Ptolémé Lyon

After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon

Maturana advanced the first systematic explanation of cognition based solely on biological principles since Aristotle. This was a risky strategy to adopt, given the intellectual currents of his time. Had it been more influential, the autopoietic theory of cognition might well have brought us much sooner to the trends currently at the forefront of the cognitive sciences, including dynamical systems, embodied and situated cognition, the emphasis on action and interaction, and other biologically based challenges to the computational paradigm, which Maturana opposed. I argue that the autopoietic theory of cognition was premature for several reasons. While it could be said that developments in the cognitive sciences have overtaken it, I believe Maturana's theory, which he developed with Varela and others, still has much to offer contemporary theorists, despite its limitations

What is cognition? It is now common knowledge that, so far, no one has a ready answer. It is much less generally acknowledged that this is a matter of strong concern when it comes to the further development of the cognitive sciences. We discuss how cognitivism provided a strongly human orientation on cognition, which hindered the development of the standard piecemeal approach, which has been so extremely successful in the biological sciences more generally: first study simple cases and then move onward to more difficult ones.