An important question in the debate over embodied, enactive, and extended cognition has been what has been meant by "cognition". What is this cognition that is supposed to be embodied, enactive, or extended? Rather than undertake a frontal assault on this question, however, this paper will take a different approach. In particular, we may ask how cognition is supposed to be related to behavior. First, we should ask whether cognition is supposed to be (a type of) behavior. Second, we should ask whether we should attempt to understand cognitive processes in terms of antecedently understood cognitive behaviors. This paper will survey some of the answers that have been (implicitly or explicitly) given in the embodied, enactive, and extended cognition literature, then suggests reasons to believe that we should answer both questions in the negative.

What is cognition? It is likely that this question will never be answered in any satisfactory way – in a way that garners universal (or probably even widespread) consent. The reason is that this question is one of philosophy and not cognitive science. As such, any answer to the question will rest on various philosophical theses that will probably always remain contestable. I shall develop this argument through discussion of the role played by a 'mark of the cognitive' in the dispute between proponents and opponents of extended cognition.

Two aspects of cognitive coupling, as brought forward in the Extended Mind Hypothesis, are discussed in this paper: (1) How shall that coupling between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail? (2) What are the candidate external entities that might enter into that coupling? Starting from some basic theoretical parallels between the Extended Mind Hypothesis and the theories of the extended phenotype (Dawkins) and the construction of environments (Lewontin), it is argued that, unlike implicitly suggested in Clark and Chalmers' examples, (ad 1) cognitive coupling should be understood in a constitutive, non-instrumental fashion and (ad 2) the paradigmatic counterparts of that coupling are, in causal-historical terms, features of the environment rather than linguistically imbued artefacts or language proper -- which are likely to have descended from more basic forms of cognition that have an extension over the environment.

The past few years have seen the emergence of interaction as a central topic within social cognition research. One particularly prominent contribution to this trend has been Auvray, Lenay, & Stewart's (2006, 2009) minimalist perceptual crossing experiment. The experiment provides an elegant illustration of the complexity of the relationship between social cognition and the interactive settings in which it usually occurs, and has proven to be a fruitful basis for the articulation of theoretical options for conceptualizing that relationship. In this contribution, we criticize one particular theoretical option that has recently been advanced by theorists working within the enactivist tradition (e.g. De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher 2010; Froese and Di Paolo 2010), who maintain that the results of the experiment corroborate the claim that interaction can play a constitutive role in social cognition.

Paradigmatic cognitive science has always been about human cognition. But not all cognitive scientists limit their attention to the cognitive capacities of the not quite 10^11 neurons embedded within the roughly 10^16 cells that comprise the human body. Cognitive approaches have been advocated for much smaller and simpler systems, as well as for the much larger aggregations of agents into social groups. I will survey the range of natural and artificial systems which some cognitive scientists have considered to be cognitive systems in their own right, including single cells, "gliders" in "the game of life", "minimally cognitive" dynamical agents, spinal cords, nonhuman animals, "hive minds", human social groups, and socio-technological hybrids. In doing so I will assess arguments for and against the conservative view that cognition is a natural phenomenon that manifests itself only within a relatively narrow range of scales, being emergent at the lower end -- perhaps around the scale of 10^6 (cf. honeybees) or 10^8 (cf. cephalopods) neurons -- and "demergent" in larger systems that have cognitive agents as parts.

My talk concerns an argument against Etiological Teleosemantics (ET) from Joseph Mendola. Mendola claims that the real problem of ET is not that their content-determination is too vague, but that "they deliver the wrong contents" (Mendola 2008, 109), which could be seen in the case of colour-blindness. In my talk I will do two things. First, I will reconstruct Mendola's argument and show that it fails. Second, I will sketch how Millikan's Biosemantics can deal with colorblindness and thereby outline the understanding of cognition in Millikan's project.

Cognition is a potentially open set of truth-conducive processes over mental representations, where the notion of truth-conduciveness might eventually be interpreted in the weakest possible way (e.g., allowing for error-tolerance, situatedness, domain-specificity, etc.). According to the classical view, these mental representations are compositional and symbolic and the processes operating on them rule-governed transformations of symbols. In this talk a neurobiologically motivated theory of cognition is developed that still regards mental representations as compositional, but no longer as symbolic. Instead, mental representation is taken to be based on neural emulation. Emulations are eigenstates of particular recurrent neural networks with non-arbitrary, causal-informationally backed assignments of singular terms to neural object signatures and predicates to neural property signatures. Propositional representations are regarded as sets of emulations that make a sentence true under the respective assignment. The semantics to be developed is isomorphic to model-theoretical semantics and thus inherits a bunch of structural features from model-theoretical semantics that are relevant for any theory of cognition.

1. Roxana Akhbari - "Action in two temporal modes of cognition: Sensory perception and memory"
2. Brandon Tinklenberg - "Animal reasoning and protologic"
3. Barbara Trybulec - "Mind embedded or extended? The tension in the theory of situated cognition"
4. Alex Tillas - "What's language got to do with cognition?"
5. Susana Monsó - "Does empathy require a theory of mind?"
6. Mog Stapleton - "Cognition is internally embodied"
7. Miljana Milojevic - "Functionalism and extended cognition"
8. María Muñoz-Serrano - "The significance of artefacts in cooperation"
9. Emmanuel Moraitis - "Is the TM model of computation adequate for cognition?"
10. Alex Díaz - "What is unbiased cognition expected to be?"
11. Patrizia Pecl and Philipp Bartels - "Distributed cognitive agents"
12. Harald Maurer - "Vectorial form of neurocognition: Fluid cognitive neuroarchitectures and integrative mechanisms"
13. Uwe Peters - "Central cognition: How do propositional attitudes interact?"
14. Richard Heersmink - "Cognition, embodiment, and brain-computer interfaces"

I will argue that an adequate response to the "what is cognition?" question begins from a perspective in which cognitive operations are seen as a special case of activity kinds. The metaphysics of activities (broadly construed) and their conceptualization (as revealed in linguistic data regarding verb use and learning) result in importantly different constraints on the behavior of activity concepts from those guiding object concepts. For example, these constraints imply -- in contrast to widely held views -- that many uses of psychological terms to label sub- or supra-personal activities are literal and can be literally true. In a scientifically relevant sense, the "cognitive" remains extendable to new domains under any of the usual ways of defining a core concept of the "cognitive".

Why are machines structurally affected by the so-called frame problem, which designates a system's insensitivity to the relevance of real life situations? According to Dreyfus, this happens because only AI, not basic human cognition, is governed by representations (stored heuristics). I argue – contra Dreyfus - that human cognition is subject to the frame problem too, and that we occasionally experience it as a general impairment of our sense-making capabilities. However, this impairment doesn't lead to paralysis, as in AI, but to peculiar out-of-context experience, or non-sense. In order to achieve richly adaptive intelligence and sensitivity to real contexts, research in theoretical AI should at first provide a normative framework for a new class of machines that sense the non-sense of unfamiliar and problematic contexts, and dynamically relate to it. If this goal could ever be achieved, it would require action-oriented representations designed to model one's own context.

In most areas of science, scientists can agree which phenomena need to be explained while disagreeing about what the explanation will look like. In cognitive science, however, views about how we ought to explain cognitive capacities are often closely tied to views about what sort of capacities qualify as cognitive. As a result, those who disagree about the domain of cognitive science cannot constructively debate the nature of explanation in cognitive science: there is increasing polarization between those who hold that cognition essentially involves rational thought and those who understand cognition in terms of the embodied interaction between agents and their environments. In this paper I demonstrate that that a variety of more nuanced positions are available with regard to relations between cognition, explanation, and rationality, and thus that the polarization of cognitive science is largely unmotivated.

In various contexts and for various reasons, writers often define cognitive processes and architectures as those involving representational states and structures. Similarly, cognitive theories are also often delineated as those that invoke representations to explain various cognitive processes. In this talk, I will present some reasons for rejecting this way of distinguishing the cognitive from the non-cognitive. Some of the reasons against defining cognition in representational terms are that doing so needlessly restricts our theorizing, it undermines the empirical status of the representational theory of mind, and it encourages wildly deflationary and explanatorily vacuous conceptions of representation. After criticizing this outlook, I'll consider alternative ways we might try to capture what is distinctive about cognition and cognitive theorizing, though I will also suggest the demarcation problem is far less important than many have thought.

There are no such things as the empirical concepts traditionally conceived by philosophers and psychologists of the last century. According to this tradition, empirical concepts consisted in part of apprehensions or structures within the mind that are common to all persons who understand a word, or another word with the same meaning. A determinate concept could be indicated just by exhibiting a word: "the concept dog" or "our concept of a university." Concepts were the sorts of things that you could grasp and I could grasp too -- the very same concept. I will argue that there are no such things. No similarities whatever between two person's ideas corresponding to the same property word or kind term can ever be taken for granted. Words for empirical properties and kinds (equally for individuals) refer directly, without mediation, to real entities in the world -- to properties, to real kinds, to individuals. To make this case I will have to talk first about the structure of the world, and of the language that makes reference to it. Then I must explain what is in the mind instead of a concept when someone understands an empirical term. Third, I must explain how the minds of different individual language users are able to grasp a common world through the medium of language.