Cognitive science isn’t confused, it’s just not doing philosophy

Understanding, remembering, and the purpose of explanation

Despite the ever increasing popularity of ‘the science of learning,’ in some corners of education there’s also a growing sense of scepticism, if not outright hostility. Critics argue that it oversimplifies complex human experiences, flattens rich conceptual distinctions, and imposes a reductive model of the mind rooted in lab-based psychology. For these critics, talk of “working memory,” “schema,” or “retrieval practice” feels like jargon that sidesteps the nuance of lived human understanding. More pointedly, they claim that cognitive science often abuses language, treating distinct terms as if they were synonymous. From this perspective, cognitive science isn’t just theoretically suspect; it’s linguistically sloppy, conceptually careless, and dangerously influential. But are these criticisms fair?

Bernard Andrews has recently offered a precise and carefully argued critique of how terms like “knowing,” “understanding,” “remembering,” and “learning” are used - often interchangeably - by cognitive scientists and educational writers. I accept that his concern is not pedantic but arises from a long-standing philosophical tradition that aims to clarify ideas by examining how we ordinarily use words.

In his view, when writers say things like “understanding is remembering in disguise,” or “learning is defined as a change in long-term memory,” they collapse meaningful distinctions. After all, one can misremember something, but not mis-know it. One can struggle to understand a fact, but “struggling to know” doesn’t quite land in everyday usage. Andrews argues that these expressions, while perhaps rhetorically effective, trade on a kind of conceptual imprecision that risks misleading both teachers and students.

There is much to admire in this approach. It treats language seriously, recognising that how we speak reflects how we think. It encourages intellectual discipline, especially in fields like education that are often vulnerable to buzzwords and bandwagons. And it reminds us – rightly - that we should pay attention to whether we’re all talking about the same thing when we use familiar terms.

I also share the view that educators should think carefully about the language they use. Too often, words like “know” or “understand” are thrown around as if they required no explanation. Andrews’ analysis calls attention to the fact that these are complex concepts, and that treating them as interchangeable can obscure more than it reveals.

That said, there is an important distinction to make between clarifying concepts and explaining processes. While philosophy helps us say clearly what we mean, science helps us explain how things work, and the two disciplines aren’t always doing the same job or working towards the same ends.

Language isn’t always the best guide to the mind

The idea that we don’t - or can’t - say things like “struggling to know” is a linguistic observation, not a psychological one. But human experience often pushes against grammatical boundaries. We say things like, “I think I know the answer,” “I used to know that, but I’ve forgotten,” or, “I know I should know this, but it’s gone.” None of these are errors. They’re perfectly ordinary expressions that reveal something deeply interesting: that “knowing” is not always experienced as a binary state - as something we either have or don’t - but as something more fluid, more effortful, and sometimes fragile. These are the moments when we are, in a very real and meaningful sense, struggling to know.

Watch this clip for a great example of struggling to know.

This struggle isn’t a conceptual mistake or a grammatical slip-up. It is a lived cognitive experience, something familiar to anyone who has felt the answer lurking just out of reach, or who has sensed the discomfort of doubt in what they thought they knew. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, the faltering recall of a half-remembered name, the search for a word we’re certain we once used fluently. All of these are examples of knowledge under strain. It would be odd to suggest that such moments are not cognitive, simply because the phrase “struggling to know” sounds a bit clunky.

This points to a broader truth: language is a public, negotiated system, not a perfect mirror of private experience. It evolves through convention and culture, shaped by what feels smooth, useful, or acceptable to say. But that doesn’t mean it captures the full texture of mental life. Sometimes our inner states exceed what our grammar readily allows. Especially when we’re confronted with new ideas and thoughts that might not have been previously thought.

So if ordinary usage lacks a clean way to describe epistemic hesitation - if “struggling to know” sounds awkward - then perhaps that awkwardness reveals a gap in the language, not a defect in our thinking. After all, scientific and psychological inquiry often advances precisely by developing ways to name and describe what language has yet to capture clearly. The fact that we can’t neatly conjugate a verb doesn’t mean the phenomenon it attempts to describe isn’t real. It just means we may need new tools - or better models - to explain it.

The role of scientific models

When cognitive scientists say, “understanding is disguised remembering,” they’re not redefining words for rhetorical flair. They’re advancing a hypothesis: that what we call understanding emerges from richly organised knowledge stored in long-term memory. It’s not that “understand” and “remember” mean the same thing but that, at a cognitive level, understanding depends on the availability and structure of remembered information. The ‘disguise’ is doing a lot of work. If there were no disguise - if it were immediately obvious that remembering and understanding rely on essentially the same processes - it wouldn’t be worth pointing out.

This is not a confusion, it’s a model. And models always require some abstraction or simplification to make complex realities comprehensible. Saying “learning is a change in long-term memory” isn’t the final word on what learning is, but it does help to challenge what we think about curriculum design, cognitive load, and instructional strategies and offers some practical insights as to what we might do differently.

Different aims, different standards

Philosophy and science don’t always play by the same rules. The philosopher wants to know if we’re talking about the same concept when we use a word. The cognitive scientist wants to know what’s going on in the brain when we experience or perform a task. Sometimes those aims align but sometimes they pull in different directions.

Andrews is right that conceptual distinctions are worth guarding. But it’s also true that many valuable insights in education have come from reframing or recombining those concepts. Schema theory, dual coding, the spacing effect all depend on seeing links between memory, learning, and understanding, even when everyday language doesn’t neatly map onto those connections.

This is not to say Andrews is wrong to worry about language. On the contrary, his intervention is helpful. It urges clarity, precision, and respect for the tools of thought. But insisting too strictly on ordinary usage can risk missing what scientific explanations are trying to do: describe the structure and function of learning in ways that help us teach better.

Where philosophers ask, “What do you mean by that?”, scientists ask, “How does it work?” In education, we need these approaches to be held in productive tension.

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What do you think? Has cognitive science jumped the shark? Should philosophers stay in their lane? Do get in touch and let me know.