"Catching Ourselves in the Act is no less than an attempt
to explain intelligence. Delightful how the author dismantles
traditional views in psychology, artificial intelligence, ethology,
and philosophy. But he goes beyond criticism by providing alternative
explanations, drawing on recent work in situated robotics. A
masterpiece in combining detailed analysis with grand theorizing. A
must for any cognitive scientist."
-- Rolf Pfeifer, AI Laboratory, Computer Science
Department, University of Zurich
Catching Ourselves in the Act uses situated robotics,
ethology, and developmental psychology to erect a new framework for
explaining human behavior. Rejecting the cognitive science orthodoxy
that formal task-descriptions and their implementation are fundamental
to an explanation of mind, Horst Hendriks-Jansen argues for an
alternative model based on the notion of interactive emergence.
Situated activity and interactive emergence are concepts that derive
from the new discipline of autonomous agent research. Hendriks-Jansen
puts these notions on a firm philosophical basis and uses them to
anchor a "genetic" or "historical" explanation of mental phenomena in
species-typical activity patterns that have been selected by a
cultural environment of artifacts, language, and intentional
scaffolding by adults. Situated robotics, allied with techniques and
principles from ethology, allows the testing of hypotheses framed in
terms of natural kinds that can be grounded through the theory of
natural selection. This approach negotiates the "nature versus
nurture" dispute in a radically new way.
Catching Ourselves in the Act provides a thorough
overview of autonomous agent research in America and Europe, focusing
in particular on work by such eminent researchers as Rodney Brooks,
Pattie Maes, Maja Mataric, and Rolf Pfeifer. It reassesses the basic
principles of artificial life and explores the repercussions of
autonomous agent research for human psychology and the philosophy of
mind, as well as its affinities with the "contextual revolution" in
sociology and anthropology.
A Bradford Book. Complex Adaptive Systems
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