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Alternatives to the classical cognitivist position on cognition, i.e. symbolic information-processing representational models, are becoming increasingly important. These alternatives embrace, for example, enactive systems and emphasize situated and embodied cognition typically using dynamical, emergent, and self-organization models. Progress in non-cognitivist approaches has been made in many different fields, ranging from psychology, through artificial cognitive systems, to artificial life. To avoid repeating the mistakes of GOFAI, we should naturalise models of thought. Natural cognition is primordially qualitative and affective, that is, it is intentional. Powerful aids to understanding intentionality can be found in the phenomenological lineage: Bergson - Merleau-Ponty - Deleuze. Natural cognitive systems are epigenetic products, and to understand this requires thinking outside the Neo-Darwinist box: Maturana+Varela; Evan Thompson Post-cognitivism itself needs to be seen as part of a wider shift in the metaphysical foundations of the scientific worldview. Here, Whitehead and C.S. Peirce are fundamental. The following are some links to relevant websites concerned with post-cognitivist psychology. euCognition Workshop: Models of Thought - Post-Cognitivist Epistemologies Munich, 20-21 February 2008
Post-Cognitivist Psychology Conference Website University of Strathclyde, UK, 2005. Abstracts of the papers presented at this conference can be found here (pdf 683 kb). A book based on these papers has been published by Imprint Press in 2007.
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