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

does not do so by using concepts, categories, descriptions, or inferences. Time and
again in his accounts of seeing and visualizing, Pylyshyn describes early vision as
being “preconceptual” or “non-conceptual.”
This is important because of Pylyshyn’s (1984) characterization of the levels of
analysis of cognitive science. Some of the levels of analysis that he invoked—in particular,
the implementational and algorithmic levels—are identical to those levels
as discussed in Chapter 2 in this volume. However, Pylyshyn’s version of the computational
level of analysis is more restrictive than the version that was also discussed
in that earlier chapter.
For Pylyshyn (1984), a computational-level analysis requires a cognitive vocabulary.
A cognitive vocabulary captures generalizations by appealing to the contents
of representations, and it also appeals to lawful principles governing these contents
(e.g., rules of inference, the principle of rationality). “The cognitive vocabulary is
roughly similar to the one used by what is undoubtedly the most successful predictive
scheme available for human behavior—folk psychology” (p. 2).
When Pylyshyn (2003b, 2007) separates early vision from cognition, he is proposing
that the cognitive vocabulary cannot be productively used to explain early
vision, because early vision is not cognitive, it is preconceptual. Thus it is no accident
that when his theory of visual cognition intersects connectionist and embodied
cognitive science, it does so with components that are part of Pylyshyn’s account of
early vision. Connectionism and embodiment are appropriate in this component
of Pylyshyn’s theory because his criticism of these approaches is that they are not
cognitive, because they do not or cannot use a cognitive vocabulary!
398 Chapter 8