Online research in philosophy

Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217-235.

We are at an exciting turning point in the development of intelligent machines. Situated robot designers (Maes, 1990) have given the AI community concrete examples of alternative architectures for coordinating sensation and action. These examples suggest that, for some navigation behaviors at least, predefined maps of the world and control structures are unnecessary. This work has developed in parallel with and lends credence to similar criticisms of models of human reasoning (Winograd and Flores, 1986; Suchman, 1987). However, it is crucial to understand that situated robotic designs are pragmatic, emphasizing engineering convenience and new ways of building machines. Brooks, et al. (1991) are not trying to model human beings, and to a significant degree their robotic designs violate situated cognition hypotheses about the nature of human knowledge and representation construction. I will sketch out some of these distinctions here, and suggest how they might be used to discover alternative architectures for robotics.

forthcoming in P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge UP).

The self-advertising, at least, suggests that 'situated cognition' involves the most fundamental conceptual re-organization in AI and cognitive science, even appearing to deny that cognition is to be explained by mental representations. In their defence of the orthodox symbolic representational theory, A. Vera and H. Simon (1993) have rebutted many of these claims, but they overlook an important reading of situated arguments which may, after all, involve a revolutionary insight. I show that the whole debate turns on puzzles familiar from the history of philosophy and psychology and these may serve to clarify the current disputes.

The case of remembering poses a particular challenge to theories of situated cognition, and its successful treatment within this framework will require a more dramatic integration of levels, fields, and methods than has yet been achieved. 1. Introduction: the interdisciplinary framework 2. Remembering as constructive activity and interpersonal skill 3. Remembering as social interaction and joint attention to the past 4. Shared remembering 5. Distributed cognition and exograms 6. Conclusion.

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

1. Introduction Consciousness is trendy. It seems that more pages are published on consciousness these days than on any other subject in the philosophy of mind. Embodiment and situated cognition are also trendy. They mark a significant departure from orthodox theories, and are thus appealing to radicals and renegades. It.