While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John (...) Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)

In 1998, Clark and Chalmers addressed a question that remained pivotal in the discussion afterwards: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Their inquiry, developed by many others, led to a questioning of the idea of the mind as a thing – a simple res cogitans – with a precise localization. I will discuss their theses, trying to show that the views of the pragmatists can provide us with a different scenario. For example, Peirce doesn’t (...) think we have to choose between an internalist stance and an externalist one, because “mind”, as any other thing, is “wherever it acts”, wherever it produces habits of behavior, wherever it guides action and produces “conscious” effects. For Peirce, as well as for Mead, habit is the key-word, not consciousness, not mind. Habit is not internal, and not properly external. It is something that lives “in the exercises that nourish it” and in the “actions to which it gives rise”. The social origin of consciousness, and the relevance of habits, as social and public structures that situate the mind, are effective pragmatist keys of interpretation that can enhance the actual field of the cognitive sciences. I will finally present a theoretical hypothesis on the role of the mind in cognition, based not on the extension of it, but, so to say, on the “intension”. In this sense, the cognitive can be read as the “intensive” trait of the pragmatic. (shrink)