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

The lofty goals of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and mathematical linguistics
that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s (and even as late as the 1970s)
have now given way to the realization that the ‘soft’ world of people and societies
is almost certainly not amenable to a precise, predictive, mathematical analysis
to anything like the same degree as is the ‘hard’ world of the physical universe.
(Devlin, 1996, p. 344)
As such a reaction, the key elements of embodied cognitive science can be portrayed
as an inversion of elements of the classical approach.
While classical cognitive science abandons Cartesian dualism in one sense,
by seeking materialist explanations of cognition, it remains true to it in another
sense, through its methodological solipsism (Fodor, 1980). Methodological solipsism
attempts to characterize and differentiate mental states without appealing to
properties of the body or of the world (Wilson, 2004), consistent with the Cartesian
notion of the disembodied mind.
In contrast, embodied cognitive science explicitly rejects methodological solipsism
and the disembodied mind. Instead, embodied cognitive science takes to heart
the message of Simon’s (1969) parable of the ant by recognizing that crucial contributors
to behavioural complexity include an organism’s environment and bodily
form. Rather than creating formal theories of disembodied minds, embodied cognitive
scientists build embodied and situated agents.
Classical cognitive science adopts the classical sandwich (Hurley, 2001), construing
cognition as an iterative sense-think-act cycle. There are no direct links
between sensing and acting from this perspective (Brooks, 1991); a planning process
involving the manipulation of internal models stands as a necessary intermediary
between perceiving and acting.
In contrast, embodied cognitive science strives to replace sense-think-act processing
with sense-act cycles that bypass representational processing. Cognition is
seen as the control of direct action upon the world rather than the reasoning about
possible action. While classical cognitive science draws heavily from the symbolmanipulating
examples provided by computer science, embodied cognitive science
steps further back in time, taking its inspiration from the accounts of feedback and
adaptation provided by cybernetics (Ashby, 1956, 1960; Wiener, 1948).
Shapiro (2011) invoked the theme of conceptualization to characterize embodied
cognitive science because it saw cognition as being directed action on the world.
Conceptualization is the view that the form of an agent’s body determines the concepts
that it requires to interact with the world. Conceptualization is also a view that
draws from embodied and ecological accounts of perception (Gibson, 1966, 1979;
Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Neisser, 1976); such theories construed perception as being
the result of action and as directing possible actions (affordances) on the world.
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 261