Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mentalrepresentations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studyingperception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In thisbook, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodiedcognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditionalproblems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of theAmerican naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewingperception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemeroargues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than interms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemeroproposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and withoutreference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology,"shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems(reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens ofradical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolvesthese problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science arewarding 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 asrigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Languageof Thought.

Anthony Chemero is Associate Professor in the Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind Program at Franklin and Marshall College.