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

e essentially embodied and embedded and still depend crucially on brains which
compute and represent” (p. 143).
The reason that an embodied cognitive scientist such as Clark may be reluctant
to eliminate representations completely is because one can easily consider situations
in which internal representations perform an essential function. Clark (1997)
suggested that some problems might be representation hungry, in the sense that
the very nature of these problems requires their solutions to employ internal representations.
A problem might be representation hungry because it involves features
that are not reliably present in the environment, as in reasoning about absent
states, or in counterfactual reasoning. A problem might also be representation
hungry if it involves reasoning about classes of objects that are extremely abstract,
because there is a wide variety of different physical realizations of class instances
(for instance, reasoning about “computers”!).
The existence of representation-hungry problems leaves Clark (1997) open to
representational theories in cognitive science, but these theories must be placed
in the context of body and world. Clark didn’t want to throw either the representational
or embodied babies out with the bathwater (Hayes, Ford, & Agnew, 1994).
Instead, he viewed a co-operative system in which internal representations can be
used when needed, but the body and the world can also be used to reduce internal
cognitive demands by exploiting external scaffolds. “We will not discover the right
computational and representational stories unless we give due weight to the role of
body and local environment—a role that includes both problem definition and, on
occasion, problem solution” (Clark, 1997, p. 154).
It would seem, then, that internal representations are not a mark of the classical,
and some cognitive scientists are open to the possibility of hybrid accounts of
cognition. That is, classical researchers are extending their representational theories
by paying more attention to actions on the world, while embodied researchers
are open to preserving at least some internal representations in their theories.
An example hybrid theory that appeals to representations, networks, and actions
(Pylyshyn, 2003c, 2007) is presented in detail in Chapter 8.
7.7 Explicit Rules versus Implicit Knowledge
Connectionists have argued that one mark of the classical is its reliance on explicit
rules (McClelland, Rumelhart, & Hinton, 1986). For example, it has been claimed
that all classical work on knowledge acquisition “shares the assumption that the
goal of learning is to formulate explicit rules (proposition, productions, etc.) which
capture powerful generalizations in a succinct way” (p. 32).
Explicit rules may serve as a mark of the classical because it has also been argued
that they are not characteristic of other approaches in cognitive science, particularly
Marks of the Classical? 345