steps to a middle Tao

The sense of dissatisfaction which comes from the separation of the cognitivist and emergent approaches to cognition from direct experience lays the basis for a refounding of the heart of theories and models of the cognition sciences: the concept of "representation":

Steps to a Middle Way

The Cartesian Anxiety

A Sense of Dissatisfaction

Why should it be threatening to question the idea that the world has pregiven properties that we represent? Why do we become nervous when we call into question the idea that there is some way that the world is “out there," independent of our cognition, and that cognition is a re-presentation of that independent world?

Our spontaneous and unreflective common sense would deny that these questions are scientific, perhaps by thinking, “How else could the mind and the world be related?” The realist in us claims that our questions are simply “phiiosophical"-a polite way of making them seem interesting, yet also irrelevant. It is true. that they are partly philosophical, but we can also rephrase them as questions in cognitive science. What actually is the scientific basis for the idea that the mind is some kind of information-processing device that responds selectively to pregiven features of the environment? Why do we assume that cognitive science cannot call into question these notions of representation and information processing not just philosophically but in its day-to-day research?

To think that we cannot raise such issues is a blindness in contemporary common sense, deeply entrenched in our Western tradition and recently reinforced by cognitivism. Thus even when the very ideas of representation and information processing change considerably, as they do in the study of connectionist networks, self-organization, and emergent properties, some form of the realist assumption remains. In cognitivism, the realism is at least explicit and defended; in the emergence approach, however, it often becomes simply tacit and unquestioned. This unreflective stance is one of the greatest dangers facing the field of cognitive science; it limits the range of theories and ideas and so prevents a broader vision and future for the field.

A growing number of researchers in all areas of cognitive science have expressed dissatisfaction with the varieties of cognitive realism. This dissatisfaction derives from a deeper source than the search for alternatives to symbol processing or even mixed "society of mind" theories: it is a dissatisfaction with the very notion of a representational system. This notion obscures many essential dimensions of cognition not just in human experience but when we try to explain cognition scientifically. These dimensions include the understanding of perception and language, as well as the study of evolution and life itself.

Our discussion so far has focused on linking the two poles of science and human experience. This part will continue this task, but by developing a nonrepresentationist alternative from within the heart of cognitive science. We now need to pause and reflect on the scientific and philosophical roots of the very idea of representation. We are thinking not merely of the current notions in cognitive science of computation and information processing but of the entire philosophical tendency to view the mind as a "mirror of nature."