Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

can do away with the body” (Hayles, 1999, p. 12).
Some would argue that similar ideas pervade classical cognitive science.
American psychologist Sylvia Scribner wrote that cognitive science “is haunted by a
metaphysical spectre. The spectre goes by the familiar name of Cartesian dualism,
which, in spite of its age, continues to cast a shadow over inquiries into the nature
of human nature” (Scribner & Tobach, 1997, p. 308).
In Chapter 3 we observed that classical cognitive science departed from the
Cartesian approach by seeking materialist explanations of cognition. Why then
should it be haunted by dualism?
To answer this question, we examine how classical cognitive science explains,
for instance, how a single agent produces different behaviours. Because classical
cognitive science appeals to the representational theory of mind (Pylyshyn, 1984), it
must claim that different behaviours must ultimately be rooted in different mental
representations.
If different behaviours are caused by differences between representations, then
classical cognitive science must be able to distinguish or individuate representational
states. How is this done? The typical position adopted by classical cognitive
science is called methodological solipsism (Fodor, 1980). Methodological solipsism
individuates representational states only in terms of their relations to other representational
states. Relations of the states to the external world—the agent’s environment—are
not considered. “Methodological solipsism in psychology is the view that
psychological states should be construed without reference to anything beyond the
boundary of the individual who has those states” (Wilson, 2004, p. 77).
The methodological solipsism that accompanies the representational theory of
mind is an example of the classical sandwich (Hurley, 2001). The classical sandwich
is the view that links between a cognitive agent’s perceptions and a cognitive agent’s
actions must be mediated by internal thinking or planning. In the classical sandwich,
models of cognition take the form of sense-think-act cycles (Brooks, 1999;
Clark, 1997; Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999). Furthermore, these theories tend to place a
strong emphasis on the purely mental part of cognition—the thinking—and at the
same time strongly de-emphasize the physical—the action. In the classical sandwich,
perception, thinking, and action are separate and unequal.
On this traditional view, the mind passively receives sensory input from its environment,
structures that input in cognition, and then marries the products of cognition
to action in a peculiar sort of shotgun wedding. Action is a by-product of genuinely
mental activity. (Hurley, 2001, p. 11)
Although connectionist cognitive science is a reaction against classical cognitivism,
this reaction does not include a rejection of the separation of perception and
action via internal representation. Artificial neural networks typically have undeveloped
models of perception (i.e., input unit encodings) and action (i.e., output
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 207