Wild systems theory as a 21st century coherence framework for cognitive science

Abstract

The present paper examines the historical choice points the led twentieth-century cognitive science to its current commitment to correspondence approaches to reality and truth. Such a “correspondence”-driven approach to reality and truth stands in contrast to coherence-driven approaches, which were prominent in the 1800s and early 1900s. Coherence approaches refused to begin the conversation regarding reality with the assumption that the important thing about it was its independence of observers because the reality-observer split inherent in correspondence-driven views often led to objective-subjective divides, which, within scientific theorizing, tended to render the latter causally unnecessary and in need of ontological justification. The present paper fleshes out the differences between coherence- and correspondence-driven approaches to reality and truth, proposes an explanation of why cognitive science came to favor correspondence approaches, describes problems that have arisen in cognitive science because of its commitment to correspondence theorizing, and proposes an alternative framework (i.e., Wild Systems Theory— WST) that is inspired by a coherence approach to reality and truth, yet is entirely consistent with science.