Discursive Cognition and Neural Networks

Abstract

Harré’s discursive psychology located human beings in their proper ecological niche—a setting of relationships and conversations. Within the exchanges to be found there they form themselves according to the values they espouse and help to make real in themselves and others through praxis. That view, developed from the philosophy of Wittgenstein and others situates a person in a context which has a profound effect on him or her. Reductive neuroscientific models and analyses based on computation are now being transcended by neural network theory such that Harré’s ideas can take on scientific realism not anticipated in an age of computational models of mind and physicalism masquerading as scientific realism . The role able to be given to discourse and its complexity as the real essence of mental life makes Harré’s work more insightful now than it has often been depicted to be in “scientific” psychology and a “fuzzy” neural network account allows its ethological complexity to be understood anew.