Abstract
Traditionally, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike considered the mind as divided into input units (perception), central processing (cognition), and output units (action). In turn, they allowed for little – if any – direct interaction between perception and action. In recent years, theorists challenged the classical view of the mind by arguing that bodily states ground cognition. Even though promising, the notion of grounding is largely underspecified. In this paper, we focus on the debate about the relation between perception and action in order to flesh out the process and in turn clarify the notion of grounding. Given that currently the debate about the relation between perception & action is far from settled, we attempt an assessment of the implications that possible outcomes of this debate would have on Grounding Cognition Theories. Interestingly, some of these possible outcomes seem to threaten the overall program of Grounded Cognition. In an attempt to make this analysis more concrete, we study two closely related speculative hypotheses about possible ways in which perception and action interact. Namely, we focus on Theory of Event Coding and Simulation Theory, and evaluate the levels of compatibility between those two views and Grounded Cognition Theories.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we proceed within a broadly construed computationalist framework and focus our analysis on sensory and motoric representations. However, we do not argue for or commit to neither strong nor modest computationalism. Clarifying this point is crucial given that grounded and embodied cognition views – especially in their stronger versions – are often seen as alternatives to Computational Theory of Mind. At the same time, even though we are sympathetic to the idea of grounded cognition, we do not commit to such views either. Furthermore, we use the notion of representation in a much broader sense than the one used in classical computational views (i.e. symbol), and we do not commit to the claim about all aspects of cognition being representational. To this extent there might well be aspects of cognition that are non-representational and non-computational (a view that modest computationalists would probably accept – see Horst (2009) for a discussion). Our focus here is simply to assess and evaluate the implications that the developments in the debate about the relationship between perception and action have for grounded cognition theories.
- 2.
See Gangopadhyay et al. (2010) for a detailed discussion about the nature of the relation between P&A.
- 3.
Further elaboration on the relation between ‘constitution’ and ‘grounding’ extends beyond the scope of the present paper. See Weber and Vosgerau (2012) for a detailed discussion.
- 4.
Mechanisms that also contribute in solving the binding problem for the representation of perceptual objects coordinate different feature codes. That is, these mechanisms bind together sensory representations of a given object’s aspects/parts/features that a subject has selectively attended to and thus represents in a fragmented fashion.
- 5.
However, recall that there are other ways to understand the relation between P&A; for instance that the two are functionally distinct and that one could operate without the other, as shown below.
- 6.
Note here that there is evidence (Catmur et al. 2007) that mirror neurons could be associationistically trained.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Patrice Soom, James Trafford, and Uwe Peters for their help and comments on earlier drafts.
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Tillas, A., Vosgerau, G. (2016). Perception, Action and the Notion of Grounding. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_27
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