ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the arguments for and against the role of representation in cognition. Whereas cognitive dynamicists see the differential equation as the basic explanatory unit for understanding cognition, roboticists take a much more “hands on” approach, building robots that, they believe, exhibit cognition despite lacking computational structure. Very prominent among roboticists who have called for the replacement of standard cognitive science is Rodney Brooks. That Brooks should find himself allied with cognitive dynamicists in this rejection of standard cognitive science is perhaps no accident. Brooks’s behavior-based robots might for good reason be called “Gibsonauts,” for their design embodies a Gibsonian approach to perception. Sensing feeds directly into action without a representational middleman. No inferential steps from an impoverished input to a perceptual output are necessary. Perhaps the most radical claim of the cognitive dynamicists and roboticists like Brooks is that attributions of representational states to cognitive systems may be inappropriate.
