What Dynamic Approaches Have Taught Us About Cognition and What They Have Not: On Values in Motion and the Importance of Replicable Forms.

Summary

Cognitive science increasingly recognizes the importance of active bodies and their dynamic interaction with the environment, leading to an 'ecological turn' in the field. Ecological psychology, along with enactivism and interactivism, can transform views on cognition and action, but faces a challenge: neither information-processing nor dynamical models explain how human symbolic thought and language arise from continuous agent-environment interaction. Treating these approaches as mutually exclusive leads to reductionism. Instead, complementary descriptions—acknowledging both physical laws and emergent historical constraints—are needed to understand cognizing systems, easing tensions between the two perspectives.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Over the past several decades, research in the cognitive sciences has foregrounded the importance of active bodies and their continuous dependence on the changing environment, strengthening the relevance of dynamical models. These models have been steadily developed within the ecological psychology approach to cognition, which arguably contributes to the "ecological turn" we are witnessing today. The embodied and situated nature of cognition, regarded by some as a passing trend, is presently becoming a largely accepted assumption. In this paper, I claim that in light of these developments, ecological psychology, in alliance with related approaches, such as enactivism and interactivism, has the potential to deeply transform our perspectives on cognition and action, restoring their pertinence to humans as persons. However, an important challenge to the realization of this potential has to be noted: neither the mainstream information-processing approach nor the dynamics-oriented perspective on cognition provides an account of how the capacity of humans to use language and think "symbolically" can be derived from the continuous flow of agent-environment interaction. I will attempt to show that posing the "dynamical" and "computational" hypotheses about the nature of cognition as mutually exclusive approaches to cognition results in undesirable reductionism, which makes it difficult to meet this challenge. There are good reasons, advanced over half a century ago by, for example, Michael Polanyi or Howard Pattee, to think that we need complementary descriptions to understand cognizing systems, in order to grasp the fact that they are governed both by physical laws and by emergent historical constraints. Details of such a complementarity-based approach still await elucidation, but some proposed solutions have the potential to ease the tension between the information-processing and dynamical approaches to cognition and to lead to a better understanding of their interrelation.

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