Cognition through Understanding is the third volume of Tyler Burge’s collected papers. The book organizes the most representative papers that Burge has written on self-knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection during the last 25 years. Some of the papers included have been previously published, but all have been revised. Three are unpublished independent essays that present substantial, retrospective commentaries, including some notes about thoughts that Burge no longer considers correct. Additionally, the book includes postscripts to some of the essays and a very clarifying introductory chapter.

The collection focuses on how epistemology could illuminate some features of human mind that empirical cognitive methods are unable to explain because scholars in this field are only invested in empirical evidence, and leave aside other kinds of warrant. The book emphasizes what Burge calls epistemic warrants, and their connections with some types of cognition based on our understanding of thought and language. Epistemic warrants differ from ordinary empirical beliefs and from logical and mathematical beliefs in two aspects: they are a priori and distinctive of persons. The articles are, then, extensions of Burge’s analysis of (as he says, “on the Earth”) some human beings’ mental features, and how these differ from non-human individuals’ cognitive properties.

The book is organized in 4 different parts, each devoted to the analysis of one type of cognition mentioned in the title. The first part, “Self-Knowledge”, centers on introspection as a cognitive way to gain knowledge of the self. As it is normally assumed, the majority of our self-knowledge is clearly empirical. We know about ourselves in the same way that we can know about other things: by observing what happens to us. Burge focuses on the Cartesian cogito as an instance of non-empirical self-knowledge, and he accepts Descartes’ lessons to extend the range of non-empirical evidence to further types of non-empirical introspection as distinctive of human beings. To summarize, part 1 develops a unified approach to rational, anti-individualistic kinds of self-knowledge in order to show that the nature of mental states are determined, or partially determined, by relations between the individuals that posses these states and specific properties of the world surrounding these psychologically capable beings.

“Interlocution”, the second part, centers on a type of cognition that derives from testimony: linguistic communication with others. Since language and communication are at the core of human cultures and scientific development, Burge’s discussion of interlocution examines this property of individuals as a central part of systematic reflection on understanding, and its relation with self-knowledge. Or, in other words, in this part Burge is interested in how explanations of the way that the first-person and the third-person acquire knowledge.

Burge introduces a distinction between two types of warrants. Entitlement (or a priori justification) is a kind of “warrant whose force does not consist, even partly, in a reason” (231). Justification “consists in warrants by reason” but “an individual can have an entitlement even if no rationalizing explanation of the entitlement is present in the individual’s psychology” (28). If we understand reasons as propositional, as it is usually assumed, then an individual is justified only if a relevant reason is present in the psychological life of that individual. In other words, even though reasons can justify an individual’s psychology by occurring or being part of the individual’s mental life, there is no necessity for these reasons to be accessible. Only those individuals aware of the presence of these reasons in their mental lives will be justified. But as testimony is the primitive non-empirical entitlement for accepting the word of others, one can believe in certain things in virtue of what others tell about them. To say it plainly, reasons are impersonal ways to sustain the truth of certain propositions, but to be competent as a psychologically capable individual one has to realize this capacity, and this is something that can be done simply by believing in what others say. Burge also introduces his notion of purely preservative memory, the capability to preserve past attitudes and their contents in cognition, without the necessity to introduce new content.

The third part is entitled “Reasoning and the Individuality of Persons.” Here Burge analyzes the relation between reasoning and the properties to be a reasoning individual. As it is well known, for being an individual the existence of some unifying conditions is necessary. Burge explores propositional forms and propositional interconnections to develop an analysis of some preservational structures in psychologies at all levels. Since these structures are the source for the unity of egos, thinkers, and selves, the structures are more complex that those analyzed in terms of indexicality, only devoted to designate whole psychological individuals. Burge presents non-reflective, first-level reasoners and selves and persons, and the features that distinguish between them.

“Reflection”, the fourth part, is “more exploratory, more ‘initial'” (45), and the essays center on apriori aspects of reflection. It puts together Burge’s criticisms of classical anti-rationalists views of reflection, mainly those of Lewis and Peacocke, and some examples of the effectiveness of reflection in meta-logic (the clarification of the notions of logical validity and logical consequences by Skolem, Gödel, and Tarski) and philosophy (the thought experiments that led to modern anti-individualism). It also includes an article about Frege’s notion of Sinn, written after the publication of Burge’s Essays on Frege (2005).

This collection is the perfect handbook to Burge’s anti-individualism. The book not only includes all relevant papers that Burge has written about this topic in the mature period of his career, it also clarifies some of the important notions of Burge’s thought on cognition and understanding. What this book offers is an excellent opportunity to undergraduates and graduates as well as scholars to have in a single volume both, the original papers of Burge and the clever and fascinating revision that Burge does of his own intellectual work. In one word: essential.

© 2014 Juan J. Colomina

Juan J. Colomina, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and The Center for Mexican American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. LEMA Research Group (University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain). Project: “Points of View and Temporal Structures” (FII2011-24549) (funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad).