Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making

Abstract

This series brings together work that takes cognitive science in new directions. Hitherto, philosophical reflection on cognitive science -or, perhaps better, philosophical contribution to the interdisciplinary field that is cognitive science -has for the most part come from philosophers with a commitment to a representationalist model of the mind.However, as cognitive science continues to make advances, especially in its neuroscience and robotics aspects, there is growing discontent with the representationalism of traditional philosophical interpretations of cognition. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have turned to a variety of sources -phenomenology and dynamic systems theory foremost among them to date -to rethink cognition as the direction of the action of an embodied and affectively attuned organism embedded in its social world, a stance that sees representation as only one tool of cognition, and a derived one at that.To foster this growing interest in rethinking traditional philosophical notions of cognition -using phenomenology, dynamic systems theory, and perhaps other approaches yet to be identified -we dedicate this series to "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science".