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

several hours to complete a task (Moravec, 1999), because the internal model of its
world was computationally expensive to create and update. The problem with the
sense-think-act cycle in robots like Shakey is that by the time the (slow) thinking is
finished, the resulting plan may fail because the world has changed in the meantime.
The subsumption architecture of behaviour-based robotics (Brooks, 1999, 2002)
attempted to solve such problems by removing the classical sandwich; it was explicitly
anti-representational. The logic of this radical move was that the world was its
own best representation (Clark, 1997).
Behaviour-based robotics took advantage of Simon’s (1969) parable of the
ant, reducing costly and complex internal representations by recognizing that the
external world is a critical contributor to behaviour. Why expend computational
resources on the creation and maintenance of an internal model of the world, when
externally the world was already present, open to being sensed and to being acted
upon? Classical cognitive science’s emphasis on internal representations and planning
was a failure to take this parable to heart.
Interestingly, action was more important to earlier cognitive theories. Take, for
example, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958, 1964;
Piaget, 1970a, 1970b, 1972; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). According to this theory, in
their early teens children achieve the stage of formal operations. Formal operations
describe adult-level cognitive abilities that are classical in the sense that
they involve logical operations on symbolic representations. Formal operations
involve completely abstract thinking, where relationships between propositions are
considered.
However, Piagetian theory departs from classical cognitive science by including
actions in the world. The development of formal operations begins with the
sensorimotor stage, which involves direct interactions with objects in the world.
In the next preoperational stage these objects are internalized as symbols. The
preoperational stage is followed by concrete operations. When the child is in the
stage of concrete operations, symbols are manipulated, but not in the abstract:
concrete operations are applied to “manipulable objects (effective or immediately
imaginable manipulations), in contrast to operations bearing on propositions or
simple verbal statements (logic of propositions)” (Piaget, 1972, p. 56). In short,
Piaget rooted fully representational or symbolic thought (i.e., formal operations)
in the child’s physical manipulation of his or her world. “The starting-point for the
understanding, even of verbal concepts, is still the actions and operations of the
subject” (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964, p. 284).
For example, classification and seriation (i.e., grouping and ordering entities)
are operations that can be formally specified using logic or mathematics. One goal of
Piagetian theory is to explain the development of such abstract competence. It does
so by appealing to basic actions on the world experienced prior to the stage of formal
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