Anthony Chemero: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

What’s radical about radical embodied cognitive science (hereinafter RECS) is the total rejection of representations, and with them, computation (‘mental gymnastics’). This sets RECS off from what I am embarrassed to admit I once took to be a radical position, namely embodied cog sci, including Andy Clark’s extended mind views. Those views, on the present account, are compromised by their computational elements. You don’t have to be a child of the 1960s to know that radical positions are much sexier than moderate (yawn) views. Whether in politics, religion, or cognitive science, radical views have an uncompromised purity that engages the emotions. The present work is not exactly a manifesto, but it is a call to a research program, and, like some other manifestos, it reserves much of its actual criticism not for the ostensible enemy but for positions that are close to but not quite as radical as it is. Thus on the one hand Chemero offers a general introduction to radical embodied cognitive science for nonpractitioners, and a defense via its successes, but he also turns often to address practitioners of RECS, arguing for how practitioners should think about RECS (and its enemies, representationalists). In particular, Chemero wants to couple RECS with Gibsonian ecological psychology. Part of the excitement of radical positions may be that they so often flirt with the danger of paradox. On the face of it, there is a pragmatic paradox in 200 plus pages of representations in the form of equations, diagrams, and good old-fashioned sentences intended to get the reader to think that representations play no role in cognition. There is another potential paradox in an anti-representationalist view that is underwritten by the alleged properties of representations: RECS uses models— that is, representations—that themselves have no place for representations. Thus the argument for anti-representationalism apparently turns upon the claimed properties