User:Paroswiki
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Please leave messages for me here by editing the very page you are looking at now. Try to include a link to yourself using wikipedia format so I know who you are.
Parowiski -- your changes to the "Embodied cognitive science" paragraph that I worked on look good. Thanks for the clean-up! Noticket 04:07, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Hi paros, wikivangelist here:
On ECS, I started to respond in detail in the talk on that page, but decided to address some of the specifics here. I was present at a small cogsci conference cosponsored by the universities of Munich and Padua that took place in Italy in 2001 where both Pfeifer and Lakoff presented their theories of embodiment--at the time I was researching neural computation and got lucky enough to wangle an invite. Pfeifer wasn't the only roboticist, but Lakoff was the only linguist--there were also a few cognitive psychologists, cognitive scientists and cognitive neuroscientists and a couple of neurobiologists. Perhaps not a whole lot came out of those conversations--as a junior scientist I tried to mediate and provoke insights where I could--fun to poke and prod at the big egos.
As to the questions of what counts as research, I think cognitive science is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field, and philosophers and linguists do research, even if they don't always do "experiments" in a hard science sense. Often the philosophical hypotheses lead not just to epistemological questions but to live experimental hypotheses in other fields, as Mandler and colleagues in developmental psych (eg Sinha, Bowerman, so on) have done with Johnson's image schemas. I can tell you from my experience as a neuroscientist that it is equally as hard to get some neurobiologists to listen seriously to "experiments" done in robotics or even neural computation... so I don't think we should try to claim that a Wikipedia entry as broadly worded as "Embodied Cognitive Science" should only summarize research as "hard" as robotics, or on robotics. As I said, that would be more appropriate for an article on embodied robotics per se.
Nor would I ever claim that Lakoff (or even Lakoff and Johnson together) is "the" (singular) root of embodied cognitive science. What is interesting IMHO about embodied cognitive science is that it is coalescing anomalies in the evidence coming from fields as disparate as animal ethnography, robotics, neurobiology, linguistics and more. I'd argue that Lakoff or Johnson wouldn't much matter to an article on Embodied Robotics, but there are a lot of fellow travelers marching (and arguing with each other) under the banner of embodied cognitive science, and all of them belong there as much as Pfeifer or Edelman do. Newell and Simon, by contrast, do not.
I do think you have a some valid points about LJ getting lots of treatment on the embodied philosophy article and that being only a click or two away, and their contributions here in ECS getting little more than a "name-dropping" in previous versions of the article. I tried to finesse this balance by discussing their contributions a bit by adding that Turing quote I stole from the end of Johnson's paper with Rohrer.
Perhaps what we need is a dedicated section on ECS' MANY interdisciplinary roots and its connections into philosophy. That can come later or earlier in the article, however it flows best as the article evolves. But it seemed to me that in discussing Varela, Edelman, Rosch and others who have made philosophical contributions as well as narrowly defined disciplinary advances, not to mention philosphical saws like anthromorphism and free will, this was the right point in the article as it now stands. I still Clark deserves a short sentence in such a section too.
Another option would be to rename this article Embodied Robotics and exclude the rest of the cognitive sciences from all but the crosslinks.
--Wikivangelist 07:03, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
