What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. W hat is cognition? Contemporary orthodoxy maintains that it is computation: the mind is a special kind of computer, and cognitive processes are the rule-governed manipulation of internal symbolic representations. This broad idea has dominated the philosophy and the rhetoric of cognitive science-and even, to a large extent, its practice-ever since the field emerged from the postwar cybernetic melee. It has provided the general framework for much of the most well-developed and insightful research into the nature of mental operation. Yet, over the last decade or more, the computational vision has lost much of its lustre. Although work within it continues apace, a variety of difficulties and limitations have become increasingly apparent, and researchers across cognitive science and related disciplines have been casting around for other ways to understand cognitive processes. Partly as a result, there are now many research programs which, one way or another, stand opposed to the traditional computational approach; these include connectionism, neurocomputational approaches, ecological psychology, situated robotics, synergetics, and artificial life.These approaches appear to offer a variety of differing and even conflicting conceptions of the nature of cognition. It is therefore an appropriate time to step back and reconsider the question: What general arguments are there in favor of the idea that cognitive processes must be specifically comnputational in nature? In order prop-* Criticism and advice from numerous people helped improve this paper, but special acknowledgement is due to Robert Port, , and the University of Skuivde were suitably and helpfully critical of earlier versions. 0022-362X/95/9207/345-81 ? 1995 TheJournal of Philosophy, Inc. 345 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 1 Dec 2014 20:03:43 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY erly to address this question, however, we must first address another: What are the alternatives? What could cognition be, if it were not computation of some form or other?There are at least two reasons why this second question is important. First, arguments in favor of some broad hypothesis are rarely, if ever, completely general. They tend to be arguments not for A alone, but rather in favor of A as opposed to B, and such arguments often fail to support A as opposed to C. For example, one of the most powerful early conrsiderations raised in favor of the computational conception of cognition was the idea that intelligent behavior requires sophisticated internal represent...

Interactionally situated cognition: a classroom example

“…Traditional cognitive science often analyzed the structure of the final performance-say, the skillful telling of a narrative-and concluded that a mental analogue of this entire structure must be the mechanism generating the performance. Many have questioned this approach (e.g., Greeno, 1997;Silverstein, 1993b;van Gelder, 1995), on two grounds. First, the mechanism producing the performance need not be as elaborate as an analyst's post hoc analysis of that performance-just as thermostats do not represent much about the nature of temperatures and human comfort zones.…”

Embedded Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics

“…However, we can refer back to dynamical theories within embedded cognition which precisely stress the point that the material boundary provided by the skin does not necessarily provide a suitable boundary for the dynamical patterns that arise in perception-action coupling (Beer, 1995(Beer, , 2000Van Gelder, 1995). From a dynamical perspective, one should talk about trajectories that are shaped both by forces inside and outside of the physical body.…”

“…9 We will give our own elaboration and defense of process externalism with respect to the causalconstitution problem, the brain in a vat, the unplugging problem and other issues elsewhere (Keijzer & Schouten, in preparation). issues of mental processes. Given the importance of ongoing dynamical couplings with the environment for intelligence, these couplings can become themselves an important indicator of mentality (Van Gelder, 1995), and precisely these dynamical couplings make it theoretically plausible to start thinking in terms of mental processes as dynamically extended.…”

“…Note that the idea of process externalism and its kin has raised a lot of criticism (Adams & Aizawa, forthcoming;Grush, 2003;Rupert, 2004;Wilson, 2002). However, we want to stress from the outset 1 Some of the most important references are for developmental psychology Thelen and Smith, 1995; for robotics Brooks, 1999;Pfeifer and Scheier, 2001; for neuroethology Beer, 1995; for philosophy Clark, 1997;Hurley, 1998aVan Gelder, 1995;and for consciousness studies O'Regan and Noë, 2001. that process externalism actually constitutes a relatively mild claim, which states only that not all mental processes can be exhaustively described by neural processes, or processes occurring within the skin.…”

Content Pragmatism Defended

“…Churchland 1981;Stich 1983), while more radical eliminativists have claimed that even representational content will be eliminated (e.g. Van Gelder 1995;Hutto and Myin 2013). The issue of how to give a naturalistic reduction of representation thereby does not exercise the eliminativist, though they must show that equally satisfying explanations of cognitive phenomena can be provided without appeal to representations.…”