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

Ecological psychology, enactivism, and interactivism have the potential to transform perspectives on cognition and action by restoring their relevance to humans as persons. However, neither the mainstream information-processing approach nor the dynamics-oriented perspective explains how human language and symbolic thought arise from continuous agent-environment interaction. Treating dynamical and computational hypotheses as mutually exclusive leads to reductionism that hinders this challenge. Complementary descriptions, as proposed by Michael Polanyi and Howard Pattee, are needed to understand that cognizing systems are governed by both physical laws and emergent historical constraints. Some proposed solutions may ease the tension between these approaches and improve understanding of their interrelation.

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.