Skip to main content
Log in

The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist Perspectives on Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics

  • Published:
Foundations of Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper discusses different approaches incognitive science and artificial intelligenceresearch from the perspective of radicalconstructivism, addressing especially theirrelation to the biologically based theories ofvon Uexküll, Piaget as well as Maturana andVarela. In particular recent work in ‘New AI’ and adaptive robotics on situated and embodiedintelligence is examined, and we discuss indetail the role of constructive processes asthe basis of situatedness in both robots andliving organisms.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

REFERENCES

  • Andersen, P.B., P. Hasle and P.A. Brandt: 1997, Machine Semiosis. In R. Posner, K. Robering and T.A. Sebeok (eds.), Semiotik / Semiotics – Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur / A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 548–571.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beer, R.D.: 1995, A Dynamical Systems Perspective on Autonomous Agents. Artificial Intelligence 72: 173–215.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bickhard, M.H.: 1998, Robots and Representations. In From Animals to Animats 5 – Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 58–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bickhard, M.H. and L. Terveen: 1995, Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science – Impasse and Solution. New York, NY: Elsevier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braitenberg, V.: 1984, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, R.A.: 1986a, Achieving Artificial Intelligence through Building Robots. Technical Report Memo 899, MIT AI Lab.

  • Brooks, R.A.: 1986b, A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2: 14–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, R.A.: 1990, Elephants Don't Play Chess. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6(1–2): 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, R.A.: 1991a, Intelligence Without Representation. Artificial Intelligence 47: 139–159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, R.A.: 1991b, Intelligence Without Reason. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 569–595.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cariani, P.: 1992, Some Epistemological Implications of Devices Which Construct Their Own Sensors and Effectors. In F.J. Varela and P. Bourgine (eds.), Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems – Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 484–493.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clancey, W.J.: 1997, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, A.: 1997, Being There – Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cliff, D.T.: 1991, Computational Neuroethology: A Provisional Manifesto. In J.-A. Meyer and S.W. Wilson (eds.), From Animals to Animats. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 29–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cliff, D.T. and G.F. Miller: 1996, Co-evolution of Pursuit and Eevasion II: Simulation Methods and Results. In P. Maes, M. Mataric, J.-A. Meyer, J.B. Pollack and S.W. Wilson (eds.), From Animals to Animats 4 – Proceedings of the Fourth InternationalConference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 506–515.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craik, K.J.W.: 1943, The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorffner, G.: 1997, Radical Connectionism – a Neural Bottom-up Approach to AI. In G. Dorffner (ed.), Neural Networks and a New Artificial Intelligence. London, UK: International Thomson Computer Press, 93–132.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dreyfus, H.L.: 1979, What Computers Can't Do – A Critique of Artificial Reason (revised edition). New York: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dreyfus, H.L.: 1996, The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4. Originally appeared in H. Haber and G. Weiss (eds.), Perspectives on Embodiment. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Driesch, H.: 1931, Das Wesen des Organismus. Leipzig, Germany.

  • Elman, J.: 1990, Finding Structure in Time. Cognitive Science 14: 179–211.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emmeche, C.: 1990, Kognition og omverden – om Jakob von Uexküll og hans bidrag til kognitionsforskningen. Almen Semiotik 2: 52–67.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emmeche, C.: 1992, Life as an Abstract Phenomenon: Is Artificial Life Possible? In F.J. Varela and P. Bourgine (eds.), Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems – Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 466–474.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emmeche, C.: in press, Does a Robot Have an Umwelt? Reflections on the Qualitative Biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll. Semiotica, special issue on the work of Jakob von Uexküll, to appear in 2001.

  • Fodor, J.A.: 1987, Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franklin, S.: 1995, Artificial Minds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franklin, S.: 1997, Autonomous Agents as Embodied AI. Cybernetics and Systems 28(6): 499–520.

    Google Scholar 

  • Funes, P. and J.B. Pollack: 1997, Computer Evolution of Buildable Objects. In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 358–367.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallam, J.C. and C.A. Malcolm: 1994, Behaviour: Perception, Action and Intelligence – The View from Situated Robotics. Proc. Royal Society Land A 349: 29–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harnad, S.: 1990, The symbol grounding problem. Physica D 42: 335–346.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger: 1962, Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Originally appeared as Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen, Germany.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hendriks-Jansen, H.: 1996, Catching Ourselves in the Act – Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoffmeyer, J.: 1996, Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Husbands, P., I. Harvey and D. Cliff: 1993, An EvolutionaryApproach to Situated AI. In A. Sloman, D. Hogg, G. Humphreys, A. Ramsay and D. Partridge (eds.), Prospects for Artificial Intelligence. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 61–70.

    Google Scholar 

  • Husbands, P., T. Smith, N. Jakobi and M. O'shea: 1998, Better Living Through Chemistry: Evolving GasNets for Robot Control. Connection Science, 10(3–4): 185–210.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson-Laird, P.N.: 1989, Mental Models. In M.I. Posner (ed.), Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kant, I.: 1781/7, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Kants Werke, Akademieausgabe, Vol. IV, Berlin.

  • Lakoff, G.: 1988, Smolensky, Semantics, and the Sensorimotor System. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 39–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langthaler, R.: 1992, Organismus und Umwelt – Die biologische Umweltlehre im Spiegel traditioneller Naturphilosophie. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lenat, D. and E.P. Feigenbaum: 1991, On the Thresholds of Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence 47(1–3): 199.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loren, L.A. and E. Dietrich: 1997, Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Cognition and the Problem of Intentionality. Cybernetics and Systems 28: 345–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lorenz, K.: 1957, The Nature of Instinct: The Conception of Instinctive Behavior. In C.H. Schiller (ed.), Instinctive Behavior – The Development of a Modern Concept. New York: International Universities Press, 129–175. Originally appeared as K. Lorenz: 1937, Ñber die Bildung des Instinktbegriffes, Die Naturwissenschaften 25: 289–300, 307–318, 324–331.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lipson, H. and J.B. Pollack: 2000, Evolution of Machines. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design. Worchester, MA.

  • Lund, H.H., J. Hallam and W. Lee: 1997, Evolving Robot Morphology. In Proceedings of the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Evolutionary Computation. IEEE Press.

  • Lund, H.H. and O. Miglino: 1998, Evolving and Breeding Robots. In Proceedings of the First European Workshop on Evolutionary Robotics. Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Manteuffel, G.: 1992, Konstruktivistische künstliche Intelligenz. In S.J. Schmidt (ed.), Kognition und Gesellschaft – Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus 2. Frankfurt a. M., Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maturana, H.R. and F.J. Varela: 1980, Autopoiesis and Cognition – The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maturana, H.R. and F.J. Varela: 1987, The Tree of Knowledge – The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala, Boston, MA. NB: All page numbers refer to the revised edition of 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meeden, L.A.: 1996, An Incremental Approach to Developing Intelligent Neural Network Controllers for Robots. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 26.

  • Meeden, L.A., G. McGraw and D. Blank: 1993, Emergence of Control and Planning in an AutonomousVehicle. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 735–740.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty, M.: 1962, Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Originally appeared as Merleau-Ponty (1945) Phenomenologie de la Perception, Paris: Gallimard.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty, M.: 1963, The Structure of Behavior. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Originally appeared as Merleau-Ponty (1942) La Structure du Comportment, Presses Universites de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Minsky, M.: 1975, A Framework for Representing Knowledge. In P. Winston (ed.), The Psychology of Computer Vision. McGraw-Hill, 211–277.

  • Mondada, F., E. Franzi and P. Ienne: 1993, Mobile Robot Miniaturisation: A Tool for Investigating in Control Algorithms. In Third International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Kyoto, Japan.

  • Müller, J.: 1840, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, Band 2. Koblenz, Germany.

  • Neisser, U.: 1967, Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appelton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newell, A.: 1990, Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newell, A. and H.A. Simon: 1976, Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search. Communications of the ACM 19: 113–126.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nolfi, S.: 1998, Evolutionary Robotics: Exploiting the Full Power of Selforganisation. Connection Science 10(3–4): 167–184.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nolfi, S. and D. Floreano: 1998, Co-evolving Predator and Prey Robots: Do ‘Arms Races’ Arise in Artificial Evolution? Artificial Life 4(4).

  • Nolfi, S. and D. Floreano: 1999, Learning and Evolution. Autonomous Robots 7(1).

  • Nolfi, S. and D. Floreano: 2000, Evolutionary Robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peschl, M.: 1997, The Representational Relation between Environmental Structures and Neural Systems: Autonomy and Environmental Dependency in Neural Knowledge Representation. NonlinearDynamics, Psychology and Life Sciences 1(2): 99–121.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peschl, M. and A. Riegler: 1999, Does Representation Need Reality. In A. Riegler, M. Peschl and A. von Stein (eds.), Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences. New York: Plenum Press, 9–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pfeifer, R. and C. Scheier: 1999, Understanding Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piaget, J.: 1954, The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books. Originally appeared as Piaget: 1937, La construction du réel chez l'enfant. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niestlé.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piaget, J.: 1967, Six Psychological Studies. New York: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pollack, J.B.: 1991, The Induction of Dynamical Recognizers. Machine Learning 7: 227–252.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prem, E.: 1997, Epistemic Autonomy in Models of Living Systems. In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prem, E.: 1998, Semiosis in Embodied Autonomous Systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 724–729.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pylyshyn, Z. (ed.): 1987, The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence. Norwood: Ablex Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richards, R.J.: 1987, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riegler, A.: 1994, Constructivist Artificial Life: The Constructivist-anticipatory Principle and FunctionalCoupling. In J. Hopf (ed.), Genetic Algorithms with the Framework of Evolutionary Computation. Max-Planck-Institute für Informatik, MPI-I-94-241, Saarbrücken, Germany, 73–83.

  • Riegler, A.: 1997, Ein kybernetisch-konstruktistisches Modell der Kognition. In A. Müller, K.H. Müller and F. Stadler (eds.), Konstruktivismus und Kognitionswissenschaft. KulturelleWurzeln und Ergebnisse. Vienna, New York: Springer, 75–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Risku, H.: 2000, Situated Translation und Situated Cognition – Ungleiche Schwestern. In M. Kadric, K. Kaindl and F. Pöchhacker (eds.), Translationswissenschaft. Festschrift für Mary Snell-Hornby. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 81–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rumelhart, D.E. and J.L. McClelland: 1986, On Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs. In D.E. Rumelhart and J.L. McClelland (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Volume 2. Psychological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 216–271.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schank, R.C.: 1972, Conceptual Dependency: A Theory of Natural Language Understanding. Cognitive Psychology 3: 552–631.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schank, R.C.: 1975, Using Knowledge to Understand. Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA.

  • Schank, R.C. and R.P. Abelson: 1977, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Searle, J.: 1980, Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417–457.

    Google Scholar 

  • Searle, J.: 1990, Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program? Scientific American, January 1990: 20–25.

  • Searle, J.: 1991, Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion and Cognitive Science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 585–642.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sejnowski, T. and C. Rosenberg: 1987, Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text. Complex Systems 1: 145–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharkey, N.E.: 1991, Connectionist Representation Techniques. Artificial Intelligence Review 5: 143–167.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharkey, N.E. and T. Ziemke: 1998, A Consideration of the Biological and Psychological Foundations of Autonomous Robotics. Connection Science 10(3–4): 361–391.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sjölander, S.: 1999, How Animals Handle Reality – The Adaptive Aspect of Representation. In A. Riegler, M. Peschl and A. von Stein (eds.), Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences. New York: Plenum Press, 277–282.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, J.: 1996, Cognition = Life: Implications for Higher-level Cognition. Behavioural Processes 35: 311–326.

    Google Scholar 

  • Suchman, L.A.: 1987, Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Varela, F.J., E. Thompson and E. Rosch: 1991, The Embodied Mind – Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Glasersfeld, E.: 1995, Radical Constructivism – A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: Falmer Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J.: 1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Springer Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J.: 1928, Theoretische Biologie. Berlin: Springer Verlag. NB: All page numbers refer to the first paperback edition, 1973, Frankfurt/Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J.: 1957, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men – a Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. In C.H. Schiller (ed.), Instinctive Behavior – The Development of a Modern Concept. New York: International Universities Press, 5–80. Appeared also in Semiotica 89(4): 319–391. Originally appeared as von Uexküll: 1934, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren undMenschen. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J.: 1982, The Theory of Meaning. Semiotica 42(1): 25–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J.: 1985, Environment [Umwelt] and Inner World of Animals. In G.M. Burghardt (ed.), Foundations of Comparative Ethology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Partial translation of T. von Uexküll (1909) Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, T.: 1992, Introduction: The Sign Theory of Jakob von Uexküll. Semiotica 89(4): 279–315. Originally appeared as T. von Uexküll: 1987, The Sign Theory of Jakob von Uexküll. In M. Krampen et al. (eds.), Classics of Semiotics. New York: Plenum, 147–179.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, T.: 1997, Biosemiose. In R. Posner, K. Robering and T.A. Sebeok (eds.), Semiotik / Semiotics – Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur / A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 447–457.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, T., W. Geigges and J.M. Herrmann: 1993, Endosemiosis. Semiotica 96(1/2): 5–51.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, S.W.: 1985, Knowledge Growth in an Artificial Animal. In J. Grefenstette (ed.), Proceedings of an International Conference on Genetic Algorithms and Their Applications. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 16–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, S.W.: 1991, The Animat Path to AI. In J.-A. Meyer and S. Wilson (ed.), From Animals to Animats: Proceedings of The First International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 15–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woods, W.A.: 1975, What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks. In D.G. Bobrow and A.M. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science. Academic Press, 35–82.

  • Ziemke, T.: 1997, The ‘Environmental Puppeteer’ Revisited: A Connectionist Perspective on ‘Autonomy’. In Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Learning Robots (EWLR-6). Brighton, UK, 100–110.

  • Ziemke, T.: 1998, Adaptive Behavior in Autonomous Agents. Presence 7(6): 564–587.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemke, T.: 1999a, Remembering How to Behave: Recurrent Neural Networks for Adaptive Robot Behavior. In L. Medsker and L.C. Jain (eds.), Recurrent Neural Networks: Design and Applications. New York: CRC Press, 355–389.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemke, T.: 1999b, Rethinking Grounding. In A. Riegler, M. Peschl and A. von Stein (eds.), Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences. New York: Plenum Press, 177–190.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemke, T.: 2000a, Situated Neuro-Robotics and Interactive Cognition. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemke, T.: 2000b, On ‘Parts’ and ‘Wholes’ of Adaptive Behavior: Functional Modularity and Diachronic Structure in Recurrent Neural Robot Controllers. In J.-A. Meyer, A. Berthoz, D. Floreano, H. Roitblat and S.W. Wilson (eds.), From Animals to Animats 6 – Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 115–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ziemke, T. and N.E. Sharkey: in press, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Robots and Animals: Applying Jakob von Uexküll's Theory of Meaning to Adaptive Robots and Artificial Life. Semiotica, special issue on the work of Jakob von Uexküll, to appear in 2001.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ziemke, T. The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist Perspectives on Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics. Foundations of Science 6, 163–233 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011394317088

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011394317088

Navigation