Michael Wheeler.
Reconstructing the Cognitive World: the next step.
MIT Press. 2005
In Reconstructing the Cognitive World, Michael Wheeler argues
that we should turn away from the generically Cartesian philosophical foundations
of much contemporary cognitive science research
and proposes instead a Heideggerian approach.
Wheeler defines Cartesian psychology as a conceptual framework
of explanatory principles and shows how each of these principles
is part of the deep assumptions of orthodox cognitive science
(both classical and connectionist).
He then turns to Heidegger’s radically non-Cartesian account of everyday cognition,
which, he argues, can be used to articulate the philosophical foundations
of a genuinely non-Cartesian cognitive science.
Finding that Heidegger’s critique of Cartesian thinking falls short,
even when supported by Hubert Dreyfus’s influential critique
of orthodox artificial intelligence, Wheeler suggests a new Heideggerian approach.
He points to recent research in “embodied-embedded” cognitive science
and proposes a Heideggerian framework to identify, amplify, and clarify
the underlying philosophical foundations of this new work.
He focuses much of his investigation on recent work in
artificial intelligence—oriented robotics, discussing,
among other topics, the nature and status of representational explanation,
and whether (and to what extent) cognition is computation
rather than a noncomputational phenomenon best described
in the language of dynamical systems theory.
Wheeler’s analysis demonstrates that Heideggerian continental philosophy and naturalistic cognitive science need not be mutually exclusive and shows further that a Heideggerian framework can act as the “conceptual glue” for new work in cognitive science.
