Abstract
Cognitive scientists are nowadays apparently required to choose between at least three different competing schools or general approaches: the computational, the connectionist and the dynamicist. More than three decades of unresolved paradigm fight encourage an alternative view: that each of these general approaches offer, not different explanations, but explanations of different aspects of cognitive phenomena. In this paper, I articulate this view by showing that each general approach can be taken to promote research primarily within a particular level of explanation. Failure to appreciate this fact has frequently led to largely incomplete accounts within each school. I argue that, if the articulation offered is sound, it supports the statement of an integrated programme for cognitive science where all the aforementioned general approaches have their place. Finally, I illustrate this analysis via a central theme for a clash of rival explanations in cognitive research, namely, systematicity.
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Notes
- 1.
Theoretical precision might require broadening the analysis to other cognitive schools as well. Extended, enacted, embedded, situated and distributed models might call for specific attention. However, simplicity and also the presumption that these other models might be reduced to or reasonably included into the ones here considered justify restricting our discussion to computationalism, connectionism and dynamicism.
- 2.
Marr was not alone in distinguishing levels of explanation in cognitive research. For instance, Newell (1986) or Pylyshyn (1984) provided a classification of cognitive explanations very similar to the one introduced by David Marr. These days, levels of explanation are, although largely unquestioned, also largely unattended to in the literature. This is arguably an unfortunate feature of contemporary cognitive theorising (see Verdejo and Quesada 2011 for an illustration of this point).
- 3.
Admittedly, some authors have argued that dynamicism can be seen as contributions to Marr’s level 1 (Cordeschi and Frixione 2007) or the algorithmic level 2 (Horgan and Tienson 1994). These approaches take as a defining feature of dynamical systems the statement of mathematical models from an abstract point of view. However, this interpretation of dynamicism arguably leaves unexplained the fundamentally embodied and anti-representational character of recent developments. This is not the place to develop this claim further. For present purposes, it suffices that the location of this school at Marr’s level 3 is plausible in the light of the dynamicist traits just mentioned in the main text.
- 4.
Some authors will be willing to cast doubts on systematicity itself. In what follows, however, I will analyse the explanations that each school provides of the phenomenon and therefore I will assume that systematicity is an (empirically confirmed) explanatory target for each of the schools under analysis.
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Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the audience of the EPSA11 conference in Athens and to an anonymous referee for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. This research work has received financial support from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spanish government), via the research project FFI2009-08828/FISO, and from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan government), through the consolidated research group GRECC (SGR2009-1528).
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Verdejo, V.M. (2013). Computationalism, Connectionism, Dynamicism and Beyond: Looking for an Integrated Approach to Cognitive Science. In: Karakostas, V., Dieks, D. (eds) EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01306-0_33
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