構成的認識論--自己・非自己循環理論の展開

Abstract

What is cognition? Cognition is such a common experience that we rarely try to define it in our everyday life. Yet no one who has worked on this problem has ever been able to answer it in a satisfactory way. This is probably not because we lack complete knowledge of components such as molecules, neurons or neural networks at different hierarchical levels of a human being, but because we lack a ‘constructive’ view integrating the fragments of knowledge at different levels during our investigation of the history of life. Actually, it is traditionally assumed that there is a very clear distinction between thinking subject and observed object. However, when we try to understand our cognitive process, it certainly appears to be a serious problem that there is no clear distinction between subject and object; we are both spectators and actors in the world. The only way to understand the problem ‘what is cognition?’ is, therefore, to construct a new framework involving both thinking subjects and observed objects. It is a ‘self-nonself circulation’ process that would operate during not only a developmental history of an individual human, but also an evolutionary history of life itself, as both are undoubtedly conducted by continuous actions of life in the world and simultaneously unavoidable reactions from it. The present paper further involves an idea that both evolution (or development or even the onset of disease) and cognition must fit the same principle of self-nonself circulation, and then develops a theory of 'constructive cognition'.