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Dynamics and Cognition

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Abstract

Many who advocate dynamical systems approaches to cognitive science believe themselves committed to the thesis of extended cognition and to the rejection of representation. I argue that this belief is false. In part, this misapprehension rests on a warrantless re-conception of cognition as intelligent behavior. In part also, it rests on thinking that conceptual issues can be resolved empirically. Once these issues are sorted out, the way is cleared for a dynamical systems approach to cognition that is free to retain the standard conception of cognition as taking place in the head, and over representations.

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Notes

  1. Van Gelder and Port (1995) trace its application to psychology back to the 1940s, especially in the field of cybernetics. However, as they recognize, it was not until the late 1980s, when dynamical systems theory was deployed for the analysis of some connectionist networks, that DCS began to pick up speed.

  2. Of course, this marks a sort of idealization given that predators and prey come in discrete packages.

  3. A referee kindly reminded me that this conception of cognition of course predates cognitive science, having roots in Descartes as well as the British Empiricists.

  4. This would be an example of what Clark and Toribio (1994) describe as a representation hungry process.

  5. Note that this is not intended as an analysis of representation, in the sense that Dretske (1988) or Fodor (1990) hoped to achieve. See Hatfield (2009: 25) for discussion.

  6. I’m assuming that when dynamicists appeal to an organism’s constant contact with the environment, they also see the contact as being with some stimulus that specifies the relevant features of the environment. If constant contact were with a stimulus that did not specify its source, then it is hard to know what use constant contact with it would afford.

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Acknowledgments

I'm grateful to audiences at the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania for constructive discussion. Ken Aizawa deserves special thanks for his detailed comments and assistance with several of the figures within.

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  1. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Lawrence A. Shapiro

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Correspondence to Lawrence A. Shapiro.

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Shapiro, L.A. Dynamics and Cognition. Minds & Machines 23, 353–375 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9290-2

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