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

Abstract

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.