I express my deepest appreciation and gratitude for Goldsmith and Laks to express their understanding (in a way, their philosophy of the history of cognitive science) on the role of history and the significance of studying it in approaching a discipline. It is such a good paragraph that I will copy it here:

“One of the best reasons to study the history of our disciplines is that everything we think we have learned was once an answer to a living, breathing question, and it was an answer provided at a time when alternative answers were also being taken every bit as seriously. But once an answer is certified as true and placed among our certainties, we forget the question to which it was the answer, and the consequence is that we forget what were the alternatives that once enjoyed some traction. In short, we become trapped by our beliefs—not always a bad thing, as long as it leads to no problems. But this phenomenon leads in a natural way to a sclerosis of the mind, a hardening of the mental arteries, and in the end a less adequate understanding of what the disciplines have learned the hard way.” (Goldsmith and Laks, pp. 1)

(By the way, a funny thing is that I uploaded the PDF to ChatGPT and asked it to extract this part of the text for me, and while ChatGPT got the first paragraph correct, it starts to hallucinate and starts giving me texts that are not from the book at all.)

This reminds me of two things, one said by Abbott and one by Nagel. I can read this paragraph in a similar sense to Abbott’s point that our attitude towards knowledge has changed to this hasty bullet-point style looking-for-the-conclusions one, rather than the discursive and associative learning that Abbott values, which certainly requires considerations of this rich history of questions-and-answers as Goldsmith and Laks point out. (Regardless of whether the two authors are pointing out a problem that our generation has, as Abbott does, or generally making a point about the role of history, I think they are right about this.)
The second thing this reminds me of is Nagel’s preface in his Mortal Questions, where he said something that I paraphrase as follows: that there are some questions that we cannot dismiss by simply defining them as bogus questions with our methods, as we will simply be still looking for something that satisfies our curiosity. Similarly, just looking at the answers and conclusions and what these discussions have brought us is less likely to be satisfactory than looking at the whole process of trying to wrestle with these questions.

Anyway, one of the most intriguing (and significant, according to the authors) aspect of the study of the mind is that we have been asking and attempting and fighting for questions that were not essentially different from thousands of years ago. It appears that the study of the mind has been persistently curious, with some questions seemingly immune from the contingent technological developments. Descartes’s dualism still has some appeals despite the pineal gland objection; Turing’s was not restricted by what computers could do at his time when he proposed the computer functionalist view of mind. I think it is important to not lose focus on the whole appeal of the study of the mind while engaging in the details, as Goldsmith and Laks used one of my favorite quotes, “Know where you came from, and you will know where you are going.” (My translation of this quote is “you will only complete the journey if you remember where you began.”)