Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Over the last two decades, an increasing number of cognitive scientists have turned to mechanistic explanatory frameworks in their efforts to describe and explain cognitive phenomena. Most mechanistic frameworks conceive of cognitive systems as composed of functionally-individuated components whose functions are narrowly defined by their ranges of possible inputs and outputs, as well as their relations to other components within the phenomenon-producing mechanism. In this paper, I argue that this modular view of cognitive mechanisms as linear systems is not applicable to biological cognitive systems, and offer an alternative characterization using the methodology of Dynamical Systems Theory.