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

understanding. The extended mind hypothesis leads not only to questions about the
nature of mind, but also to the questions about the methods used to study mentality.
5.9 The Roots of Forward Engineering
The most typical methodology to be found in classical cognitive science is reverse
engineering. Reverse engineering involves observing the behaviour of an intact
system in order to infer the nature and organization of the system’s internal processes.
Most cognitive theories are produced by using a methodology called functional
analysis (Cummins, 1975, 1983), which uses experimental results to iteratively
carve a system into a hierarchy of functional components until a basic level of subfunctions,
the cognitive architecture, is reached.
A practical problem with functional analysis or reverse engineering is the frame
of reference problem (Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999). This problem arises during the distribution
of responsibility for the complexity of behaviour between the internal processes
of an agent and the external influences of its environment. Classical cognitive
science, a major practitioner of functional analysis, endorses the classical sandwich;
its functional analyses tend to attribute behavioural complexity to the internal processes
of an agent, while at the same time ignoring potential contributions of the
environment. In other words, the frame of reference problem is to ignore Simon’s
(1969) parable of the ant.
Embodied cognitive scientists frequently adopt a different methodology, forward
engineering. In forward engineering, a system is constructed from a set of
primitive functions of interest. The system is then observed to determine whether
it generates surprising or complicated behaviour. “Only about 1 in 20 ‘gets it’—that
is, the idea of thinking about psychological problems by inventing mechanisms
for them and then trying to see what they can and cannot do” (Minsky, personal
communication, 1995). This approach has also been called synthetic psychology
(Braitenberg, 1984). Reverse engineers collect data to create their models; in contrast,
forward engineers build their models first and use them as primary sources of
data (Dawson, 2004).
We noted in Chapter 3 that classical cognitive science has descended from the
seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy of René Descartes (1960, 1996). It was
observed in Chapter 4 that connectionist cognitive science descended from the early
eighteenth-century empiricism of John Locke (1977), which was itself a reaction
against Cartesian rationalism. The synthetic approach seeks “understanding by
building” (Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999), and as such permits us to link embodied cognitive
science to another eighteenth-century reaction against Descartes, the philosophy
of Giambattista Vico (Vico, 1990, 1988, 2002).
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 235