Opinion
Where's the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science

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In cognitive science, we are currently witnessing a ‘pragmatic turn’, away from the traditional representation-centered framework towards a paradigm that focuses on understanding cognition as ‘enactive’, as skillful activity that involves ongoing interaction with the external world. The key premise of this view is that cognition should not be understood as providing models of the world, but as subserving action and being grounded in sensorimotor coupling. Accordingly, cognitive processes and their underlying neural activity patterns should be studied primarily with respect to their role in action generation. We suggest that such an action-oriented paradigm is not only conceptually viable, but already supported by much experimental evidence. Numerous findings either overtly demonstrate the action-relatedness of cognition or can be re-interpreted in this new framework. We argue that new vistas on the functional relevance and the presumed ‘representational’ nature of neural processes are likely to emerge from this paradigm.

Section snippets

From representation to action

Since its formation as a discipline that aims for a naturalistic account of the mental, cognitive science has been dominated by a view of cognition as computation over mental representations 1, 2, 3, 4. This classical paradigm has been highly fruitful and has stimulated important research in the early decades of cognitive science. However, significant criticisms have been voiced, claiming that the classical view may be strongly biased, if not misleading in nature 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,

Action-oriented views in cognitive science

Pioneering the ‘enactive approach’ to cognition, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch defined cognition as ‘embodied action’ [9]. They emphasized that cognition is not detached contemplation of the world, but a set of processes that determine possible actions. According to their view, the criterion for success of cognitive operations is not to recover pre-existing features or to construct a veridical representation of the environment. Instead, cognitive processes construct the world by bringing forth

The concept of a pragmatic turn

We will use the notion ‘pragmatic turn’ to denote the action-oriented paradigm emerging in cognitive science. The term ‘pragmatic’ is used here, first, to highlight our conjecture that cognition is a form of practice. Second, we introduce the term to refer to action-oriented viewpoints, such as those developed by the founders of philosophical pragmatism 29, 30, albeit without suggesting a return to exactly the positions put forward by these authors.

The central premise of this new paradigm could

Action-relatedness of sensory processing

The pragmatic turn is strongly supported by findings on the role of exploratory activity and sensorimotor interactions for neural development and plasticity. It has been known for a long time that developmental processes in the nervous system are activity-dependent. The development of neural circuits in the visual system and the acquisition of visuomotor skills critically depend on sensorimotor interactions and active exploration of the environment 33, 34. The same holds for the development of

The role of action-effect predictions

An important line of evidence concerns the function of corollary discharge or ‘efference copy’ signals, which deliver ‘motor predictions’ necessary for an organism to distinguish self-generated sensory changes from those not related to own action 49, 50, 51. In technical contexts, the same principle is often referred to as a forward model 50, 52, 53. The importance of corollary discharge signals is well established in the context of eye movements and grasping or reaching movements 50, 51, 52.

The cognitive function of motor circuits

An action-oriented view implies that procedural knowledge is fundamental to the acquisition of object concepts 25, 59 and, therefore, the storage of information about events and objects should generally involve action planning regions 25, 64. In line with this prediction, recent imaging studies show that object concepts in semantic memory do not only rely on sensory features but, critically, also on motor properties associated with the object's use 25, 64, 65. If subjects are trained to perform

Action-relatedness of attention and decision-making

Attention and decision making provide two examples of cognitive processes that classically are assumed to be interposed between perception and action. Recent studies demonstrate that these are much more closely related to the function of motor and premotor circuits than previously thought 27, 74, 75, 76.

As part of the so-called ‘premotor theory of attention’ [77], it has long been suggested that the selection of sensory information should be modulated and focused by constraints that arise from

Challenging representations

The studies discussed above are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that cognition is fundamentally action-bound, subserving the planning, selection, anticipation, and performance of actions. Thus, cognition and action are not only closely interrelated – cognition seems fundamentally grounded in action 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22. If valid, this conclusion would enforce a radical change in how we conceive of the functional significance of neural activity patterns. According to the view

Dynamic directives

We suggest that, rather than trying to reshape the notion of representation, it may be more appropriate to replace it by a term that does not carry so much of the cognitivist burden. As an alternative, one of us (A.K.E.) has proposed to use the term ‘directive’ to denote the action-related role of large-scale dynamic interaction patterns that emerge in a cognitive system [20]. On this account, directives can be defined as dispositions for action embodied in dynamic activity patterns. On hand in

Concluding remarks

We have discussed a novel action-oriented framework for cognition that receives increasing support from researchers who strive to cope with problems not adequately solved by classical approaches in cognitive science. At this point, the pragmatic turn presumably denotes more an agenda than a paradigm already in place. We have argued that such an action-oriented framework is conceptually sound and supported by a large body of experimental evidence. Moreover, this agenda has a number of important

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge support by grants from the EU (IST-2005-27268, NEST-Path-043457, FP7-ICT-270212, ERC-2010-AdG-269716), the Volkswagen Foundation (II/80609) and the DFG (GRK1247, SFB 936/A2/A3/B6).

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