Adaptive Behavior http://adb.sagepub.com/
From perception to action to perception in action: a review of Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory Paulo De Jesus Adaptive Behavior 2014 22: 360 DOI: 10.1177/1059712314546052 The online version of this article can be found at: http://adb.sagepub.com/content/22/5/360
Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
International Society of Adaptive Behavior
Additional services and information for Adaptive Behavior can be found at: Email Alerts: http://adb.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://adb.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://adb.sagepub.com/content/22/5/360.refs.html
>> Version of Record - Oct 6, 2014 What is This?
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
Book Review
From perception to action to perception in action: a review of Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory
Adaptive Behavior 2014, Vol. 22(5) 360–366 Ó The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1059712314546052 adb.sagepub.com
Paulo De Jesus Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory. Series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, Vol. 15. John Mark Bishop & Andrew Owen Martin (Eds.). 2014, X, 253 pp. ISBN 978-3-319-05107-9. Hardcover £126.00
1 Introduction Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory presents a collection of papers that analyse the philosophical foundations of sensorimotor theory and explore its application to various empirical domains. In this review, I examine the contributing chapters and offer some comments, based on these contributions, on the role of sensorimotor theory within modern cognitive science as well as its place within embodied/enactive cognitive science.
2 The background The volume under consideration emerged from the first AISB1 member’s workshop on ‘Sensorimotor Theories of Perception’, which was held at Goldsmiths, University of London on September 2012. In the preface, it is pointed out that the contributors to the workshop were asked not only to comment on the contemporary state of sensorimotor theories of perception but also to ‘reflect on their place within modern Cognitive Science’. In certain respects, much more could have perhaps been said about the latter request and so with this in mind I will frame much of this review around this particular issue. A further motivation for doing this is that it will hopefully also shed some light on the role of sensorimotor theory in relation to the embodied/enactive cognition paradigm. For centuries, perception and indeed cognition more broadly, has traditionally been understood as a rather passive representationalist affair. Perception was essentially something that happened to the agent and mostly in his head. This article of faith has, however, come under intense scrutiny from a number of thinkers who in various ways have cast doubt on its inherent plausibility. Most recently within cognitive science researchers from a variety of fields have presented convincing arguments
as well as empirical evidence to undermine traditional intuitions. In contrast to the tradition, perception is here cast as essentially embodied and active, and not necessarily completely reducible to brain mechanisms. Tradition notwithstanding, the idea that perception is embodied and active does have a rich historical precedent, in both psychology and philosophy. In psychology the idea is most commonly associated with the ecological approach to psychology initiated by James Gibson (1979), while in philosophy similar ideas can be found both in continental phenomenology (MerleauPonty, 1945/2012) and American pragmatism (Dewey, 1896). Following in this intellectual lineage, the idea has recently been thrust into the limelight thanks to the seminal work of Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noe¨ (2001), in the process generating a huge amount of interest and debate within cognitive science. Thus, sensorimotor theory (ST), as it is now known, stems concretely from this work by O’Regan and Noe¨, which in retrospect can be seen to have given birth to this area of research. In contrast to traditional accounts in cognitive science, which take perception to be ultimately reduced to computational processes in the brain, the authors make the bold claim that perception is constituted by embodied agents engaging with the world through skilful action, not just happenings in the head.
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK Corresponding author: Paulo De Jesus, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, 29 St James, London SE14 6NW, UK. Email:
[email protected]
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
De Jesus
361
It is practical knowledge expressed through sensorimotor know-how that constitutes perception. This idea of sensorimotor know-how is then cashed out in terms of a cognitive system’s grasp of ‘sensorimotor contingencies’, which are understood as systematic lawful dependencies corresponding to features of an agent’s sensory apparatus and features of the agent’s environment. They are interrelations between actual and possible perceptions, sensations, actions and movements. According to the ST theorist, my perception of a whole tomato for example, is constituted by an implicit understanding of the ways in which my potential movements in relation to the tomato, or its movement it relation to me, will bring further aspects of its shape into view. Accordingly, ‘vision is a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowledge of what we call sensorimotor contingencies’ (O’Regan & Noe, 2001, p. 940). It is worth noting here, as Loughlin (p. 107) points out in his contribution, ‘that there is nothing inherently controversial in the claim that what an agent does influences what the agent perceives’. Where O’Regan and Noe’s ST does differ from this more commonplace view is on the constitutive role it places on embodied know-how and practical understanding. According to ST, sensorimotor contingencies are more than merely causally important to perception, they actively constitute it. These brief remarks on the nature of ST should already be enough to highlight one of its important implication, perhaps the most important, the fact that this view of perception in action lends strong support to an alternative non-cognitivists conception of cognition. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that in most respects, ST forms the very bedrock of so-called embodied cognitive science (Froese & Ziemke, 2009). This also provides one rough-and-ready answer to the question of how ST stands in relation to modern cognitive science. On the face of it, it appears deeply antagonistic and the source of a plausible alternative framework to mainstream accounts. With this in mind, we can now take a closer look at the contributions of this volume and see whether this initial answer is indeed backed up.
3 The contributions The 16 relatively short chapters collected in this volume are loosely divided into two groups. The first deals primarily with the theoretical and philosophical foundations of ST, while the second explores some of the theory’s current applications to human computer interaction, developmental psychology, virtual reality, robotics and linguistics. For the purpose of this review, the chapters are not reviewed in sequential order as they appear in the volume.
The editors, Mark Bishop and Andrew Martin, set the scene for the volume with a very engaging introduction, which places ST within enactivism and offers two broad possible interpretations of the field. The two interpretations are roughly coextensive with Alva Noe¨’s and Kevin O’Regan’s subsequent distinctive development of ST. The authors then suggest that these two strands can be understood in non-computationalist amenable terms, which takes the connection between life and mind seriously, and in more computationalist amenable terms, which places little emphasis on this connection or on any connection to a particular material substrate and concentrates more on the cognitive access to phenomenal conscious experiences. In light of this interpretation, Bishop and Martin then assess ST in the broader context of artificial intelligence/robotics to establish whether systems developed on the theoretical basis of either strand would be considered genuinely cognitive. They conclude by suggesting that the computationalist-based ST, though an improvement on traditional disembodied cognitivism, is nonetheless bound to encounter similar difficulties, as did the earlier abstract functionalist accounts of cognition. It is worth pausing at this point to consider this interpretation of ST presented by Bishop and Martin, as the papers in this volume implicitly, at times explicitly, fall within one or other strand. Insofar as this is the case, it also further allows a first, again rough-andready, assessment of how these two distinct strands of ST sit not only within modern cognitive science but also within embodied/enactive cognitive science itself. So here already we can point out that, since ST can be interpreted along two connected yet distinct strands, it highlights how embodied/enactive cognitive science itself can also be developed and understood along two distinct strands. To put this in the broader context of cognitive science, we can use a distinction introduced by Di Paolo (2014), which echoes that of Bishop and Martin, to rephrase the issue. Similarly to Bishop and Martin, Di Paolo suggests that O’Regan and Noe¨’s (2001) claim that perception requires an agent’s mastery of the laws of sensorimotor contingencies can be broadly interpreted in two very distinct ways. Di Paolo suggests that the ‘mastery’ involved here can be broadly understood as either ‘in-the-head’ or ‘not-just-in-the-head’. When mastery of sensorimotor contingencies are conceived of as in-the-head they can be understood as states that can sufficiently be accounted for simply by the functional architecture of the agent. Though the label suggests that these states be realised solely in the head of the agent, this need not be the case; nonetheless, the result of this conception is internalist representationalism. By contrast, interpreted as not-just-in-the-head sensorimotor contingencies are conceived as non-representational forms of embodied know-how, which cannot be reduced to an agent’s functional architecture.
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
362
Adaptive Behavior 22(5)
The exact details of these accounts need not concern us here, the crucial point I wish to highlight is that there are different ways that embodiment itself can be understood, some more amenable to traditional cognitivists accounts than others. The importance of this is that contemporary ST, more than most other accounts of perception and cognition, brings this point clearly to the fore. Moreover, in relation to the volume under discussion, it clearly appears to be divided along these two lines, between those positions that can easily be assimilated into the tradition and those that reject it outright. As Bishop and Martin suggest, the work of Kevin O’Regan clearly epitomises the former. O’Regan’s contribution begins by providing a brief overview of ST followed by a more in depth exposition of his more recent development of it. In particular, O’Regan presents the ST as an account of phenomenal conscious experience more broadly and not perception alone. Here O’Regan argues that phenomenal consciousness involves two related but distinct parts, one relating to the quality of sensations, the other relating to whether these qualities are consciously experienced. In connection to the second part, O’Regan explains that something akin to ‘higher order’ cognitive mechanisms, mechanisms similar to those proposed by advocates of so-called ‘higher order thought’ theories of consciousness, will be required to fully explain how any system can be said to be conscious of something. Therefore, ‘a second mechanism, namely a form of higher order cognitive access, is additionally required to make the experienced qualities conscious’ (p. 27). This is in part O’Regan’s response to those theorists – those who favour the non-computationalist/not-just-in-the-head – variety of ST. We should note here that an implication of O’Regan’s account is that with one stroke it eliminates consciousness from the vast majority of living organisms in our planet. This is rather curious and indeed somewhat ironic, as in the beginning of the paper O’Regan speculates that one possible reason ST hasn’t been more warmly accepted within the wider cognitive science community is due to an ‘anthropocentric chauvinism’ (p. 27), which is intent in holding ‘onto the last bastion of humanity’. Arguably, O’Regan’s demand for this second mechanism entrenches him deeper into anthropocentric chauvinism than he might have anticipated. The two chapters directly following O’Regan’s explore the connections, as well as the divergence, between contemporary ST and continental existential phenomenology. Rachel Paine explores the work of O’Regan from a Heideggerian viewpoint, and assesses it in light of Hubert Dreyfus’s influential critique of traditional accounts of cognition in artificial intelligence. Paine explores several ways in which O’Regan can be understood as positively addressing Dreyfus Heideggerian concerns. The author then goes further in
suggesting that O’Regan’s account is in several respects even ‘more Heideggerian than that of Dreyfus’ himself. Paine concludes, however, by highlighting that O’Regan leaves out any role for emotion and that Heidegger could here offer useful insights to plug this deficiency. Ken Pepper also draws from the phenomenological tradition and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s to advance a phenomenological interpretation of sensorimotor understanding. Upon uncovering three possible difficulties for Noe¨’s account of visual perception, Pepper draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as a means of addressing these objections. In particular, the author appeals to the concepts of the ‘body schema’ and ‘sedimentation’ to enrich Noe¨’s account. The contribution by Jack Wadham begins by highlighting some internal inconsistencies within Noe¨’s account of visual perception and proposes a means of rectification. According to Wadham, Noe¨’s account of perceptual content is incompatible with his account of perspectival content via ‘p-properties’. P-properties refer to those visual properties an object has from a particular perspective. Wadham makes the case that Noe¨’s ‘virtual content thesis’, which suggests that our visual field is ‘virtually present’, in the sense that it is not given all at once in complete detail but is accessed as and when it is needed, implies that the p-properties are invisible, which is in deep contrast to the role these actually play within his overall theory. Wadham concludes by offering his ‘appearance-pattern theory’ as a possible resolution to this contradiction. Similarly, Victor Loughlin finds internal difficulties for ST. The chapter places ST in the broader debate surrounding the ‘extended mind hypothesis’ advanced by Clark and Chalmers (1998). Or more specifically the ‘causation/constitution fallacy’ of which accounts of this ilk (the not-just-in-the-head conceptions of cognition) are said to fall prey to. Some theorist have attacked ST on the grounds that it commits a causal/ constitution fallacy, which accordingly rests on a conflation of the causal contributors of perception for its constituent parts. According to Loughlin, ST as originally conceived by O’Regan and Noe¨ commits this fallacy and has no plausible response to it. We can note that the author relies on in-the-head interpretation of ST for his conclusion and suggests that the only way to overcome the said fallacy is by advocating a not-in-the-head interpretation of sensorimotor know-how. The chapter is concluded with a suggestion that Hutto and Myin’s (2013) radical enactive account of ST has the key theoretical resources needed. Alfonsina Scarinzi investigates ST’s standing within the broader framework of enactivism. The conclusion the author draws from her investigation is that ST is merely ‘semi-enactive because they are essentially limited in scope’ (p. 70). Here Scarinzi indirectly echoes
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
De Jesus
363
Paine’s contribution in this volume and more directly the sentiments generally held by most proponents of ‘autopoietic enactivism’ in particular, which hold that ST lacks an account of agency/subjectivity. The term autopoietic enactivism was coined by Hutto and Myin (2013) to refer to a branch of enactivism that emerged from the original work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) and that places the theory of autopoiesis and biological autonomy at the centre of its account of cognition.2 This chapter thus deals with an issue that is turning out to be a real sticking point amongst not only the enactive community but in embodied cognitive science at large. Indeed, in most respects, this corresponds directly to the two distinctive approaches/interpretations of ST highlighted by the editors. Computationalist amenable ST lacks an account of agency/subjectivity while the non-computationalist amenable variety begins by first providing such an account. The chapter also raises a further point, which, just as the proceeding one, could have some implications for a unified embodied cognitive science. This relates to the incompatibility between ecological and enactive (of the autopoietic kind) approaches to perception. According to Scarinzi, who here is following the great majority of autopoietic enactivism theorists, ecological psychology stemming from the work of Gibson is strictly incompatible with this brand of enactivism. This conclusion, however, strikes me as being a bit premature; I believe that the status of ecological psychology within enactivism and particularly autopoietic enactivism is still very much an open question. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the arguments for incompatibility advanced by Scarinzi rest on one particular conception of ‘affordances’, which is not advocated by all ecological psychologists. It is beyond the scope of this review to investigate this issue any further; here it is brought up simply as a means of highlighting that it is far from clear-cut and that it presents another potential unresolved source of tension for ST and enactivism more broadly (see for example Chamero, 2009, for a conception of affordances, which, prima facie at least, seems compatible with autopoietic enactivism; see also the contribution by Rucinska, this volume). This particular contribution then also raises some important meta-theoretical issues regarding the wider enactive cognition paradigm (Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010). The chapter by Joel Parthmore presents a reconstruction, through the lenses of unified conceptual space theory, of the original O’Regan and Noe¨ (2001) sensorimotor account dubbed ‘sensorimotor++’ (p. 137). Drawing from Gaa¨rdenfors’s conceptual spaces theory and enactivism, Parthemore sketches out a model that makes room for the role of emotional affect and the somatosensory system in ST. These
additional aspects are then used as a potential means of accounting for ‘salience’ in agents and the emergence of concepts. Parthemore thus also echoes a point, made in several places throughout the volume, that unless meaning is presupposed the ST account would fail to get off the ground. Caroline Lyon shifts the focus away from the theoretical and philosophical considerations of the preceding contributors towards more empirical concerns. Drawing from her own experimental work in developmental robotics as well as other empirical studies, Lyon argues for the importance of understanding perception in richer multi-modal terms in contradistinction to the narrower focus on visual perception found in ST – a point equally echoed by Joel Parthemore in his contribution. Lyon makes a convincing case that ST accounts of perception that focus primarily on vision and touch are in fact inadequate for accounting for other sensory modalities, particularly audition. According to Lyon, including sound in accounts of perception would strongly enrich ST accounts in general. Moreover, Lyon concludes by suggesting that although ST could usefully be applied to other sensory modalities, it should not be assumed that these are active in the same manner in which visual perception requires action. In the case of audition and especially for the perception of speech for example, Lyon convincingly demonstrates that ‘the subject can commonly be either active or passive’. From a information-theoretic perspective, Gamez offers two interlinked hypotheses, which in most respects are in stark contrast to contemporary ST. Nonetheless, these two hypotheses also appear to epitomise the in-the-head conception of ST. The first hypothesis suggests that the differences between our conscious sensations (vision sound, smell, etc.) could be linked to the various ways our senses ‘process and structure information’. While the second hypothesis suggests that the organisation of conscious sensations into conscious perception of the external world could be linked to our mastery of sensorimotor contingencies. In contrast to ST, Gamez maintains that ‘neural activity patterns in the brain are correlated with conscious contents’ (p. 161). Accordingly, the brain learns these patterns by interacting with the world and so when these are reactivated in such a trained brain, they can ‘potentially be correlated with conscious contents independently of the current environment’ (p. 161). Such phenomena as conscious sensations without motor action. Conscious sensations produced by direct stimulation of the brain, or the apparent failure of sensory substitution systems to generate genuine visual sensations in congenitally blind subjects, are argued to give credence to these hypotheses. The author concludes by making suggestions on how these hypotheses could be empirically tested.
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
364
Adaptive Behavior 22(5)
In her excellent contribution, Zuzanna Rucinska creatively applies insights from ST to developmental psychology. More specifically, drawing from O’Regan and Noe¨’s (2001) augmented by ecological psychology, Rucinska offers an account of the symbolic pretend play of pre-verbal children grounded in ‘action’ rather than in ‘representations’. Rucinska draws on Gibson’s notion of affordance to complement ST and argues that ‘sensorimotor affordances’ can help explain imaginative play in young children, thus providing a nonrepresentationalist theory of pretence. Accordingly, a young child’s ability to pretend that a banana is a phone for example, involves direct ‘on-line’ capacities rather than ‘off-line’ conceptual resources or internal representations. In line with standard ST accounts, pretence, just like perceiving, ‘is a way of acting’. Rucinska thus provides a very promising way of understanding a phenomenon that has commonly been assumed to require representations and in the process opens up new lines of inquire for future work. Following the same anti-representationalist approach, Gilles and Kleinsmith in their chapter use insights from ST to argue the case for a nonrepresentationalist account of user-interface design, their aim being to push user-interface design away ‘from traditional graphical user interfaces to more bodily forms of interaction such as gesture or movement tracking’ (p. 201). According to the authors, the true payoff of adopting ‘bodily’ as opposed to representationalist-based interfaces is that they can positively exploit our prior embodied ‘non-representational’ skills of worldly interactions – something that traditional representational approaches to interaction design are unable to adequately capture. Gillies and Kleinsmith conclude with an illustration of the general idea by introducing an application used to design interactions with video game characters. By contrast to the chapters by Rucinska, and Gilles and Kleinsmith, Hoffman presents some fascinating work, which suggests that cognition does involve a minimal form of inner representation. As a means of shedding some light on ‘minimally cognitive’ behaviours, Hoffman draws from work in the field of cognitive robotics. More specifically, Hoffman presents a collection of case studies involving a quadruped robot in order to explore this phenomenon more concretely, and contrasts the concepts of body schema, forward internal models and sensorimotor contingencies. These latter concepts are in turn assessed in the context of their relative contributions to cognitive robotics. In light of these studies, the author presents two opposing interpretations of the resulting work – one based on a ‘grounded cognition’ approach and the other on a non-representationalist enactive approach. Hoffman concludes by highlighting the difficulties and limitations involved in engineering a truly enactive/non-representational system and as a
consequence advocates a minimally representation approach. The contributions by Rucinska, Gilles and Kleinsmith, and Hoffman all explicitly deal with one of the most contentious issues within modern cognitive science. Indeed, representationalism vs nonrepresentationalism has now become one of the central battlegrounds for distinguishing between cognitivist and non-cognitivists cognitive science. But, as this volume clearly highlights, the debate over representationalism is itself a central issue within embodied cognition in general and enactivism in particular. Let me here make one brief observation regarding what I take to be an inherent ambiguity, an equivocation even, between the notions of representations and representing. This ambiguity surfaces at various points throughout this volume (e.g., Scarinzi, Lyon, Parthemore) and so needs some further clarification. Regardless of where one’s personal views on the representationalism vs non-representationalism debate lie, it is important we do not confuse the representational activities of cognitive agents with representations as theoretical posits deployed by theorists in order to explain these activities. Thus, while cognitive systems can arguably be said to use external representations in some sense or other, this should not automatically be taken to mean that this activity also involves internal mental representations. For example, Rucinska claims that ‘Without the need to represent what they’re doing, children engage in pretend play by enacting typical routines stemming from perception (p. 185). This phrase strikes me as potentially misleading and could easily confuse. Surely the very act of pretending that a banana-is-a-phone is a representational act. It is a representational act because the child takes one thing (a banana) to stand for another thing (a phone). Nonetheless, the activity being a representational one does not in and of itself imply that it involves internal mental representations, which appears to be the default assumption when speaking about representations and the intuition behind Rucinska’s claim. The same follows for Gilles and Kleinsmith; though graphics-based user interfaces differ from bodily based ones, they are nonetheless both representational. Enactivists in their haste to exorcise mental representations tend to overlook this important distinction. In so doing, it overlooks an important dimension of cognitive agents – their inherent representational capacities. Joel Parthemore in his contribution goes some way towards recognising this, but falls short of explicitly acknowledging it. Gibbs and Devlin in their contribution explore the relationship between perception in ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ environments in the context of ST of perception. To this end, the authors present a survey of sensory substitution/sensory augmentation devices, so-called ‘enactive interfaces’, and consider what sort of device might
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
De Jesus
365
be used to study this relationship empirically. Drawing on ST, the authors challenge the ‘unspoken assumption’ that pictorial (moving as well as static) images viewed on screens are processed in much the same manner as real world images. Accordingly, the sensorimotor contingencies, which apply in the context of a virtual environment, are significantly different from those involved in real-world perception and it is proposed that these differences could account for the differences found between ‘normal’ perception and the perception of pictures. The authors also propose a classification of enactive interface systems that would allow for a more unified and systematic empirical investigation, which could benefit both the study of enactive interface systems as well as ST. Finally, Stephen Cowley’s concluding chapter offers a rich exposition of distributed language as languaging and the role of sensorimotor contingencies therein. Cowley convincingly argues that a predominant fixation with the written word has had some undesirable side-effects in our conception, understanding and studying of language. To remedy these shortcomings, Cowley advocates a thoroughly interactive/distributed/ enactive account of language, or following Maturana, languaging. Importantly, language cannot be reduced to structural couplings in the Maturana vein nor sensorimotor contingencies in the vein of O’Regan and Noe¨. Thus, ‘linguistic activity (.) is best conceptualized as sense-saturated coordination or interactivity’ (p. 249). Cowley goes on to present a case study to illustrate both the role of action and language in perception and to highlight the above point that languaging cannot be successfully reduced to abstract computations in the head, nor embodied sensorimotor contingencies.
the relationship between contemporary ST and more traditional cognitive science is far from clear-cut. Issues to do with computation, representations, the connection between life and mind, the nature of subjectivity and agency, and the status of ecological psychology within enactivism, all remain open issues that first need to be clarified by ST before it can be said to present a true alternative unified framework for cognitive science. A failure to do this would not only make it difficult to integrate all these related strands into truly plausible unified alternative framework but also continue to make the dividing lines between traditional and non-traditional cognitive science distinctively blurry. On the other hand, some will certainly fail to see any problems here. The intuition being that what cognitive science really needs, and is currently in the process of undergoing, is a tinkering here and there, whereby cognitivism and embodiment are brought closer together. Indeed, as several chapters also highlight, much successful work has been done despite these underlying unresolved issues. In this case, rather than attempting to overthrow cognitivism, one should merely draw from embodied cognition to correct and so enrich cognitivism. Indeed, this would appear to be a central intuition guiding the in-the-head conception of ST. Still, whatever researchers eventually settle on, it appears clear that it is precisely here where most theoretical and conceptual grounding work will need to take place. Ultimately, it appears that contemporary ST is clearly blossoming while its role within both traditional cognitive science and embodied cognitive science is anything but clear-cut.
5 Concluding remarks 4 Discussion Let us pause here briefly to consider the possible answers to the two questions presented at the start of the workshop. These were: ‘What is the current state of ST?’ and ‘What is its place within modern cognitive science?’ While we received strong evidence for concluding that ST continues to be an inspirational resource for ongoing theoretical and empirical research, its exact role within modern cognitive science remains less clear. It is worth noting here once again, as pointed out at the start, that the second question was not explicitly addressed by any of the contributions. One can only speculate why. Certainly one reason would seem to lie in the inherent complexity of the task at hand. As various chapters make abundantly clear, there are several interrelated issues at work here that make it difficult to present any concise answers. Thus, despite the rather seductive rough-and-ready answer provided above, which suggested that ST provides an alternative (embodied) to traditional cognitive science, the truth is that
This volume will provide valuable reading not only for those scholars unfamiliar with contemporary ST but also for those well versed in the area. The newcomer will find herein a collection of papers that are well written, well structured and offer clear insights into this increasingly influential area of research. While for those familiar with ST, it will provide a clear insightful snapshot of the current state of play in the field. Moreover, given the interdisciplinary nature of ST, something nicely illustrated through the content of the volume, philosophers, psychologists, linguists and artificial intelligence/robotics researchers may all find something of value in the volume. Finally, this will provide a good reference point, particularly to those scholars interested in so-called embodied cognitive science. On a deeper meta-theoretical level, it also provides a glimpse into the complexities involve within this area and its relationship with traditional cognitive science. If there is a minor critical note here, it is to the fact that the volume is grossly biased on the side of ST. Only one paper voices a strict opposition to ST and the
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
366
Adaptive Behavior 22(5)
embodied cognition framework it presupposes. Perhaps for the sake of balance if nothing else, it might have been worth having more critical contributions. Yet, this was perhaps never the remit of the workshop. Nonetheless, the volume provides a valuable snapshot of the current state of play of the sensorimotor approach. Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to an anonymous reviewer for detailed comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes 1. The AISB is the society for the study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour; it is one of the oldest and the largest artificial intelligence societies in the United Kingdom. For more details on the symposium, see http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/calendar/?id=5478. 2. See Thompson (2007) for the definitive formulation of this position.
References
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Chicago, IL: MIT Press. Di Paolo, E. A. (2014). The worldly constituents of perceptual presence. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 450. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Froese, T., & Ziemke, T. (2009) Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind. Artificial Intelligence, 173(3–4), 466–500 Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. London, UK: Routledge Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes. London, UK: Routledge. O’Regan, J. K., & Noe¨, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–973. Stewart, J. R., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. A. (Eds.). (2010). Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991) The embodied mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7–19.
Downloaded from adb.sagepub.com by guest on October 7, 2014
