Andy Clark

Recent studies such as Thelen and Smith, Kelso, Van Gelder, Beer, and others have presented a forceful case for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition and adaptive behavior. These studies call into question some foundational assumptions concerning the nature of cognitive scientific explanation and the role of notions such as internal representation and computation. These are exciting and important challenges. But they must be handled with care. It is all to easy in this debate to lose sight of the explanatorily important issues and to talk at cross purposes, courtesy of the various ways in which different theorists often concieve key terms.

There is a definite challenge in the air regarding the pivotal notion of internal representation. This challenge is explicit in, e.g., van Gelder, 1995; Beer, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wheeler, 1994; and elsewhere. We think it is a challenge that can be met and that (importantly) can be met by arguing from within a general framework that accepts many of the basic premises of the work (in new robotics and in dynamical systems theory) that motivates such scepticism in the first place. Our strategy will be as follows. We begin (Section 1) by offering an account (an example and something close to a definition) of what we shall term Minimal Robust Representationalism (MRR). Sections 2 & 3 address some likely worries and questions about this notion. We end (Section 4) by making explicit the conditions under which, on our account, a science (e.g., robot- ics) may claim to be addressing cognitive phenomena

In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing — the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing is fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cog- nitive profiles themselves. And third, that the sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception

  Marinov''s critique I argue, is vitiated by its failure to recognize the distinctive role of superposition within the distributed connectionist paradigm. The use of so-called subsymbolic distributed encodings alone is not, I agree, enough to justify treating distributed connectionism as a distinctive approach. It has always been clear that microfeatural decomposition is both possible and actual within the confines of recognizably classical approaches. When such approaches also involve statistically-driven learning algorithms — as in the case of ID3 — the fundamental differences become even harder to spot. To see them, it is necessary to consider not just the nature of an acquired input-output function but the nature of the representational scheme underlying it. Differences between such schemes make themselves best felt outside the domain of immediate problem solving. It is in the more extended contexts of performance DURING learning and cognitive change as a result of SUBSEQUENT training on new tasks (or simultaneous training on several tasks) that the effects of superpositional storage techniques come to the fore. I conclude that subsymbols, distribution and statistically driven learning alone are indeed not of the essence. But connectionism is not just about subsymbols and distribution. It is about the generation of whole subsymbol SYSTEMS in which multiple distributed representations are created and superposed

O'Regan and Noe present a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive defense of a position whose broad outline we absolutely and unreservedly endorse. They are right, it seems to us, to stress the intimacy of conscious content and embodied action, and to counter the idea of a Grand Illusion with the image of an agent genuinely in touch, via active exploration, with the rich and varied visual scene. This is an enormously impressive achievement, and we hope that the comments that follow will be taken in a spirit of constructive questioning. Overall, we have two main reservations.

Beer’s (2003) paper is a tour de force of detailed comments on the more general notion of “situated- dynamical modeling, and provides a concrete sample ness”, Beer suggests that “on this view, situated action of the kinds of understanding dynamicists may realis- is the fundamental concern and cognition is … one tically hope to achieve. The analysis is thus, as Beer resource among many that can be brought to bear as an states, a “tool for building intuition”, and in this it suc- agent encounters its world”. In the worked example of ceeds brilliantly. But it is also an attempt to show that an agent that approaches circles and avoids diamonds, dynamical approaches can get a foothold in the expla- we see direct evidence of this in the claim that a certain nation of “minimally cognitive behaviors”; that is to three-dimensional projection provides a potent analytic say, behaviors that seem, on the surface at least, good tool. For this projection happens to be one that involves contenders for more traditional forms of problem de- one environmental state variable (vertical object posi- composition and analysis. In these brief comments, I tion), one body state variable (horizontal position rela- want to focus on one important question that I think tive to the object) and one neuronal state variable remains unanswered, and that bears rather directly on (output of interneuron 9). By dispensing with talk of this enterprise of “scaling up”. representations and their contents, and restricting the The question concerns the notion of an integrated depiction of the inner realm to a depiction of inner state dynamical explanation itself. The point about such alone (section 9.3), the dynamicist makes it easy to..

The first question concerns a fundamental assumption of most researchers who theorize about the brain. Do neural systems exploit classical compositional and systematic representations, distributed representations, or no representations at all? The question is not easily answered. Connectionism, for example, has been criticised for both holding and challenging representational views. The second quesútion concerns the crucial methodological issue of how results emerging from the various brain sciences can help to constrain cognitive scientific models. Finally, the third question focuses attention on a major challenge to contemporary cognitive science: the challenge of understanding the mind as a controller of embodied and environmentally embedded action.

This book presents the Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, held at San Sebastian in May, 1991, to discuss from an interdisciplinary point of view topics which are at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. With a total of eleven papers from leading scholars in the field, the volume provides many different theoretical approaches to the study of Categories, Consciousness and Reasoning. The book is addressed to researchers, specialists, advanced students and scholars in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, semantics, logic and artificial intelligence.

Enquiries into the possible nature and scope of innate knowledge never proceed in an empirical vaccuum. Instead, such conjectures are informed by a theory (perhaps only tacitly endorsed) concerning probable representational form. Classical approaches to the nativism debate often assume a quasi-linguistic form of knowledge representation and deliniate a space of options (concerning the nature and extent of innate knowledge) accordingly. Recent connectionist theorizing posits a different kind of represenational form, and thus determines a different picture of the space of possible nativisms

Language, according to Jackendoff, is more than just an instrument of communication and cultural transmission. It is also a tool which helps us to think. It does so, he suggests, by expanding the range of our conscious contents and hence allowing processes of attention and reflection to focus on items which would not otherwise be available for scrutiny. I applaud Jackendoff s basic vision, but raise some doubts concerning the argument. In particular, I wonder what it is about public language that uniquely fits it to play the functional role which Jackendoff isolates — why couldn't expression in a private inner code induce the same computational benefits? I suggest a weaker position in which the communicative role of public language moulds it into a suitably expressive resource, such that natural language emerges as the logically and technologically contingent filler of a functional role which could, in principle, be filled by other means. I also compare and contrast Jackendoff's position with some related ideas due to Daniel Dennett and others, concluding with a sketch of my own view of language as an external artifact whose computational properties complement those of the basic biological brain.