Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studied philosophy at Syracuse University and the University of London, and received her PhD from Harvard University. With Norbert Horn-stein, she co-edited Chomsky and His Critics. Antony is interested in naturalistic epistemology, and is currently trying to develop a psychologically realistic account of empirical justification. She also works in feminist philosophy, coediting with Charlotte Witt A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity.Antony has been a guest on the radio show Philosophy Talk, and has contributed to The New York Times. She was recently elected Vice-President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has served as President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Zan Boag: I’d like to delve into your work as a philosopher of mind. Of course, that’s not the only thing you’ve done, but I’d like to find out about the overlap between philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Do you work with cognitive scientists?
Louise Antony: I don’t do any original research in cognitive science myself. I came of age as a philosopher in the ‘70s. I was at Harvard from ‘75 to ‘80. And that was right around the time that the cognitive revolution was happening and was led by people at MIT,particularly Noam Chomsky and, on the philosophy side, Jerry Fodor. I hung out at MIT and took courses and seminars there as much as at Harvard. And in fact, Harvard as a department at that time, was very antagonistic toward cognitive science. It was a kind of Neo-Wittgensteinian department in many ways. Hilary Putnam was my official advisor, but after having articulated a functionalist conception of the mind and normalising the idea that higher-order sciences like psychology were not going to be easily reducible to biological kinds – so a psychological kind, Putnam argued, would be multiply realisable in different kinds of material. Now, the only minds we know about are the minds that are embodied in brains, but conceivably there could be minds embodied in other kinds of physical systems. Jerry Fodor took that idea and ran with it. But Putnam bailed from the idea that philosophy of mind should be connected to cognitive science early on. I was in the middle of an antagonistic position, which I think was, for me, very stimulating and fruitful.
I really was in the thick of this cognitive revolution. The founding of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology happened during the time that I was in graduate school. I eventually became the president of that society. So here’s the sort of irony: I was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine, who said that we needed to naturalise epistemology and the idea was to start asking how we manage to get to the theories that we get to from the data that we have available to us.That seemed to me to be an invitation to do cognitive science; not to Quine!
The Society for Philosophy and Psychology has been great because it’s an interdisciplinary society that tries to bring psychologists and linguists – in the early days there were more computer scientists than there have been recently, and ecologists – as it became OK to talk about beings having minds, people began to say, “Well, animals seem to have minds too.” So with the demise
