Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The computational metaphor for mind is still the central guiding idea in cognitive science despite many insightfuland well-founded rejections of it. There is good reason for its staying power: when we are at our cognitive best, we reasonabout our world with our concepts. But the challengers are right, I argue, in insisting that no reductive account of that capacityis forthcoming. Here I describe an externalist account that grounds representations in organism-level engagement with itsenvironment, not in its neural activity.