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

exploring how this problem might be solved by adding a modifiable connectionist
network to map relations between sensors and motors. Note that this approach
requires moving beyond a pure embodied account and taking advantage of connectionist
concepts.
In my opinion, it is the limitations inevitably encountered by forward engineers
that will provide incentive for a cognitive synthesis. Consider the strong antirepresentational
positions of radical embodied cognitive scientists (Chemero, 2009;
Noë, 2004). It is certainly astonishing to see how much interesting behaviour can
be generated by systems with limited internal representations. But how much of
cognition can be explained in a data-driven, antirepresentational manner before
researchers have to appeal to representations? For instance, is a radical embodied
cognitive science of natural language possible? If embodied cognitive scientists
take their theories to their limits, and are then open—as are natural computation
researchers—to classical or connectionist concepts, then an interesting and productive
cognitive synthesis is inevitable. That some embodied researchers (Clark, 1997)
have long been open to a synthesis between embodied and classical ideas is an
encouraging sign.
Similarly, radical connectionist researchers have argued that a great deal of
cognition can be accomplished without the need for explicit symbols and explicit
rules (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986a; Smolensky, 1988). Classical researchers have
acknowledged the incredible range of phenomena that have yielded to the fairly
simple PDP architecture (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988). But, again, how much can connectionists
explain from a pure PDP perspective, and what phenomena will elude
their grasp, demanding that classical ideas be reintroduced? Might it be possible
to treat networks as dynamic symbols, and then manipulate them with external
rules that are different from the learning rules that are usually applied? Once again,
recent ideas seem open to co-operative use of connectionist and classical ideas
(Smolensky & Legendre, 2006).
The synthetic approach provides a route that takes a cognitive scientist to the
limits of their theoretical perspective. This in turn will produce a theoretical tension
that will likely only be resolved when core elements of alternative perspectives are
seriously considered. Note that such a resolution will require a theorist to be open
to admitting different kinds of ideas. Rather than trying to show that their architecture
can do everything cognitive, researchers need to find what their architectures
cannot do, and then expand their theories by including elements of alternative, possibly
radically different, views of cognition.
This is not to say that the synthetic approach is the only methodology to be
used. Synthetic methods have their own limitations, and a complete cognitive science
requires interplay between synthesis and analysis (Dawson, 2004). In particular,
cognitive science ultimately is in the business of explaining the cognition of
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