Radical views on cognition and the dynamics of scientific change
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Radical views on cognition and the dynamics of scientific change Pierre Steiner1 Received: 29 August 2018 / Accepted: 22 May 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that cognitive science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm (computationalism) is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy. Keywords Enactivism · Kuhn · Scientific change · Laudan · Research traditions · Paradigms · Embodied cognition
1 Situating radicality, 20 years after Clark What are Radical Views on Cognition (RVC)? Andy Clark was amongst the first to use the adjective « radical » as meant to qualify some alternative theories of cognition. In his 1997 book Being There, Clark defined Radical Embodied Cognition as the claim that structured, symbolic, representational and computational views of cognition are mistaken. Embodied cognition is best studied by means of non-computational and nonrepresentational ideas and explanatory schemes (1997, p. 148).
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Pierre Steiner [email protected] COSTECH, Centre de Recherche, Université de Technologie de Compiègne – Sorbonne Université, 60200 Compiègne, France
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Synthese
Clark attributed this position—or ancestral versions of it—to different philosophers and scientists, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Rodney Brooks, Maturana & Varela, Gibson, van Gelder, and Thelen & Smith. In a 1999 paper called “An embodied cognitive science?” Clark subsequently proposed a distinction between two different ways of appealing to facts about embodiment and environmental embedding in cognitive science: The first, which I will call ‘simple embodiment’, treats such facts as, primarily, constraints upon a theory of inner organization and processing. The second, which I will call ‘radical embodiment’ goes much further and treats such facts as profoundly altering the subject matter and theoretical framework of cognitive science. The distinction between the simple and radical forms is, however, not absolute, and many (perhaps most) good research programs end up containing elements of both. (1999, pp. 348–my emphasis) Radical embodiment (or what Clark called in 1997 “radical embodied cognition”) is thus scientifically ambitious, and even revolutionary: it aims at drastically changing cognitive sc
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