Abstract

Embodied, enactive cognitive science has traditionally rejected computationalism and its compatriot, representationalism. I argue that this rejection is too hasty, and places undo weight on intuitions about simple dynamical systems, such as the Watt Governor. I suggest instead that enactivists should consider cognition analogous to more complex, functional dynamical systems, such as analog computers, offering in particular a hydrodynamic computer, the MONIAC, as a new metaphor for embodied cognitive science. The implication of this approach is that adequate explanations of embodied cognition will require both the construction of models and the identification of representations.