This paper attempts to provide the basis for a broader naturalized account of agency. Naturalization is considered as the need for an ongoing and open-ended process of scientific inquiry driven by the continuous formulation of questions regarding a phenomenon. The naturalization of agency is focused around the interrelation of the fundamental notions of autonomy, functionality, intentionality and meaning. Certain naturalized frameworks of agency are criti¬cally considered in an attempt to bring together all the charac¬teristic properties that constitute an autonomous agent, as well as to indicate the shaping of these notions/properties during the development and the evolution of its agential capacity. Autonomy and interaction are proved to be key concepts in this endeavor.

Key words: Autonomy, agency, naturalization, functionality, meaning, interactive representations.

Minimalism is a useful element in the constructivist arsenal against objectivism. By reducing actions and sensory feedback to a bare minimum, it becomes possible to obtain a complete description of the sensory-motor dynamics; and this in turn reveals that the object of perception does not pre-exist in itself, but is actually constituted during the process of observation. In this paper, this minimalist approach is deployed for the case of the recognition of “the Other.” It is shown that the perception of another intentional subject is based on properties that are intrinsic to the joint perceptual activity itself.

Key words: sensory-motor, dynamics, perception, minimalism

Interactivism and enactivism spring from some similar insights and intuitions. There are, however, some arguably significant divergences, and I will explore a few of the important similarities and differences. Topics addressed include the basic notions of how cognition and mind emerge in living systems; how growth, learning, development, and adaptation can be modeled within the basic frameworks; and how phenomenological investigations can be taken into account and their phenomena modeled.

Key words: interactivism, enactivism, autopoiesis, autonomy, phenomenology, emergence

The last fifteen years have seen a sea change in cognitive science where issues of embodiment, situatedness and dynamics have become central to the explanatory resources in use. 
This paper evaluates the suggestion that representation should be eliminated from the explanative vocabulary of cognitive science. We trace the history of the issue by examining the usefulness of action-oriented representation (AOR), and we reassess if there is still a good explanatory role for the notion of representation in contemporary cognitive science by looking at contexts of re-use, contexts of informational fusion and elaboration, contexts of virtualist perception, and contexts of representational extension, restructuring and substitution. We claim that in these contexts the notion of representation continues to fulfill a valuable function in linking the inner informational economy of cognitive systems to how they interact and couple with the world, and that the role of representation in explanation has not been superseded by enactive and radical embodied theories of cognition. The final section of the paper suggests that we might be better off adopting a more pluralist research perspective, accepting that certain branches of cognitive science seem to require the positing of representations in order to develop, whereas others (e.g. research into minimal cognitive systems), do not appear to require it. We conclude that trying to suppress the notion of representation in all areas of cognitive science is seriously misguided.

Key words: representation, action-oriented representation (aor), embodied cognitive science, space

The interactivist-constructivist (IC) approach offers an attractive framework for the development of intelligent robots. However, we still lack genuinely intelligent robots, capable of representing the world, in the IC sense. Here we argue that the reason for this situation is the lack of learning mechanisms that would allow the components of the robotic controller to learn constructively while they direct the robot’s action in accordance to its value system. We also suggest that spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) may be such a learning mechanism that operates in the brain.

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Although prediction plays a prominent role in mental processing, we have only limited understanding of how the brain generates and employs predictions. This paper develops a theoretical framework in three steps. First I propose a process model that describes how predictions are produced and are linked to behavior. Subsequently I describe a generative mechanism, consisting of the selective amplification of neural dynamics in the context of boundary conditions. I hypothesize that this mechanism is active as a process engine in every mental process, and that therefore each mental process proceeds in two stages: (i) the formation of process boundary conditions; (ii) the bringing about of the process function by the operation – within the boundary conditions – of a relatively ‘blind’ generative process. Thirdly, from this hypothesis I derive a strategy for describing processes formally. The result is a multilevel framework that may also be useful for studying mental processes in general.

Key words: anticipation, embodied valuation, forward model, mental simulation, objectification, predictive coding

In this paper, we trace the origin and development of the concept of egocentrism in Piaget’s work. We evaluate a number of criti¬cisms that have been leveled against the concept of egocentrism. Based on our evaluation, we propose a reconceptualization of the concept of egocentrism as a decentering process with different phases that is recapitulated at different stages of development. We provide examples of the decentering process for the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete-operational, and formal operational stages. Piaget introduced the concept of egocentrism in his early writ¬ings in the 1920s to describe general characteristics of the preschool child. Since its introduction, the concept of egocentrism has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention and has drawn numerous criticisms. Piaget attributed these criticisms to serious misunderstandings of the concept of egocentrism. Indeed, Piaget (1945/1962: 285, fn) admitted that the choice of the term egocentrism was “unfortunate”, and he apologized (Piaget & Inhelder, 1948/1967: 220) for having dwelt on this expression for the last twenty-five years. In this paper, we trace the origins of the concept of egocentrism in Piaget’s writings and examine the subsequent changes to this concept. We examine some of the criticisms leveled against the concept of egocentrism and conclude that the concept of egocen¬trism remained ambiguous in Piaget’s writings. Finally, we suggest a revision of the concept of egocentrism that addresses these ambiguities.

Key words: Cognitive development, social-emotional development egocentrism, centration.

Extract: It is not without sadness that an author discovers, 25 years after its publication, the work of a fellow author who has died in the meantime, when that work contains so many points of immediate interest to him which should have been discussed personally and in detail. Although my friend A. Luria kept me up to date concerning Vygotsky’s sympathetic and yet critical position with respect to my own work, I was never able to read his writings nor to meet him, and in reading his work today, I regret this profoundly, for we could have come to an understanding on a number of issues. E. Hanfmann, who is one of Vygotsky’s best successors, has kindly asked me to comment on the reflections of this distinguished author concerning my first works. I thank her very warmly for this but also confess some embarrassment, for while Vygotsky’s book appeared in 1934, those of mine which he discusses date back to 1923 and 1924. On thinking over the question of how to carry out such a discussion in retrospect, I have however found a solution that is both simple and instructive (at least for me), namely to ascertain whether what I have done since then confirms or invalidates Vygotsky’s criticisms. The answer is both yes and no: on certain issues I find myself more in agreement with Vygotsky than I would have been in 1934, while on other issues I now have better arguments for answering him than would previously have been the case.