ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—The morphological level is the level that qualitatively structures material substrates into sensible forms. According to the morphodynamic approach to cognition, this structuring process is objective, albeit qualitative, and results from the dynamic self-organization of physical substrates. To the extent that it accounts for the genesis of forms through the self-organization of material, physical, or neural substrates, morphodynamics makes the morphological level into a third term situated between the physical level and the symbolic structure level (→DYNAMIC SYSTEM, EMERGENCE, PHYSICALISM, SYMBOL). It thus strives to establish both a physical theory of phenomenological properties and an ontology of structures, in an attempt to achieve a unitary conception of reality. Because of the importance it grants to the morphological level, this approach is reminiscent of Gestalt theory and phenomenology. Its originality lies in its choice of a naturalistic and monistic framework, and in its claim that the morphological level is an objective one (→DUALISM/MONISM, NATURALIZATION). It also has much in common with connectionist models (→CONNECTIONISM) of the subsymbolic paradigm, sharing with those models the view that relative to morphological infrastructures, the symbolic level is only a surface phenomenon.
