Abstract
The mind has an evolutionary history; it is an adaptation for coping with the environment. Perception and action are intimately related. Thinking is grounded in and inseparable from action. Mental representations do not play the role that traditional cognitive science has posited for them. The mind is shaped by, dependent upon, and bound up with the body and its environment. Each of these general ideas has made an appearance in the growing embodied cognition and extended mind (EC-EM) literature. Each of these components of this developing perspective is open-ended, subject to renements or interpretations that make them more or less radical. They are also shaped, rened, and developed, in part, by the research interests of a diverse array of cognitive scientists from developmental psychologists to roboticists, philosophers, and vision scientists. Developmental psychologists within the EC-EM movement focus on the way in which infants mature and emphasize the role of action and perception in their development. Roboticists and vision scientists adopting the EC-EM perspective emphasize the role of the environment in guiding perception and action, minimizing the role of intensive centralized information processing. Philosophers have concerned themselves with arguments that attempt to undermine apparent cognitive differences between brain processes and processes that take place in the body and environment. To sample and introduce some of the leading ideas of the EC-EM perspective, we will adopt an approach often taken by the proponents of the perspective, namely, we will contrast the EC-EM approach with the more mainstream cognitivist approach. As we see it, the proponents of EC-EM have often sought to distance their new perspective from a more traditional cognitivist or “old-fashioned” articial intelligence perspective according to which cognitive processes are processes operating on mental representations. At times, however, we think that these differences are overstated. For example, a cognitivist view of the mind is perfectly compatible with the idea that the mind has an evolutionary history and that it is an adaptation for coping with the organism’s environment. Such an evolutionary cognitivist view is, in fact, developed at length by Steven Pinker.2 One consequence of the attempt to distance the EC-EM approach from more mainstream ideas is that it exaggerates some differences. At times this threatens to create differences that do not really exist and, at others, to eclipse differences that do. What we propose to do in this chapter, after a brief introduction to cognitivism, is review and explain some of the leading ideas of the EC-EM approach, drawing attention to the diversity of ways in which these ideas might be developed further.