Filling in versus finding out: A ubiquitous confusion in cognitive science

Abstract

One of the things you learn if you read books and articles in (or about) cognitive science is that the brain does a lot of "filling in"--not filling in, but "filling in"--in scare quotes. My claim today will be that this way of talking is not a safe bit of shorthand, or an innocent bit of temporizing, but a source of deep confusion and error. The phenomena described in terms of "filling in" are real, surprising, and theoretically important, but it is a mistake to conceive of them as instances of something being filled in, for that vivid phrase always suggests too much--sometimes a little too much, but often a lot too much. Here are some examples (my boldface throughout).