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

Vico based his philosophy on the analysis of word meanings. He argued that the
Latin term for truth, verum, had the same meaning as the Latin term factum, and
therefore concluded that “it is reasonable to assume that the ancient sages of Italy
entertained the following beliefs about the true: ‘the true is precisely what is made’”
(Vico, 1988, p. 46). This conclusion led Vico to his argument that humans could only
understand the things that they made, which is why he studied societal artifacts,
such as the law.
Vico’s work provides an early motivation for forward engineering: “To know
(scire) is to put together the elements of things” (Vico, 1988, p. 46). Vico’s account
of the mind was a radical departure from Cartesian disembodiment. To Vico, the
Latins “thought every work of the mind was sense; that is, whatever the mind does
or undergoes derives from contact with bodies” (p. 95). Indeed, Vico’s verum-factum
principle is based upon embodied mentality. Because the mind is “immersed and
buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things” (p. 97).
While the philosophical roots of forward engineering can be traced to Vico’s
eighteenth-century philosophy, its actual practice—as far as cognitive science is
concerned—did not emerge until cybernetics arose in the 1940s. One of the earliest
examples of synthetic psychology was the Homeostat (Ashby, 1956, 1960), which
was built by cyberneticist William Ross Ashby in 1948. The Homeostat was a system
that changed its internal states to maximize stability amongst the interactions
between its internal components and the environment. William Grey Walter (1963,
p. 123) noted that it was “like a fireside cat or dog which only stirs when disturbed,
and then methodically finds a comfortable position and goes to sleep again.”
Ashby’s (1956, 1960) Homeostat illustrated the promise of synthetic psychology.
The feedback that Ashby was interested in could not be analyzed mathematically;
it was successfully studied synthetically with Ashby’s device. Remember, too, that
when the Homeostat was created, computer simulations of feedback were still in
the future.
As well, it was easier to produce interesting behaviour in the Homeostat than
it was to analyze it. This is because the secret to its success was a large number of
potential internal states, which provided many degrees of freedom for producing
stability. At the same time, this internal variability was an obstacle to traditional
analysis. “Although the machine is man-made, the experimenter cannot tell at any
moment exactly what the machine’s circuit is without ‘killing’ it and dissecting out
the ‘nervous system’” (Grey Walter, 1963, p. 124).
Concerns about this characteristic of the Homeostat inspired the study
of the first autonomous robots, created by cyberneticist William Grey Walter
(1950a, 1950b, 1951, 1963). The first two of these machines were constructed in 1948
(de Latil, 1956); comprising surplus war materials, their creation was clearly an
act of bricolage. “The first model of this species was furnished with pinions from
236 Chapter 5