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

Turing machine, can easily be described as pure sense-act processors (Wells, 1996).
Also, earlier electromechanical computers often used external memories to scaffold
processing because of the slow speed of their componentry.
Furthermore, prototypical classical architectures in cognitive science appeal to
processes that are central to the embodied approach. For example, modern production
systems have been extended to include sensing and acting, and have used these
extensions to model (or impose) constraints on behaviour, such as our inability to use
one hand to do two tasks at the same time (Kieras & Meyer, 1997; Meyer et al., 2001;
Meyer & Kieras, 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Meyer et al., 1995). A production system for
solving the Towers of Hanoi problem also has been formulated that uses the external
towers and discs as the external representation of the problem (Vera & Simon, 1993).
Some have argued that the classical emphasis on internal thinking, at the expense
of external sense-acting, simply reflects the historical development of the classical
approach and does not reflect its intrinsic nature (Newell, 1990).
Approaching this issue from the opposite direction, many embodied cognitive
scientists are open to the possibility that the representational stance of classical cognitive
science may be required to provide accounts of some cognitive phenomena.
For instance, Winograd and Flores (1987a) made strong arguments for embodied
accounts of cognition. They provided detailed arguments of how classical views of
cognition are dependent upon the disembodied view of the mind that has descended
from Descartes. They noted that “detached contemplation can be illuminating, but
it also obscures the phenomena themselves by isolating and categorizing them”
(pp. 32–33). However, in making this kind of observation, they admitted the existence
of a kind of reasoning called detached contemplation. Their approach offers an
alternative to representational theories, but does not necessarily completely abandon
the possibility of internal representations.
Similarly, classical cognitive scientists who appeal exclusively to internal representations
and embodied cognitive scientists who completely deny internal representations
might be staking out extreme and radical positions to highlight the differences
between their approaches (Norman, 1993). Some embodied cognitive scientists have
argued against this radical polarization of cognitive science, such as Clark (1997):
Such radicalism, I believe, is both unwarranted and somewhat counterproductive.
It invites competition where progress demands cooperation. In most cases, at
least, the emerging emphasis on the roles of body and world can be seen as complementary
to the search for computational and representational understandings.
(Clark, 1997, p. 149)
Clark (1997) adopted this position because he realized that representations may be
critical to cognition, provided that appeals to representation do not exclude appeals
to other critical, embodied elements: “We should not be too quick to reject the more
traditional explanatory apparatuses of computation and representation. Minds may
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