Chapter 7: Mind is Movement: We Need More Than Static Representations to Understand It

Standard cognitive science adopts a representational and computational view of cognition (e.g., Bickhard, 2009; Borghi & Caruana, 2015; Clark, 2001), which is grounded on an assumption of substantial ontology. Such assumption is implicit in the amodal nature that this family of theories attributed to symbols (Fodor, 1983; for a critical discussion of the amodal model of cognitive symbols, see Barsalou, 1999, 2010, 2016). Indeed, insofar as cognitive symbols are amodal, this means that one has to assume that the sensorial input has to be translated from the physical to the symbolic format (so called “transduction,” cf. Pylyshyn, 1984). And this then means that the sensorial input must have its own structure—indeed, a translation is possible only if there is something to translate—in turn mirroring the structure of the external object causing it (Bickhard, 2009).