Recent work in cognitive science has suggested that there are actual cases in which cognitive processes extend in the physical world beyond the bounds of the brain and the body. We argue that, while transcranial cognition may be both a logical and a nomological possibility, no case has been made for its current existence. In other words, we defend a form of contingent intracranialism about the cognitive.

Many cognitive scientists have recently championed the thesis that cognition is embodied. In principle, explicating this thesis should be relatively simple. There are, essentially, only two concepts involved: cognition and embodiment. After articulating what will here be meant by ‘embodiment’, this paper will draw attention to cases in which some advocates of embodied cognition apparently do not mean by ‘cognition’ what has typically been meant by ‘cognition’. Some advocates apparently mean to use ‘cognition’ not as a term for one, among many, causes of behavior, but for what has more often been called “behavior.” Some consequences for this proposal are considered.

Key words: Behavior, Chemero, Chomsky, Clark, Cognition, Dennett, Embodied Cognition, Haugeland, Maturana, Skinner

This paper examines the experience of where we end and the rest of the world begins, that is, the sense of boundaries. Since meditators are recognized for their ability to introspect about the bodily level of experience, and in particular about their sense of boundaries, 27 senior meditators (those with more than 10, 000 hours of experience) were interviewed for this study. The main conclusions of this paper are that (a) the boundaries of the so-called “physical body” (body-as-object) are not equivalent to the individual’s sense of boundaries; (b) the sense of boundaries depends upon sensory activity; (c) the sense of boundaries should be defined according to its level of flexibility; (d) the sense of body ownership (the sense that it is one’s own body that undergoes an experience) cannot be reduced to the sense of boundaries; nevertheless, (e) the sense of ownership depends on the level of flexibility of the sense of boundaries.

Key words: boundaries, mindfulness, sense of boundaries, sense of ownership.

Excerpt: The phenomenological perspective described by M. Merleau-Ponty, particularly in his Phenomenology of Perception (1962), seems to be emerging in the context of contemporary developmental research, theories of communication, metaphor theory, and cognitive neuroscience. This emergence is not always accompanied by reference to Merleau-Ponty, however, or appropriate interpretation. In some cases, the emergence of the perspective seems rather inadvertent. The purpose of this essay is to ferret out some of the points which contemporary thinking has in common with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Though it may appear that the examples chosen for this essay might be scrutinized separately, the thread that ties them together is Merleau-Ponty’s work.

Current cognitive science models of perception and action assume that the objects that we move toward and perceive are represented as determinate in our experience of them. A proper phenomenology of perception and action, however, shows that we experience objects indeterminately when we are perceiving them or moving toward them. This indeterminacy, as it relates to simple movement and perception, is captured in the proposed phenomenologically based recurrent network models of brain function. These models provide a possible foundation from which predicative structures may arise as an emergent phenomenon without the positing of a representing subject. These models go some way in addressing the dual constraints of phenomenological accuracy and neurophysiological plausibility that ought to guide all projects devoted to discovering the physical basis of human experience.

This paper outlines an original interactivist–constructivist (I-C) approach to modelling intelligence and learning as a dynamical embodied form of adaptiveness and explores some applications of I-C to understanding the way cognitive learning is realized in the brain. Two key ideas for conceptualizing intelligence within this framework are developed. These are: (1) intelligence is centrally concerned with the capacity for coherent, context-sensitive, self-directed management of interaction; and (2) the primary model for cognitive learning is anticipative skill construction. Self-directedness is a capacity for integrative process modulation which allows a system to “steer” itself through its world by anticipatively matching its own viability requirements to interaction with its environment. Because the adaptive interaction processes required of intelligent systems are too complex for effective action to be prespecified (e.g. genetically) learning is an important component of intelligence. A model of self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL) is formulated based on interactive skill construction, and argued to constitute a central constructivist process involved in cognitive development. SDAL illuminates the capacity of intelligent learners to start with the vague, poorly defined problems typically posed in realistic learning situations and progressively refine them, transforming them into problems with sufficient structure to guide the construction of a solution. Finally, some of the implications of I-C for modelling of the neuronal basis of intelligence and learning are explored; in particular, Quartz and Sejnowski’s recent neural constructivism paradigm, enriched by Montague and Sejnowski’s dopaminergic model of anticipative–predictive neural learning, is assessed as a promising, but incomplete, contribution to this approach. The paper concludes with a fourfold reflection on the divergence in cognitive modelling philosophy between the I-C and the traditional computational information processing approaches.

In a recent paper, Jakob Hohwy argues that the emerging predictive processing (PP) perspective on cognition requires us to explain cognitive functioning in purely internalistic and neurocentric terms. The purpose of the present paper is to challenge the view that PP entails a wholesale rejection of positions that are interested in the embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive dimensions of cognitive processes. I will argue that Hohwy’s argument from analogy, which forces an evidentiary boundary into the picture, lacks the argumentative resources to make a convincing case for the conceptual necessity to interpret PP in solely internalistic terms. For this reason, I will reconsider the postulation and explanatory role of the evidentiary boundary. I will arrive at an account of prediction error minimization and its foundation on the free energy principle that is fully consistent with approaches to cognition that emphasize the embodied and interactive properties of cognitive processes. This gives rise to the suggestion that explanatory pluralism about the application of PP is to be preferred over Hohwy’s explanatory monism that follows from his internalistic and neurocentric view of predictive cognitive systems.

Key words: dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition, explanatory pluralism, free energy principle, prediction error minimization.

The discourse of postmodernism proclaims with a unified voice the context-dependence or knower-dependence, the relativity or subjectivity, of all truth claims. But the discourse of postmodernism also proclaims universal truths upon which this antirealist epistemology itself rests. These constitute the very foundational claims that the postmodernist campaign, in all its alleged antifoundationalism, strives to subvert. In this article I consider three universal truth claims of postmodernist discourse. And because the antirealism that defines much of postmodernist discourse is often grounded in the doctrine of social constructionism, the three truth claims under consideration constitute the claims of social constructionism itself, especially the claims of social constructionism as it has been propounded within postmodern therapy circles. Each of the three claims is articulated, and then followed by a critique which asks whether the claim is not either (a) simply a variant of the so-called modernist paradigm that is under attack, or (b) the product of the very observational/empirical powers that postmodernist doctrine seeks to erode in its anti-empiricist spirit. Particular attention is given to challenging the value – found within postmodernist circles – of a pragmatic or utilitarian standard for acceptance of theory or discourse.

Borrett, Kelly, and Kwan follow the lead of Merleau-Ponty and develop a theory of neural-network modeling that emerges out of what they find wrong with current approaches to thought and action. Specifically, they take issue with “cognitivism” and its tendency to model cognitive agents as controlling, representational systems. While attempting to make the point that pre-predicative experience/action/place (i.e. grasping) involves neither representation nor control, the authors imply that control-theoretic concepts and representationalism necessarily go hand-in-hand. The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate that this is not the case. Rather, it will be argued that such necessity is only assumed because the authors attempt to apply the control theory of servo-mechanisms to the behavior of organisms. By adopting this engineering control-theoretic perspective, the authors are led, as are most of the cognitivists with whom they disagree, to overlook critical aspects of how it is that biological systems do what they do. It is the ignoring of these critical aspects of biological control, due to the acceptance of an engineering approach to control, that makes it appear as though control theory and representationalism necessarily go hand-in-hand.