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

summarizes that text visually by using size, colour, and font. Typically, the more frequently
a term appears in a text, the larger is its depiction in a word cloud. The goal
of a word cloud is to summarize a document in a glance. As a way to illustrate contrasts
between classical, connectionist, and embodied cognitive sciences, I compare
word clouds created for each of chapters 3, 4, and 5. Figure 9-1 presents the word
cloud generated for Chapter 3 on classical cognitive science. Note that it highlights
words that are prototypically classical, such as physical, symbol, system, language,
grammar, information, expression, as well as key names like Turing and Newell.
Figure 9-1. Word cloud generated from the text of Chapter 3 on classical cognitive
science.
An alternative word cloud emerges from Chapter 4 on connectionist cognitive
science, as shown in Figure 9-2. This word cloud picks out key connectionist elements
such as network, input, hidden, output, units, connections, activity, learning,
weights, and neural; names found within the cloud are McCulloch, Berkeley,
Rescorla-Wagner, and Rumelhart. Interestingly, the words connectionist and classical
are equally important in this cloud, probably reflecting the fact that connectionist
properties are typically introduced by contrasting them with (problematic)
classical characteristics. The word clouds in Figures 9-1 and 9-2 differ strikingly
from one another.
A third word cloud that is very different from the previous two is provided in
Figure 9-3, which was compiled from Chapter 5 on embodied cognitive science. The
words that it highlights include behaviour, world, environment, control, agent, robot,
body, nature, extended, and mind; names captured include Grey Walter, Clark, and
Ashby. Once again, embodied and classical are both important terms in the chapter,
Towards a Cognitive Dialectic 401