Question 2 : How Does It Work?

1 What the book is about The Embodied Mind classiies all research in cognitive science into three major categories; cognitivist, emergent and enactive. Cognitivism is described as \no computation without representation" and is criticized for holding to the view of a world with pregiven features that are subsequently represented by cognitive systems. The criticism is not directed at the failure to answer questions of meaning. Instead, cognitivism is criticized for failing to take into account the feedback from action to perception via the actions of a situated, embodied cognitive agent in the real world. The emergence school (connectionism) is described as \learning representations via an optimal t between system and environmental features" and is criticized for being silent on the issue of representation. Despite the emergent school's focus on self-organization, it's lumped in the same boat as cognitivism due to its failure to take into account the perception/action loop alluded to earlier. The enactive approach is preceded by an extensive survey of color and color vision in birds, animals and humans. External objectivism (the view that colors are surface reeectances and are to be found in the external 1 world) is criticized for failing to account for the opponent nature of hues, colors as perceived attributes of the sky, afterimages and dreams and for neglecting the role of color vision in surface segmentation. Neurophysiological subjectivism (the view that colors are in the head) is criticized for failing to recognize that colors belong to a shared biological and cultural world. A circular deenition of color is adopted. It is argued that this circularity does not prevent color from exhibiting universals that can be studied by cognitive science. The discussion of color serves as a springboard for the introduction of the enactive approach. The enactive approach is presented as a middle way between the extremes of objectivism and (neurophysiological) subjectivism. Self-organization as viable, structural coupling between the cognitive system and the world (with appropriate perception/action loops) forms the kernel of the enactive program. The second major theme in the book is the nature of the self. A big departure is taken from all forms of materialism. A fundamental circularity is introduced between cognitive science and external behavior plus personal experience. While the role of cognitive science in performing an information processing characterization of behavior and experience is recognized, the entire scientiic endeavor called cognitive science is itself brought into circulation as collective …