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

tension? One approach to achieving synthesis in the cognitive dialectic may involve
considering why the differences highlighted in Table 9-1 have arisen.
One context for considering Table 9-1 is the Indian fable of the six blind men
and the elephant, the subject of a famous nineteenth-century poem by John Godfrey
Saxe (Saxe, 1868). Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant, and comes
away with a very different sense of the animal. The one who touched the tusk likens
an elephant to a spear, the one who felt the knee compares the animal to a tree, the
one who grabbed the tail likens it to a rope, and so on. After each has explored their
part of the elephant, they reconvene to discuss its nature, and find that each has a
dramatically different concept of the animal. The result is a heated, and ultimately
unresolved, dispute: “And so these men of Indostan / Disputed loud and long, / Each
in his own opinion / Exceeding stiff and strong, / Though each was partly in the right,
/ And all were in the wrong!” (p. 260).
To apply the moral of this story to the differences highlighted in Table 9-1, it is
possible that the different approaches to cognitive science reflect differences that
arise because each pays attention to different aspects of cognition, and none directs
its attention to the complete picture. This view is consistent with one characterization
of cognitive science that appeared at the cusp of the connectionist revolution
(Norman, 1980).
Norman (1980) characterized a mature classical cognitive science that had
decomposed human cognition into numerous information processing subsystems
that defined what Norman called the pure cognitive system. The core of the pure
cognitive system was a physical symbol system.
Norman’s (1980) concern, though, was that the classical study of the pure cognitive
system was doomed to fail because it, like one of the blind men, was paying
attention to only one component of human cognition. Norman, prior to the rise of
either connectionist or embodied cognitive science, felt that more attention had to
be paid to the biological mechanisms and the surrounding environments of cognitive
agents.
The human is a physical symbol system, yes, with a component of pure cognition
describable by mechanisms. . . . But the human is more: the human is an animate
organism, with a biological basis and an evolutionary and cultural history.
Moreover, the human is a social animal, interacting with others, with the environment,
and with itself. The core disciplines of cognitive science have tended to
ignore these aspects of behavior. (Norman, 1980, pp. 2–4)
Norman (1980) called for cognitive scientists to study a variety of issues that would
extend their focus beyond the study of purely classical cognition. This included
returning to a key idea of cybernetics, feedback between agents and their environments.
“The concept has been lost from most of cognitive studies, in part because
of the lack of study of output and of performance” (p. 6). For Norman, cognitive
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