Call for Papers: A post-cognitivist cognitive science?
2025-12-08
Most researchers in contemporary cognitive sciences take for granted in their research (implicitly or explicitly) a philosophical view that is called “cognitivism”. Research in neuroscience, for instance, seems to take for granted some form of mental representations and to assume a cognitivist theoretical paradigm of human cognition: researchers in neurolinguistics look for the neural correlates of specific linguistic features, that is neural representations of such linguistic features, and so on. While cognitivism understands cognition as a three-phases process of stimulus–information-processing–response, admitting that the processed information consists in mental representations internally manipulated by the subject, post-cognitivism rejects such view and contends that cognition is not based on information-processing; cognition is, instead, the skilful capacity of an organism to successfully deal with its environment. As stated by Heras-Escribano, “in the post-cognitivist approach, cognition is not inner information-processing, but adaptive behavior”.
Post-cognitivism represents nowadays a growing theoretical field that is redefining cognitive sciences. But how does it concretely affect scientific research? Are “mental representations” unavoidable in contemporary cognitive sciences? While the dilemma representationalism/anti-representationalism is an old discussion among philosophers, it still may represent a debated question for contemporary cognitive sciences. For instance, some theorists defend a radical embodied cognitive science that avoids relying on representations, drawing on the concept of “resonance”, while other theorists keep arguing for a main role of representations in cognition. Anyway, there is no evidence so far of structural representations in neuronal activity, which constitutes a concrete difficulty for a defence of representationalism in cognitive science. Yet, mental representations may still play some role in cognition.