notion of a state xcoding for an outcome y involves the state‘s constituting afull description of y. This is what I call the ’myth of theself-contained code‘. The second error is to think that the practice oftreating certain factors as special (e.g., seeing genes as coding foroutcomes in a way environmental factors do not) depends on the (oftenmistaken) belief that the singled out factor is somehow doing the most realwork. Where the amounts of causal influence are evenly spread, it is assumed there can be no reason to treat one factor in a special way. Thisis what I term the ’Myth of Explanatory Equality‘. Avoiding these errorsinvolves reminding ourselves of (1) the rich context-dependence of evenstandard, unproblematic uses of the notions of code, program andinformation content (all three make sense only relative to an assumedecological backdrop) and (2) the difference between explaining why an eventoccurred and displaying the full workings of a complex causal system.