The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is the scientific study of thinking. However, thinking in the colloquial sense of the term is conscious, attentive deliberation, and the vast majority of cognitive science is concerned with automatizable operations such as detecting stimuli, storing and retrieving information, and parsing sentences. This paper argues that cognitive science has lost sight of deliberative thought as a distinctive, core feature of human cognition. We survey areas of the literature that attempt to characterize deliberation and argue that they generally fail for one of two reasons: either they attempt to deflate deliberation by reducing it to cognitive states and processes that admit of automation and thereby fail to capture what is unique about deliberative thought, or they simply restate the non-automatic character of deliberation in other terms (“executive function” or “loading on working memory”) without providing a deeper understanding. We then point to some threads that offer hope for a theory of deliberation, including the potential role of consciousness as a driver of cognitive operations rather than a passive monitor of otherwise-implicit processing.