Today’s New APPS Interview is with Ezequiel Di Paolo, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian, Spain. The subject of today’s interview is the new collection Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2010), of which Di Paolo is a co-editor, along with John Stewart and Olivier Gapenne.
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Many thanks, Ezequiel, for taking part in this interview. Let’s set the stage for those readers who may be relatively new to this field. Enaction is a developing “third way” in cognitive science, beside the two dominant paradigms of classical computationalism (cognition works via the rule-bound manipulation of discrete symbols) and connectionism (cognition works via the emergence of global states in neural networks). From the enactivist viewpoint, computationalism and connectionism are united in their functionalism. Can you tell us in what ways enaction takes its distance from functionalism as a basic presupposition in cognitive science?
The dominant paradigm in cognitive science has been functionalism in its computational-representational form. Connectionism is a correction to how this had initially been understood in AI (rules implemented via symbolic manipulation) but remains placed well within the functionalist paradigm.
What is interesting to me about functionalism is not its conception of the mind as a form of computation (whether in our brains or bodies or extended in the world, it doesn’t make a big difference). What I find interesting is that simply saying that the mind is a form of information processing is to say very little. What kind of computation, specifically? Is computation as a concept co-extensive with cognition? Why not? What makes some systems cognitive and not others?
In order to answer such questions we must first realize that functionalism is precisely designed to avoid them! And this is exactly the power of the information processing metaphor and the use of representational language. It doesn’t say anything, but it allows a research discipline to function.
Asking big questions like what is cognition?, what is meaning,? what is behavior?, what is agency?, what is the social?, subverts the functionalist project because such questions point to its “foundational crime”. Like nation states and the rule of law, scientific disciplines also function by a consensual blindness about their origins. We conspire not to look at the fact that our disciplinary edifices are often built over a mud of ignorance. It’s impolite to ask a biologist about the nature of life, a physicist about what is matter or a cognitive scientist about what is the mind. I have done it and the first reaction is invariably one of consternation, as if I had mentioned something obscene.
How does enaction address these unasked fundamental questions?
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