Beyond the bounds of cognition

Cognitive Science, 1993

This issue of Cognitive Science contains a debate among proponents of two distinct approaches to the study of human cognition. One approach, the tradition upon which cognitive science was founded, is that of symbolic processing, represented in the article by Alonso Vera and Herbert Simon. The other more recent approach, emphasizing the role of the environment, the context, the social and cultural setting, and the situations in which actors find themselves, is variously called situated action or situation cognition. It is represented by four articles written in response to Vera and Simon: James Greeno and Joyce Moore; Philip Agre; Lucy Suchman; and WilIiam Clancey. The debate was triggered by Vera and Simon's article, which takes note of the work in situated action and its attacks on the role of symbolic processing, and argues that the new approach could easily be incorporated within the old. The respondents take issue with this characterization.

Philosophical Psychology

Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity, and Human Artifice, a collection of fourteen essays, is a fine representation of the current state of the field in distributed cognition-not only for empirical developments but also for disagreements about how to think about distributed cognition. Helpfully introduced and concluded with essays by Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau, this collection evidences not just the disagreements in distributed cognitive science but also ways in which the disagreeing parties can make progress.

2021

Orthodox cognitive science claims that situated (world-embedded) activity can be explained as the outcome of in-the-head manipulations of representations by computational information processing mechanisms. But, in the eld of Arti cial Life, research into adaptive behaviour questions the primacy of the mainstream explanatory framework. This paper argues that such doubts are well-founded. Classical A.I. encountered fundamental problems in moving from toy worlds to dynamic unconstrained environments. I draw on work in behaviour-based robotics to suggest that such di culties are plausibly viewed as artefacts of the representational/computational architecture assumed in the classical paradigm. And merely moving into connectionism cannot save the received orthodoxy. If we adopt the perspective according to which neural networks are most naturally conceptualized as dynamical systems, it becomes appropriate to treat such networks as computational devices only if the network-dynamics are del...

Conference Cognitive Science, 2016

Distributed cognition is a perspective that primarily has been applied to complex socio-technical systems such as flight decks of commercial airliners, or operating rooms where professionals perform cognitive tasks in environments specifically designed for this. For some scholars distributed cognition is exactly this kind of specialized cognitive system. On the other hand it has been claimed by some workers in the field that distributed cognition is not a kind of cognition but a perspective on all cognition. We have therefore studied an environment very different from the systems previously studied, namely single people's homes. We find that there are many similarities between the home and the specialized socio-technical environments. To us this suggests that the specially designed complex environments can be seen as specialized cases of the general principles of distributed cognition which are not reflections of "particular work practices" but of general features of human cognition.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2008

The frame problem is the difficulty of explaining how non-magical systems think and act in ways that are adaptively sensitive to context-dependent relevance. Influenced centrally by Heideggerian phenomenology, Hubert Dreyfus has argued that the frame problem is, in part, a consequence of the assumption (made by mainstream cognitive science and artificial intelligence) that intelligent behaviour is representation-guided behaviour. Dreyfus' Heideggerian analysis suggests that the frame problem dissolves if we reject representationalism about intelligence and recognize that human agents realize the property of thrownness (the property of being always already embedded in a context). I argue that this positive proposal is incomplete until we understand exactly how the properties in question may be instantiated in machines like us. So, working within a broadly Heideggerian conceptual framework, I pursue the character of a representationshunning thrown machine. As part of this analysis, I suggest that the frame problem is, in truth, a two-headed beast. The intra-context frame problem challenges us to say how a purely mechanistic system may achieve appropriate, flexible and fluid action within a context. The inter-context frame problem challenges us to say how a purely mechanistic system may achieve appropriate, flexible and fluid action in worlds in which adaptation to new contexts is open-ended and in which the number of potential contexts is indeterminate. Drawing on the field of situated robotics, I suggest that the intra-context frame problem may be neutralized by systems of special purpose adaptive couplings, while the inter-context frame problem may be neutralized by systems that exhibit the phenomenon of continuous reciprocal causation. I also defend the view that while continuous reciprocal causation is in conflict with representational explanation, specialpurpose adaptive coupling, as well as its associated agential phenomenology, may feature representations. My proposal has been criticized recently by Dreyfus, who accuses me of propagating a cognitivist misreading of Heidegger, one that, because it maintains a role for representation, leads me seriously astray in my handling of the frame problem. I close by responding to Dreyfus' concerns.

Psychological Review, 2010

Proceedings of the Twelveth IJCAI, 1991

This paper discusses the recent views on knowledge, representations, and memory as presented by different researchers under the flag of 'situated cognition*. The situated view implies a radical shift of paradigm. We argue that there are no strong reasons to leave the traditional paradigm of cognitive science and AI. Four main issues are addressed; the role of computational models in theories of cognition, theories on knowledge and memory, the frame of reference problem and implications for learning and instruction. The main conclusion of the paper is that 'situationism' is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Consolidated achievements of Cognitive Science and AI still stand, even if the architectures that are assumed to underly traditional models of cognition can be challenged.

The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 2009

2011

The dissertation is based on four papers that together offer a theory of General Situated Cognition. The project has two overarching goals: (1) to unify existing foundational approaches to cognition by investigating cognition within the framework of the philosophy of information; (2) to characterize the function of cognition and suggest a general (meta-)framework for cognitive architecture. Two of the papers, "Pre-cognitive Semantic Information" and "The Information Medium", deal primarily with the concept of information. They offer a pragmatic and structural account of information, as well as a novel and more general theory of meaning appropriate for simple, non-linguistic organisms -the interface theory of meaning.