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Make up your mind: octopus cognition and hybrid explanations

  • Sidney Carls-DiamanteEmail author
S.I.: Explanations in Cognitive Science: Unification vs Pluralism
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Abstract

In order to argue that cognitive science should be more accepting of explanatory plurality, this paper presents the control of fetching movements in the octopus as an exemplar of a cognitive process that comprises distinct and non-redundant representation-using and non-representational elements. Fetching is a type of movement that representational analyses can normally account for completely—but not in the case of the octopus. Instead, a comprehensive account of octopus fetching requires the non-overlapping use of both representational and non-representational explanatory frameworks. What this need for a pluralistic or hybrid explanation implies is that cognitive science should be more open to using both representational and non-representational accounts of cognition, depending on their respective appropriateness to the type of cognition in question.

Keywords

Hybrid explanations Explanatory pluralism Octopus cognition 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following people for their comments and feedback: Glenn Carruthers, Emily C. Parke, Iván Gonzalez-Cabrera, and the anonymous reviewers of this paper.

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© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI)KlosterneuburgAustria

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