Access to this full-text is provided by Frontiers.
Content available from Frontiers in Psychology
This content is subject to copyright.
HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY
published: 17 January 2022
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750086
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Edited by:
Gregory John Feist,
San Jose State University, United
States
Reviewed by:
Luis H. Favela,
University of Central Florida, United
States
Karen Pearlman,
Macquarie University, Australia
*Correspondence:
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira
sanchessanchez@tu-berlin.de
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Cognition,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 30 July 2021
Accepted: 22 November 2021
Published: 17 January 2022
Citation:
Sanches de Oliveira G (2022) From
Something Old to Something New:
Functionalist Lessons for the Cognitive
Science of Scientific Creativity.
Front. Psychol. 12:750086.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750086
From Something Old to Something
New: Functionalist Lessons for the
Cognitive Science of Scientific
Creativity
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira*
Biological Psychology and Neuroergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and
familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is
typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate
internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it is hard to
imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed
light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind
scientists so often engage in. The present article offers an entry point to addressing this
challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in
the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James
and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the
nature of mind,thought, and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive
science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The
result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the article claims that the functionalist
conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the
combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted
here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific
theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from
combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light
of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims.
Keywords: creativity, representation, mind, experience, functionalism, embodied cognitive science
1. INTRODUCTION
Innovative design often involves combining previously separate features or functions into a single
new product. Obvious examples include simple 2-in-1 products, such as the shampoo/conditioner
combo, the washing machine with a built-in dryer, and the versatile baby car seat that transforms
into a stroller. This is also the case with multi-functional (i.e., many-in-one) products, such as
current cellphones: in addition to making phone calls, the smartphone also acts as a camera, GPS
device, calculator, alarm clock, internet browser, and more. What was creative about products like
these when they were first invented was not that they did something entirely novel that did not
exist previously: rather, their originality lies in bringing together in a single object different uses
that were already well known but which had previously been separate from one another.
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
From a psychological standpoint, creativity is frequently
described in a similar fashion as relating to the production of
novelty out of what was already familiar. Some researchers have
emphasized the role of personality traits in lowering barriers
to creative behaviors: different levels of openness, extraversion,
nonconformity, impulsivity, and persistence, for instance, might
increase the likelihood of diverging from more familiar behaviors
or increase the occurrence of unusual associations (refer to, e.g.,
Batey and Furnham, 2006; Feist, 2010, 2019 for detailed reviews).
Other researchers have emphasized social psychological factors
contributing to creative performance, including evaluation by
others and expectations of future evaluation, the availability of
rewards, and access to role models to draw from in generating
original behavioral variations (refer to, e.g., Hennessey, 2003,
2010; Amabile et al., 2018). From a specifically cognitive focus,
research on imagination has shown that when we try to come up
with a completely novel member of a given category, properties
that are typical for members of that category tend to structure
our imagination (Ward, 1994; Ward et al., 1999; Ward and
Kolomyts, 2010). Even when we cannot trace the origin of a
new thought, idea, or behavior, the process underlying creative
insight is usually assumed to involve some kind of combining or
associating prior knowledge in a new way rather than actually
coming up with something completely novel out of thin air. As
Thomas Ward puts it, “Clearly, ideas do not arise in a vacuum,
and there is a trivial sense in which we must always rely on
some type of stored information when we develop any new idea”
(Ward, 1995, p. 157–158).
The present article is concerned with evaluating this intuitive
view of creativity in terms of combinations or associations, even
in this supposedly trivial sense. The special focus is on how the
combinatorial view figures in the cognitive science of science, that
is, in the application of theories and methods from cognitive
science toward investigating cognitive phenomena at play in
scientific practice itself. The dominant paradigm in cognitive
science is to understand the mind in terms of the internal
knowledge structures and procedures that mediate between
perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs (refer to, e.g., Neisser,
1967/2014; Marr, 1982; Fodor, 1983; Pinker, 1997; Thagard, 2005,
2019; Boden, 2008; Clark, 2014). Along these lines, cognitive
explanations of scientific practice have tended to emphasize the
role of mental representations and computational information-
manipulating procedures in enabling the individual scientist to
generate new knowledge (refer to, e.g., Gholson et al., 1989;
Gopnik, 1996; Carruthers et al., 2002; Feist, 2008; Nersessian,
2008; Feist and Gorman, 2012; Thagard, 2012).
In parallel with the dominant computational-representational
approach, an increasingly popular alternative understands
cognition as an embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and
ecological phenomenon (refer to, e.g., Gibson, 1979; Maturana
and Varela, 1980; Varela et al., 1991; Clark, 1998, 2003, 2008;
Calvo and Gomila, 2008; Chemero, 2009; Menary, 2010; Shapiro,
2010, 2014; Di Paolo et al., 2017; Gallagher, 2017; Newen
et al., 2018). This diverse research tradition, referred to as
embodied cognitive science or “4E cognition” for short, is widely
recognized (even by critics) as being very successful in explaining
non-representationally so-called “lower-level” behaviors, which
includes, for instance, accounts of how we navigate cluttered
environments without collision or how we catch balls and
other moving targets, all in terms of real-time perception-
action coupling. But, embodied cognitive science appears to
face a problem. This is the problem of “scaling up” non-
representational, embodied explanations so that they can also
make sense of what has been referred to as “representation-
hungry” processes, i.e., processes that seem to require explanation
in terms of internal representations, such as abstract conceptual
thinking, logical reasoning, imagination, memory, and language
(Clark and Toribio, 1994; Chemero, 2009; Gallagher, 2017;
Sanches de Oliveira et al., 2021).
The scaling-up problem presents a challenge for embodied
cognitive science in general, but it can also seem to pose a
special barrier for the application of the embodied approach
in the cognitive science of science. This is because scientific
practice exhibits all of the main characteristics that are usually
considered to be problematic for embodied, non-representational
approaches to cognition. No doubt, scientists use their bodies
to interact with parts of the world that are readily available for
perception, as is clear, for instance, in operating equipment to
conduct experiments and collect data. But even in these cases,
scientific work is unavoidably tangled in a complex web of
meaning that seems paradigmatically “representation hungry,”
involving reasoning about entities that are not immediately
available for real-time perception and that perhaps could not
even possibly be available in that way, such as in the case of
abstract concepts.
This is the issue that the present paper is ultimately concerned
with, namely, examining the view of creativity as a combination
or association with an eye to determining how it might fit in
the broader project of approaching scientific practice from the
perspective of embodied cognitive science. Embodied cognitive
science is sometimes treated by critics as a new trend, and
the canonical references cited above, mostly from the past
couple of decades, illustrate the focus on recent research. In
fact, however, embodied cognitive science is rooted in work in
the functionalist tradition extending all the way back to the
late 19th century and the origins of psychology as a distinct
scientific discipline (Heft, 2001; Crippen and Schulkin, 2020).
By exploring these functionalist roots of embodied cognitive
science, the goal here is to find a new way of understanding
creativity that makes it more amenable to explanation in
non-representational, embodied terms. Section 2 reviews how,
within the computational-representational paradigm, scientific
creativity is understood in terms of combination and association.
Section 3 examines some of the key elements making up the
functionalist approach to psychology as developed by William
James and John Dewey. Section 4 then traces out implications
of those aspects of the functionalist paradigm for thinking about
creativity, especially in science, from the perspective of embodied
cognitive science. As its functionalist roots make clear, embodied
cognitive science is more than just a local theory limited to
“lower-level” cognitive phenomena: rather, it is a comprehensive
approach capable of advancing our understanding of all of
cognition, including even phenomena of interest for the cognitive
science of science.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
2. CREATIVITY IN
COMPUTATIONAL-REPRESENTATIONAL
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
2.1. The Newell, Shaw, and Simon Model
and the Foundations of
Computational-Representational Cognitive
Science
Cognitive approaches to creativity are about as old as cognitive
science itself. If the year 1956 is taken as the birth of cognitive
science (Miller, 2003), it would only be another couple of years
until Newell et al. (1958/1962) offered an early example of a
computational approach to creative thinking. They described
their approach as follows: “we would have a satisfactory theory of
creative thought if we could design and build some mechanisms
that could think creatively (exhibit behavior just like that of
a human carrying on creative activity), and if we could state
the general principles on which the mechanisms were built and
operated” (Newell et al., 1958/1962, p. 64). While recognizing
that the programs they described fell short from the level of
sophistication and complexity characteristic of human creativity,
the authors held that the processes at play were of the same
type: their working hypothesis was that “creative thinking is
simply a special kind of problem-solving behavior” (p. 65) and,
however simple, the candidate explanations they offered were
“qualitatively of the same genus as these more complex human
problem-solving processes” (p. 116). In their view, effective
problem solving is a matter of employing “search” strategies that
narrow down the entire “problem space” and enable finding
acceptable solutions within a restricted time frame. The key to
making sense of problem-solving behavior that is effective in a
creative manner, then, lies in considering the “system of heuristics
possessed by the problem-solver” (p. 104). In many cases, when
strategies that have been useful in the past prove unsuccessful for
dealing with new situations, a problem-solver will be “more likely
to succeed if his repertoire of heuristics includes the injunction:
‘If at first you don’t succeed, try something counter-intuitive’" (p.
105). Consequently, while in some cases, a creative solution can
be found by employing a combination of different heuristics, in
other instances it might require “generat[ing] new heuristics to
fill the vacuums created by the rejection of the ones previously
used” (p. 107).
The focus of this section will be on a different, more recent
cognitive account of creativity. Still, starting with Newell, Shaw,
and Simon’s account is instructive for two reasons.
The first reason has to do with the view of creativity at play in
their account. The brief summary given above emphasized their
goal of explaining how problem-solving behavior can be creative,
namely depending on the heuristics that problem solvers know
and use. But although their focus was explicitly on the ‘how’ of
creativity, they did not ignore the “what” question: for them, this
was the question of what makes a given problem solution creative
in the first place. Synthesizing the prior psychological literature
and bringing it to the nascent domain of cognitive science,
Newell, Shaw, and Simon identify four criteria each of which they
thought sufficed to make a solution count as creative: “creative
activity appears simply to be a special class of problem-solving
activity characterized by novelty, unconventionality, persistence,
and difficulty in problem formulation” (p. 66). Contemporary
work tends to emphasize novelty and unconventionality without
seeing persistence and difficulty as nearly as important. Along
these lines, for instance, Margaret Boden offers the following
characterization: “Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas
or artifacts that are new, surprising, and valuable” (Boden, 2004,
p. 1). Boden also adds—without reference to Newell, Shaw
and Simon, but clearly in agreement with them—that creativity
is not a sui generis process, “not a special “faculty” but an
aspect of human intelligence in general” (ibid.). Newell, Shaw,
and Simon’s inclusion of persistence and difficulty is likely
motivated by their attention to creative innovation in highly
skilled activities in science and technology: as they propose,
these require “motivation” to sustain specialized activities “either
over a considerable span of time (continuously or intermittently)
or at high intensity” (p. 65) and sometimes problems in these
specialized domains are “vague and ill-defined, so that part of
the task was to formulate the problem itself,” which can be
difficult (p. 66). But even Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s description
of novelty was prescient: in their view, the first criterion for
creative problem-solving is that “The product of the thinking has
novelty and value (either for the thinker or for his culture)” (p.
65). In this, they seem to anticipate a distinction that would be
drawn much later between the “P-creative” and the “H-creative,”
that is, between that which is innovative for an individual yet
may not be innovative for others and that which is historically
innovative, or novel for all (Boden, 1990, 2004; see also, e.g.,
Nersessian, 2008).
Relatedly, but beyond the specific topic of creativity, a second
reason for the relevance of their account for the purposes of this
article is that the main theoretical commitments they articulated
have remained by and large the same in contemporary cognitive
science. What is key here is the assumption that providing a
cognitive explanation of some phenomenon amounts to providing
an explanation in computational-representational terms. Newell,
Shaw, and Simon propose: “In order for us to think about
something, that something must have an internal representation
of some kind, and the thinking organism must have some
processes that are capable of manipulating the representation”
(Newell et al., 1958/1962, p. 102). The assumption here is that
the mind trades in representations of the external world: through
perception, we obtain information from the environment, and
intelligent behavior arises from manipulating those internal
information structures. In some cases, information processing is
for planning and executing motor actions that involve continued
contact with the environment and typically require further
sensory feedback. In other cases, information processing is for
engaging in more purely intellectual activities, such as when
we think about objects that are no longer present externally
and that, presumably, must therefore remain accessible in
the form of internally-stored mental representations. In either
case, according to this view, a proper understanding of mind
and behavior calls for description in terms of computational
procedures and the manipulation of internal representations or
information structures.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 3January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
If this way of understanding mind and behavior sounds
uncontroversial, that is precisely because the work by people like
Newell, Shaw, and Simon helped establish this as the standard
way of doing cognitive science. Foreshadowing Marr’s (1982)
influential distinction between levels of description, in this early
paper on creativity Newell et al. (1958/1962, p. 98) already
indicate how the project of computational-representational
explanation is seen as independent from research on what goes
on in the brain: “We are asking here neither a physiological
nor a ‘hardware’ question. We wish an answer at the level of
information processing, rather than at that of neurology or
electronics.” Exclusive focus on explanation at the cognitive
level without any regard at all to advances in neuroscience
is increasingly less common today: for the past couple of
decades, cognitive science continues to be “pulled vertically
down into the brain,” as Bechtel et al. (1998/2017) put it.
But the nature of this shift toward closer contact between
cognitive and neural explanations is illuminating. To a large
extent, this shift has been possible not so much because,
through contact with neuroscientific research, cognitive scientists
have begun reconceptualizing cognition in neurophysiological
terms—on the contrary, the shift is for the most part due to
the increasing popularity of conceptualizations of the brain
and neural processes in computational-representational terms
(refer to endorsements as well as critical discussions in, e.g.,
Posner et al., 1988; Sejnowski et al., 1988; Barlow, 1994; Boden,
2008; Neske, 2010; Piccinini and Bahar, 2013; Anderson, 2014;
Gazzaniga, 2014; Brette, 2019). The assumption that we find
already in Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s work and that remains
widespread today is that, whatever it does, physiologically
speaking, the brain can be adequately understood as engaging in
storing and processing information. It was by building upon the
foundation of this computational-representational theoretical
assumption that the contemporary cognitive neuroscientific
project of understanding creativity could become equated to “the
question of how brains compute creative ideas” (Dietrich and
Haider, 2017, p. 2).
2.2. Thagard’s Neurocomputational
Account of Scientific Creativity
Paul Thagard’s approach to creativity, including scientific
creativity, exhibits important similarities and dissimilarities
to the one by Newell, Shaw, and Simon. Conceptually,
Thagard’s account agrees in highlighting the role of novelty,
surprise, and value in creativity: in his view, something
(say, a behavior, a concept or a product) is creative when
it is original, when it is unexpected because not obvious,
and when it is considered useful and important (Thagard,
2019). Theoretically, Thagard also approaches creativity from a
computational-representational perspective and focuses on the
“how” question of understanding the information-processing
mechanisms involved in the generation of creative outputs. Still,
his account differs significantly from the one by Newell, Shaw,
and Simon because, in line with the recent developments just
described, Thagard’s project embraces the more recent idea that
the computational-representational framework can be a way
of integrating cognitive and neural explanations rather than
divorcing the two. Given this, a more fundamental difference lies
in the specific mechanism posited to explain creativity. Unlike
Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s focus on problem solving and on the
“creative” as a feature of some problem solutions, Thagard’s focus
is more general, not limited to problem solving but encompassing
other kinds of behaviors and activities understood in reference to
neural processes.
This more fundamental difference is made clear by Thagard’s
claim that he sees “the problem of creative combination
of representations as an instance of the ubiquitous ‘binding
problem’ that pervades cognitive neuroscience” (Thagard, 2012,
p. 114). Put briefly, the binding problem is the problem of
explaining how we integrate multiple sensory inputs, even from
different sensory modalities, into unified representations. In
typing these very words, for instance, I feel the keys at the
tip of my fingers, I hear the sound of each key press, and I
see the letters show up in succession on the screen. And yet,
each of these sensory inputs (tactile, auditory and visual) goes
on unnoticed—or at least they did until I started writing this
example—and the whole situation unfolds smoothly as I have
a single coherent experience of the world rather than a jumble
of disjointed sensations. This applies even for a single sensory
modality. Focusing on vision, Thagard explains: “Recognizing
objects requires combinations of features” such that, when a
monkey recognizes a banana, that recognition involves binding
“[d]ifferent neural groups [that] serve to encode different features
of bananas, such as yellow, long, and round” much like the
binding of features such as nose, eyes, and mouth when you
recognize a friend’s face (Thagard, 2019, p. 26). The binding
problem, then, is the problem of understanding how this
happens. The problem matters for us precisely because, again,
in Thagard’s account the binding of distinct representations
explains not only the unity and coherence of ordinary experience
but also the occurrence of behaviors and concepts that are novel,
surprising, and valuable, that is, that are creative: as he puts it,
“representation combination” or binding “is the fundamental
mechanism of creativity in various domains” (Thagard, 2012,
p. 142).
Thagard’s account is based on what he calls the “combinatorial
conjecture,” which he describes as the view that “All creativity
results from convolution-based combination of mental
representations consisting of patterns of firing in neural
populations” (Thagard, 2012, p. 142). The account can thus
be understood in light of two distinctions, the first between
combinatorial models and non-combinatorial alternatives, and
the second between combinatorial models that are based on
convolution and combinatorial models that are not.
First, in endorsing the combinatorial conjecture, Thagard
(2012) explicitly opposes the alternative view that, rather than
involving the combination of different representations, a creative
idea is the result of blind variations on a single concept or
representation. As he explains, this kind of view is generally
inspired by an analogy to evolutionary processes in biology:
just as new adaptive biological features arise through random
genetic mutations, so are original and useful concepts supposed
to arise through mutation or blind variation on prior versions
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 4January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
of individual concepts. A more specific target of Thagard’s
(2012) criticism is the view developed by Simonton (2010) as
a reworking of Campbell’s (1960) blind-variation and selective-
retention (BVSR) model of creativity (refer to, e.g., Simonton,
1999, 2011, 2013, 2018). After examining Simonton’s model,
Thagard suggests that, even accounting for the role of serendipity
and unforeseen developments, scientific discoveries can never be
entirely blind. In Thagard’s example, although Galileo may not
have had the intention to discover the moons of Jupiter, still
“his interests, background knowledge, and cognitive processes
made it more probable that” upon turning his telescope in the
right direction “he would generate the representation ‘Jupiter has
moons”’ compared to the probability of generating “some utterly
useless representation such as ‘Rome has toes’ ” (Thagard, 2012,
p. 157). This leads Thagard to the conclusion that blind variation
cannot be the mechanism for creativity: “discovery is not blind,
and biological evolution is a poor model for scientific discovery
and other kinds of creativity” (Thagard, 2012, p. 157).
A sticking point for Thagard, therefore, seems to be the
notion of “blindness” at play in the BVSR view. Interestingly,
however, Simonton explicitly states that blindness does not
equate to randomness: “Although all random variations are
inexorably blind, blind variations are not inevitably random,
and are actually seldom so” (Simonton, 2010, p. 157). Elsewhere
Simonton explains that blindness does not consist in the
“equiprobability for all possible alternatives” (Simonton, 1999, p.
312); rather, blindness more simply suggests that the variation
is not sighted in the sense of being informed or guided by
the probability of the variation’s success. This suggests that
Thagard’s criticism, as illustrated in his Galileo example, may
be unwarranted since Simonton’s BVSR model does not entail
the equiprobability of the success of both Galileo’s discovery
and of his hypothetical nonsensical thought. Not only that,
but the example also suggests blind variation to be the whole
story, when in reality the BVSR model expressly includes a
second element of selective retention (this is the “SR” in
“BVSR”); and this selective element is something creativity
also has in common with biological evolution: “The creative
individual, too, produces original ideas, which are then subjected
to first cognitive and then sociocultural selection, retaining
solely those ideas that are adaptive by some criteria of utility,
truth, or beauty” (Simonton, 1999, p. 322; and also, e.g.,
Simonton, 2010, p. 157). So, although this selective function
is not part of the variational process itself (which is blind),
it is still present at the (sub)personal and collective levels,
which could explain why Galileo did not have something like
the nonsensical idea Thagard described, or at least why we
would not know about it if he did. Last, besides these points
about blindness and the importance of selection, Thagard’s
focus on Simonton (2010) as a target of criticism is curious
for the further reason that, in Simonton’s account at least,
blind variation is an explicitly combinatorial mechanism: rather
than the single-concept mutation view, what Simonton proposes
is precisely that creativity is “contingent on the capacity to
proliferate blind combinatorial variations” (Simonton, 2010, p.
158; refer to, e.g., Simonton, 2011, 2013), which situates both
Simonton’s and Thagard’s accounts within the same larger camp,
even if they disagree with regard to the specific nature of
combinatorial processes.
Setting aside the question of whether Thagard’s (2012)
criticism of Simonton’s (2010) account is warranted, the
second contrast useful for understanding Thagard’s proposal
is one between his convolution-based combinatorial approach
and the alternative combinatorial approach based on neural
synchronization. Both approaches, as Thagard explains, are
candidate solutions to the binding problem. In the neural
synchronization view, the coherence of experience is a result of
the binding of neuronal firing patterns that represent different
incoming sensory stimuli but that are temporally coordinated:
“The neural synchrony hypothesis is that binding takes place
because the representations that need to be bound together are
firing in the same temporal patterns” (Thagard, 2019, p. 26).
Thagard criticizes neural synchronization models for being too
biologically implausible, in some cases making assumptions that
do not hold about real neurons and in other cases requiring
“more neurons than exist in the human brain” (Thagard,
2012, p. 115). He also identifies important cognitive limitations
attending synchronization models (refer to Thagard, 2019,
pp. 26–27). On the one hand, for instance, while temporal
coordination may contribute to how we recognize perceived
objects through binding sensory inputs, Thagard suggests it is
not clear how this can accommodate the fact that we often
draw inferences about those perceived objects for which there
is no incoming sensory stimulation. On the other hand, even
if neural synchronization is responsible for the binding of
representations that are temporally coordinated, Thagard argues
that neural synchronization models do not thereby explain
how we manipulate representations once they have been bound
together. Limitations like these pose general challenges for neural
synchronization as a solution to the binding problem, but
they are even more relevant for the project of understanding
the emergence of creative thoughts and ideas, since in the
combinatorial perspective these are supposed to arise from
manipulations that bind together different representations. These
limitations motivate Thagard to pursue an alternative approach
drawing instead on Eliasmith’s (2013) work on convolution and
semantic pointers.
Thagard offers two helpful analogies to explain the perspective
he favors. The first analogy describes convolution by reference
to braiding hair. If you weave together strands of hair to form
a braid, later it is still possible to undo the braid to get the
strands back apart; similarly, convolution is a mathematical
function by which neuronal patterns are hypothesized to
weave together representations in such a way that it is still
possible to access the individual representations separately
(which would not be the case if concepts always mutated like
genes). The second analogy describes the semantic pointer
architecture by analogy to street addresses. An address with
street name and building number offers a short and convenient
way to represent whatever occupies a specific location (e.g.,
your house); similarly, a pointer in a computational sense
is a representation whose value is the value of some other
representation or set of representations, such that it functions
as an address that indicates (i.e., points to) that representation
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 5January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
or set. These two notions work together because, in the view
Thagard adopts, “Semantic pointers result from binding multiple
representations together by means of convolution” (Thagard,
2019, p. 29): that is, through convolution, neural patterns
of activity with all kinds of different representational content
can be “woven” (or bound) together, regardless of temporal
coordination; and by doing so as part of an entire architecture
of pointers, the woven or bound pattern can function as a
specific pointer without thereby compromising access to the
individual representations directly or their use as part of other
pointers. It is for reasons like these that Thagard proposes that
“creativity results from neural processes that include binding
of representations, generation of new concepts and rules, and
the application of analogies” (Thagard, 2019, p. 247). As he
explains, the binding applies to “the full range of multimodal
representations needed for creativity in the domains of scientific
discovery, technological invention, artistic imagination, and
social innovation” (p. 248): this includes, for instance, verbal,
mathematical, imagistic, or sensorimotor representations, all of
which can be combined into new pointers that are creative
because they are original, surprising, and valuable in the
specified domain.
Thagard’s account is relevant for us as a prime example
of a cutting-edge approach to creativity in the cognitive
science of science. Thagard (2012, 2019) is explicitly concerned
with the project of applying theories and methods from
cognitive science to make sense of science, including scientific
practices of problem solving, explanation, modeling, belief
formation, conceptual change, and theory development, and
it is in the context of this larger project that he offers an
account of creativity as it occurs for individual cognitive
agents engaged in scientific work. Moreover, Thagard’s view
is particularly significant for present purposes because of
his outspoken criticism of non-representational approaches
in embodied cognitive science. Thagard characterizes non-
representationalism as “radical and implausible” (2019, p.
48). He grants the importance of the body and of situated
activity for cognitive functioning, but he believes that these
are explanatorily incomplete without reference to internal
information processing. As he puts it, “Humans are indeed
embodied dynamic systems embedded in their environments,
but our success in those environments depends heavily on our
ability to represent them mentally and to perform computations
on those representations” (2012, p. 155). Ultimately, for
Thagard as for other critics, embodiment is not a viable
alternative to the computational-representational paradigm, but
merely a dimension of cognitive phenomena that is to be
accommodated into information-processing models. Crucially,
this leads Thagard to complete skepticism about the use of
non-representational embodied accounts for advancing our
understanding of creativity in the cognitive science of science:
as he affirms categorically, “no one has a clue how to use
pure embodiment to explain creative developments in science
and technology” (2012, p. 155) because, ultimately, he thinks
that “explaining our cognitive capacities requires recognizing
representational/computational abilities that outstrip embodied
action” (p. 56).
3. THE FUNCTIONALIST ROOTS OF
EMBODIED COGNITIVE SCIENCE
The general aim of this article is to propose that, despite its non-
representational character, embodied cognitive science (or “4E
Cognition”) can make a positive contribution to the goals of
the cognitive science of science, including the particular project
of making sense of scientific creativity. As suggested at the
beginning of the paper and exemplified by Thagard’s criticism,
this is a controversial proposal. It is controversial because of how
the difference between computational-representational cognitive
science and embodied cognitive science is often construed.
As just seen, computational-representational cognitive science
acknowledges the importance of bodily activity at the input
and output levels and it investigates the informational states
and manipulation processes that lead from sensory input to
behavioral output; sometimes it also assigns a role to the body
in the specific formatting of representational structures (refer to,
e.g., Barsalou, 2008). In contrast, non-representational embodied
cognitive science, as seen by critics, appears merely to deny
the existence of internal informational states and computational
procedures, and to thereby place all the explanatory burden on
bodily activities at the input and output levels, in effect leaving
a vacuum between the two. This oversimplification is clear, for
instance, in the way critics sometimes disparagingly treat the
non-representationalism of ecological psychology “as merely a
form of dressed-up behaviorism,” as Shapiro (2010, p. 38) puts
it in explicit reference to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Bunge and
Ardila (2012) also endorse this crude comparison when they state
that “Both hold that behavior is the sole effect of environmental
stimuli; both model the organism as an empty box. The difference
between them is that, whereas ecological psychology focuses on
perception, behaviorism is mainly interested in overt behavior”
(p. 120). Were this a fair characterization of ecological psychology
in particular and of embodied cognitive science more generally,
the critics’ pessimism would be well justified—but this is not a
fair characterization. To see why, it is helpful to take a larger view
of contemporary embodied cognitive science and to understand
it in continuity with the functionalist tradition in psychology
developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey1.
For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting how the sense
of “functionalism” at play here is different from the one used
in other contexts. In a different sense, common, especially in
philosophy of mind (refer to, e.g., Polger, 2012; Levin, 2018),
functional explanation describes psychological states in terms
of what they “do” at a level of description that abstracts
away from implementation details. For instance, understood
functionally, the heart pumps blood, and this is a function
that can be implemented using non-biological materials (e.g.,
an artificial heart). But more than simply being interested in
identifying what the functions of a particular psychological
state are, functionalism is the view that equates that state’s
identity with its function: in this view, “what it is to be a
1On the specific question of the relation between ecological psychology
and behaviorism, including their similarities and differences, more nuanced
discussions can be found in, e.g., Reed (1996),Heft (2001), and Barrett (2016).
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 6January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
psychological state of a certain sort just is and consists entirely of
having a certain function” (Polger, 2012, p. 337). In mainstream
computational-representational cognitive science, explanation at
the algorithmic level (Marr, 1982) can be seen as functionalist
in this philosophical sense insofar as it explains cognition in
terms of mental functions that are medium-independent and,
at least in principle, “multiply realizable” or implementable in
different media (e.g., in the human brain, in artificial intelligent
agents, in distributed computational/cognitive systems, etc.).
This is not the “functionalism” this article is concerned with. The
psychological approach of James and Dewey is “functionalist” in
a different sense, rooted in a Darwinian, naturalist perspective
that seeks to understand psychological phenomena in terms
of their biological role in nature (refer to, e.g., Godfrey-
Smith, 1996; Chemero, 2013). Along these lines, Heidbreder
(1933) emphasizes how, for psychological functionalists like
James and Dewey, to properly understand a given “mental
operation,” it is necessary to “investigate both its antecedents
and its consequences, to discover what difference it makes to
the organism, and to take into account its whole complex
setting in the complex world in which it appears” (p. 202).
Psychological functionalism (our focus here) can thus be seen as
moving in the opposite direction of philosophical functionalism,
rejecting abstract characterizations of mental phenomena and
emphasizing their inherently situated, context-dependent, and
biological nature. In more contemporary terms, functionalism
(in the relevant psychological sense) has turned into a focus on
the embedded, enactive, and ecological nature of cognition as a
feature of brain-body-environment systems.
Taking into consideration how radically different the
functionalist paradigm is makes it possible to move beyond
purely negative characterizations of embodied cognitive science
(i.e., merely as the rejection of representations) and to arrive
at a fuller appreciation of its potential given the resources
at its disposal. Toward this goal, the current section offers a
selective overview of key aspects of the functionalist framework
lying at the foundation of contemporary embodied cognitive
science. Besides situating the contemporary work in its proper
historical context, this exercise also helps reveal the richness
of embodied cognitive science and the resources it has at its
disposal for making sense of complex cognitive phenomena
including even those at play in scientific creativity. To be clear,
however, creativity only becomes our primary focus in section
4: for now, our analysis is at the level of the assumptions at
play in psychological theorizing, which includes but is not
limited to theorizing about creativity. To have a good grasp
of the functionalist paradigm developed by James and Dewey,
before examining directly how they construed “mind” and
“thought” (section 3.2), it is helpful first to consider how their
ideas relate to, and diverge from, popular views stemming from
classical empiricism.
3.1. Empiricism Without Elementarism and
Associationism
In agreement with Locke, Hume, and other empiricists,
functionalists in the Jamesian and Deweyan sense see experience
as the bedrock of our mental lives and the only possible
source of content for our thoughts: the crucial difference is
that functionalists reject the assumption of elementarism and
associationism. For classical empiricists, thought is built up from
“ideas” or “impressions” given by the senses. Our sensory organs
register how phenomena in the external world impinge upon
them, providing the mind with distinct sensations of simple
qualities of objects, such as size, shape, texture, color, tone,
taste, smell, and so on. These simple sensory impressions furnish
the mind with elements that, in turn, can get associated in
various ways. In perception, these elements combine to provide
the unitary, coherent experience we have of a tomato, for
instance, rather than disconnected impressions of seeing red
and of smelling and tasting a peculiar, fresh fragrance and
flavor. Beyond perception, however, the association of elementary
sensory ideas or impressions is also what explains our ability
to think about what we have not seen: if, for instance, I had
never seen a yellow or green tomato but you described one
to me, I would be able to imagine it by rearranging sensory
impressions I had of tomatoes along with non-tomato-related
impressions of yellow or green. For classical empiricists, it was
important to emphasize that even the most abstract thoughts we
may have must originate in experience: in contrast with their
rival rationalists (most prominently those of Cartesian influence),
who believed that at least some, and perhaps most or all, mental
content is innate, empiricists instead held that anything we can
think of necessarily traces back to sensory impressions or their
combinations, however complex the combination may be.
Like the classical empiricists, James, Dewey, and other
functionalists reject nativism and see experience as being of
central importance for thought, the only source of what we
can think about. But unlike classical empiricists, functionalists
reject the assumption of elementarism and associationism, and
a straightforward reason for this is that this assumption gets the
actual order of events exactly in reverse. As James emphasizes,
we perceive objects in their entirety, and the ability to categorize
and distinguish the parts and features of objects is added upon
the basic experience rather than being its starting point. During
childhood, we are taught by adults how to name different
characteristics of objects, and through this practice, we develop
skills in differentiating between characteristics of a given type
as well as among types of characteristics. To use James’s own
example, in drinking a lemonade on a hot summer day, one
can identify “the sourness, the coolness, the sweet, the lemon
aroma, etc., and the several degrees of strength of each and
all of these things” (James, 1890/1983, p. 652), yet, even if
the lemonade is prepared by combining ingredients with these
distinctly identifiable characteristics, it is a mistake to conclude
that the experience of lemonade flavor is a composite of these
elementary sensations. A child drinking lemonade for the first
few times experiences a single, simple flavor and only later learns
to discriminate the various specific characteristics just described.
This results in a qualitative change, “the experience [now] falling
into a large number of aspects, each of which is abstracted,
classed, named, etc.” (ibid.) and, as such you might judge this
lemonade to be too sweet or too sour or too cold. Still, we have
no reason to suppose, just because the lemonade was made by
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 7January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
combining lemon with sugar and cold water in some ratio, that
the experience of the lemonade itself is similarly composed of the
addition of independently experienced elementary sensations2.
In Dewey, also, we find much the same way of thinking.
Already in his classical article against the “reflex arc,” Dewey
(1896) emphasizes how the notions of “stimulus” and “response”
are analytical categories that the psychologist uses to describe
phenomena rather than components of the phenomenon itself
that are separable from each other and independent from
observation. Something counts as a stimulus only retroactively,
and only because the individual (the observer) had identified
some later event to be a response to that earlier event: where
no action is observed and labeled as a response, no earlier
event is identified as a stimulus, even though there is always
a multitude of things seen, heard, touched and so on. So it is
not right to say that stimuli cause responses because, quite in
the opposite direction, it is our calling something a response
that causes us to call something else that preceded it a stimulus.
And the same general principle applies to elementarism and
associationism, namely, that we have to resist the impulse to
reify our analytical categories. This is one version of what James
calls the psychologist’s fallacy, in which the psychologist as an
external observer confuses “his own standpoint with that of the
mental fact about which he is making his report” (1890/1983, p.
195). This fallacy manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as in
assuming that whatever the psychologist has words to describe
must exist, and whatever there are no words to describe must
not exist; and assuming that the smallest and/or simplest parts
the observer can identify in the phenomenon in fact correspond
to its elementary building blocks. As Dewey explains, we must
be careful not to assume that the elements we identify when
we describe a phenomenon and discriminate its characteristics
actually correspond to basic “sensory data” (i.e., simple qualities
given to the senses) that combine to yield a unitary perception:
“Sensory data, whether they are designated psychic or physical,
are thus not starting points; they are the products of analysis”
(Dewey, 1925/1929, p. 144). Put differently, the version of the
psychologist’s fallacy at play here is that of assuming that, because
the psychologist can name different parts and aspects of a given
object to analytically decompose it, a subject’s perception of that
same object must be caused by the combining together of such
parts and aspects as discrete sensory data. Strictly speaking, in
terms of logical or metaphysical necessity, it does not follow from
a person’s ability to decompose an object into parts and features
that the person’s thought about the object is made up from, or
decomposable into, (sub)thoughts about its parts and features.
For James and Dewey, then, elementarism and associationism
reverse the natural order of events and mistake analytical
categories (which are learned) for proper parts of things and
of thought. But the more fundamental reason for rejecting
elementarism and associationism is that they rest on a
problematic assumption about the mind and its relation to the
world. This is the assumption that there is a gap between subjects
2This is an issue I will address directly later (section 4), but for now the reader is
invited to consider how this example from James and the point articulated here
relate to the binding problem discussed in section 2.
and the “external world” and that experience of the world is
indirect, mediated by structures that make present internally
(i.e., that re-present) to the mind aspects of what is (or has
been) out there. As James neatly puts it, this common but
problematic view presupposes that “the mind must in some
fashion contain what it knows,” such that, for example, “for m
and nto be known in any way whatever, little rounded and
finished off duplicates of each must be contained in the mind
as separate entities” (James, 1890/1983, p. 472). Along similar
lines, Dewey denounces the common “conception of experience
as the equivalent of subjective private consciousness” (Dewey,
1925/1929, p. 11), a conception he sees as motivating a strange
conclusion: if appearances stand for and indirectly make present
to the mind certain things and events in the so-called “external
world,” then what we know and experience directly is only those
appearances and not real things and events in the real world. In
contrast, functionalists understand “experience” as an objective
event that unfolds in the real world (which is neither “internal”
nor “external”), an event in which, at a particular point in time
and space, different processes and objects intersect and relate
to one another in various ways. For the human individual, the
relations of experience are not only mechanical or chemical, for
instance, but also “cognitive,” a term that traditionally was not
limited to the “psychological” or “mental” but also encompassed
the “epistemic.” In other words, from the perspective of the
human individual, experience establishes an objective relation
of knowledge, or acquaintance with reality: rather than merely
obtaining subjective sensory clues to a mysterious “external”
world we are otherwise separated from, having an experience
is a matter of participating in a rich web of objective relations
through which we directly come to know, or become familiar
with, things in the world.
This reconceptualization of experience, or of the mind’s
relation to the world, imparts a whole new layer of meaning to
the functionalists’ rejection of elementarism and associationism.
When James and Dewey say that experience is not first and
foremost of parts and features that are recombined internally but
of whole things, their point is not simply that the appearances
we supposedly form in “subjective private consciousness” (e.g.,
sensory inputs, or “ideas” and “impressions”) are holistic, as
if representing entire objects before representing their parts.
Rather, the point is that, through experience, we become
acquainted with entire things (i.e., things themselves, not some
supposedly “finished off duplicates” inside the mind), whatever
the object of our concern and attention is. No doubt, in many
situations, we are especially sensitive to different details and
aspects of the objects we are interacting with. Consider, for
instance, the difference between buying bananas because you
want some fruit (any fruit) for the week to come and, in
contrast, buying bananas that are ripe so that you can use
them for baking soon, preferably today: in each case, different
objects (e.g., bananas compared to apples or cucumbers) and
different characteristics of those objects (e.g., their ripeness) will
be relevant to you, and will shape your focus and activity. But
rather than motivating the conclusion that parts and features are
the building blocks of perception, these instances simply illustrate
the fact that, in knowing things in their entirety, we can also come
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 8January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
to know and care about their elementary parts and features when
these matter for specific purposes. As James puts it,
The ‘simple impression’ of Hume, the ‘simple idea’ of Locke
are both abstractions, never realized in experience. Experience,
from the very first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely
continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in
space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and
parts. (James, 1890/1983, p. 461)
This reconceptualization thus makes it possible for functionalists
to reject elementarism and associationism while still agreeing
with empiricists with regard to the central importance of
experience for our mental lives: while classical empiricists assume
an agent who is separated from their environment and tasked
with piecing together sensory impressions as clues to what may be
“out there,” functionalists see experience as an objective relation
to entire objects, a relation that can change with attention
and intention, but which is of direct, unmediated acquaintance
with reality.
3.2. Mind and Thought
This radically different functionalist conception of experience,
or of our relation to the world, has as its counterpart a
corresponding, and equally radically different, conceptualization
of mind and thought. In a quote cited above, we saw how James
is critical of the view that the mind needs to contain within
itself a copy of what it knows—or, put differently, that knowing
something amounts to recreating it inside the mind. The key
point, now, is that this does not just misconstrue the nature of
experience, as just seen, but it also mistakes the nature of mind,
assuming it to be the sort of thing that can carry content, that can
contain within itself objects of some sort or other.
James illustrates his alternative conception with the image of
what he calls the stream of thought or stream of consciousness
(James, 1890/1983). This well-known notion is sometimes
interpreted narrowly, as simply emphasizing that thoughts lead
to other thoughts in a continuing succession. Although this
is not entirely inaccurate, the emphasis on mere succession
overlooks the fact that, in favoring the image of the river or
stream, James explicitly rejects the railway-inspired image of
a “train” constituted by a number of separate, individual cars
or wagons lined up one after the other (James, 1890/1983, p.
233). A fuller appreciation of what James meant, then, must
take into consideration that, when he first introduced the stream
of thought or stream of consciousness, he also offered another
name for it that he considered synonymous with the first two:
the stream of subjective life (p. 233). Subjective life is, to be
sure, characterized by a succession: over the course of a person’s
biography—the historical process that converges and intersects
with other historical processes at particular experiences—the
individual goes through a succession of activities, which includes
a succession of objects interacted with and related to, both
physically and conceptually. And as James recognizes, our
thought changes over time, between each of these situations,
and sometimes even within them. But he was skeptical of the
conception of thoughts as discrete entities, each with a different
content, and all simultaneously living inside the mind, just
waiting to be activated, raised to the level of conscious awareness,
or something like that. In line with this, it is worth noting that
James usually speaks of a stream of thought (in the singular)
rather than a stream of thoughts (in the plural). In the sense
at play here, thought is perhaps better understood as the entire
mental condition or state of an organism at a given point in time.
From this it follows, on the one hand, that we can never have more
than one thought at the same time: as James puts it, we cannot
“have two feelings in our mind at once” (1890/1983, p. 160), there
is always a single total state of subjective life at a given point in
time. On the other hand, it also follows that we can never have the
same thought more than once: “no state once gone can recur and
be identical with what it was before” (p. 224), to which he adds,
“there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us
twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT” (p. 225).
These and other points are illustrated in the example
mentioned earlier of a child drinking lemonade. James explains:
The mind of the child enjoying the simple lemonade flavor and
that of the same child grown up and analyzing it are in two entirely
different conditions. Subjectively considered, the two states of
mind are two altogether distinct sorts of fact. The later mental
state says ‘this is the same flavor (or fluid) which that earlier
state perceived as simple,’ but that does not make the two states
themselves identical. It is nothing but a case of learning more
and more about the same topics of discourse or things. (James,
1890/1983, p. 652)
A stream changes over its course: it has its ebbs and flows, and it
turns to the right and to the left, sometimes abruptly, other times
smoothly. Similarly, the mind (or our thought) changes over time
as we attend to, interact with, and come to know better, different
objects in different circumstances. Understanding thought in
analogy to a flowing stream thus suggests a contrast with the
conception of individual thoughts as distinct buckets of water:
we can get multiple bucketfuls of water out of the stream,
conceivably until we emptied out the river bed, yet this doesn’t
entail that the flowing stream just is a collection of bucket-
sized amounts of water bumping into each other; so it is with
the mind, whose entire state and whose transition between
entire states constitute thought, such that thought cannot be
equated to combinations of any kind of discrete, individual sub-
parts we may wish to identify. This suggests, further, that we
cannot combine or associate thoughts, but can only have new
thoughts that are informed by previous ones: “Our Thought is
not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may
be” (James, 1890/1983, p. 344), and “We cannot mix feelings as
such, though we may mix the objects we feel, and from their
mixture get new feelings” (p. 160). This also relates to the point
that the same thought does not occur more than once. You can
pick up a bucket of water and walk around with it, then put
it back down, and later pick it up again, as many times as you
want. The same is possible in some contemporary conceptions of
mental content, as illustrated in section 2: once a given content is
internally stored, it can be retrieved multiple times, just as it can
be used to generate new representations. But if thought is the total
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 9January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
state of subjective mental life at a point in time, it makes sense to
conclude that we can never go back to a previous state: even if
we now interact with and think about the same object as before,
this is now a different thought, a different stage in subjective life.
The present state is made up of an enriched web of relations and
can include, for instance, a different appreciation of the object’s
meaning, or simply the recognition that this is the same object
from earlier (e.g., it is the same lemonade flavor). New thoughts,
James says, are “cognizant and appropriative of the old, whereas
the old were always cognizant and appropriative of something
else” (1890/1983, p. 335); and, he adds later on, “The knowledge
of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote,
is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing”
(p. 571). When we think now about the same object as before,
the object is the same but the thought is new, partly because it
includes in itself prior stages of thought, including our knowledge
of the same object back then and including even our knowledge of
other objects and events and relations: “Experience is remolding
us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing
is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to
that date” (p. 228).
Compared to James’s idea of the stream of thought—
as just seen, so susceptible to misunderstanding—Dewey’s
conceptualization of mind in linguistic terms is rather
straightforward. The dominant conception throughout the
history of Western thought has been to treat the mind as a
noun, that is, a substance, thing, or object. But thinking is an
activity, something that we do; moreover, whatever we do, we
can do it more or less mindfully or thoughtfully. Accordingly,
Dewey proposes that “mind” is better understood as a verb,
an adverb, or an adjective rather than as a noun. Emphasizing
the adverbial character of mind, Dewey claims: “mind denotes
every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things:
practical, intellectual, and emotional” (Dewey, 1980, p. 263).
Later, also highlighting the active, verb-like nature of mind, he
states: “Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which
we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which
we find ourselves” (ibid.). As such, it is more adequate to see
an individual “thought” as a slice of an activity we engage in
rather than a distinct entity underlying that activity. Along these
lines, Dewey claims: “the organism is not just a structure; it is a
characteristic way of interactivity which is not simultaneous, all
at once but serial. It is a way impossible without structures for
its mechanism, but it differs from structure as walking differs
from legs or breathing from lungs” (Dewey, 1925/1929, p. 292).
Besides criticizing the reification of the mental and mindful
as a supposedly underlying thing (i.e., a mind), this quote also
suggests Dewey would agree with James that we cannot have
more than one thought at once nor have the same thought more
than once. On the one hand, even if we try to multitask, there
is always a single thing we are doing, however fast we may be
trying to jump between activities and objects of concern. On
the other hand, when we repeat an action we have performed
before, what that means is typically that we are performing a
similar action to accomplish similar ends, just as, by “the same
thought” we normally just mean we’re once again thinking about
the same object. Strictly speaking, however, we cannot have the
same thought more than once because we cannot perform the
very same action more than once nor move our bodies in exactly
the same way as before.
In a passage worth quoting at length, Dewey describes some of
the effects of misconceiving mind as a noun, a thing:
Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed
modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the
activities in question. It has treated the mind as an independent
entity that attends, purposes, cares, notices, and remembers. This
change of ways of responding to the environment into an entity
from which actions proceed is unfortunate, because it removes the
mind from necessary connection with the objects and events, past,
present, and future, of the environment with which responsive
activities are inherently connected. Mind that bears only an
accidental relation to the environment occupies a similar relation
to the body. In making the mind purely immaterial (isolated from
the organ of doing and undergoing), the body ceases to be living
and becomes a dead lump. (Dewey, 1934/1980, pp. 263–264)
Mind and thought are, in the functionalist view, activities we
engage in or our manner of dealing with the world—which
includes, as seen above, the cognitive or epistemic character of
experience for human organisms. It is easy to see how significant
this perspective is when it comes to a number of philosophical
disputes, including those surrounding the mind-body problem,
the problem of other minds, and skeptical concerns about the
existence of the external world: in fact, Dewey predicts that “if
there were an interdict placed for a generation upon the use of
mind, matter, consciousness as nouns” rather than as adjectives
and adverbs, we would as a result “find many of our problems
much simplified” (Dewey, 1925/1929, pp. 75).
4. DISCUSSION: RETHINKING SCIENTIFIC
CREATIVITY FROM A FUNCTIONALIST,
EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE
The previous section explored some foundational themes in
the functionalist tradition in psychology developed by James
and Dewey, emphasizing their views on the nature of mind,
thought, experience, and the relation between mind and world.
While certainly relevant for an appreciation of the history
of the sciences of the mind, this exercise is of more than
merely historical interest. The contemporary view of cognition
as embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and ecological may
seem to be a recent invention, but its roots extend far back to
James’s and Dewey’s functionalist psychology (on these historical
connections refer to, e.g., Heft, 2001; Johnson and Rohrer, 2007;
Chemero, 2009; Gallagher, 2009; Lobo et al., 2018; Crippen
and Schulkin, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2021). As such, gaining
a better understanding of the functionalist paradigm can be
a powerful means to properly understand embodied cognitive
science, its goals, and potential. The prospect of developing
an embodied cognitive account of scientific creativity seems
particularly daunting if—like some critics mentioned in sections
2 and 3—you take embodied cognitive science to hold the same
view of mind and thought as mainstream cognitive science
except for the rejection of computation and representation. But
this is a misconception. The functionalist roots of embodied
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 10 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
cognitive science reveal a radically different paradigm compared
to the one at play in the computational-representational cognitive
framework. Considering these differences can provide valuable
insight into the field and suggest innovative directions for
contemporary discussions about creativity and science. In what
follows I sketch this, first, by identifying some direct implications
of functionalist ideas for thinking about creativity, and then by
linking these to more current views and projects in embodied
cognitive science.
Section 2 presented prominent ways of approaching creativity
from the computational-representational perspective, in terms of
the heuristics a problem-solver creates and uses (Newell, Shaw,
and Simon) or, more generally, in terms of how we process and
“bind” mental representations of various sorts in the context
of everyday activities including but not limited to problem
solving (Thagard). Despite the difference in focus and scope, the
starting point in both accounts is the view that creative “outputs”
arise from manipulations of internal knowledge structures. Of
course, this appeal to internal knowledge structures already
reveals a point of fundamental disagreement for the classical
functionalists and those of us following in that tradition. But
it is important not to oversimplify the disagreement. It could
perhaps seem like researchers in embodied cognitive science
merely and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of
mental representations and internal knowledge structures, as if
embodied anti-representationalism was a mere recapitulation of
the most extreme forms of behaviorism, as already suggested.
More accurately, however, the important point is that the
intellectual pull to posit internal knowledge structures arises out
of a view of the relation between mind and world that, from the
functionalist perspective, is inadequate: namely, the assumption
that a gap separates agents from their environment such that we
can have no direct acquaintance with reality and can only obtain
knowledge about the world by reconstructing it internally—as Di
Paolo, Buhrmann and Barandiaran put it, this is the problematic
assumption that “one cannot have knowledge of what is outside
oneself except through the ideas one has inside oneself” (Di Paolo
et al., 2017, p. 23). We saw in section 3 that both James and
Dewey reject this view of mind along with the associated view
of experience as private subjective consciousness. In line with
this, the rejection of elementarism and associationism motivates
seeing the binding problem as more of a pseudo-problem. We
do not need to explain how representations combine to yield
coherent internal “experiences” of the external world: experience
(as an objective event that is neither “internal” nor “external”)
is itself coherent and connects entire things, such as objects
and persons in situations. Knowers can participate in experience
more or less fully and more or less attentively, but in any case,
the qualitative character of the experience for those participating
in it does not arise from combining “ideas” or “impressions”
of individual objects or their elementary parts and features, but
rather through direct acquaintance with selected aspects of the
unfolding situation3.
3It’s worth noting that, despite the radical theoretical and conceptual differences
between the paradigms, the functionalist embodied framework is not inimical
to the applied, practical orientation that traditional cognitive science has had
This alternative way of understanding mind and experience
has significant implications for how we approach creativity from
a psychological standpoint. In an ordinary sense, we say we “have
an idea” when we have an insight, when a thought occurs to us
that reveals something new, such as a novel plan or course of
action. From a Jamesian/Deweyan functionalist perspective, it
would be a mistake to think that this amounts to having a new
“idea” in the elementarist-associationist sense synonymous with
“impressions,” as if a new internal representational structure was
created from the combination of previous thoughts (other “ideas”
or “impressions”) about the object in question. Thoughts are not
countable entities that you can collect and mix and match, but
rather are activities we engage in, each constituting a momentary
state of subjective life. Similar events may reoccur in life, but one
and the same event never literally repeats itself. The same is true
of thought. Thinking is something agents do in some situation or
other, and that is why, as we have seen, it is impossible to have
the exact same thought more than once, just as it is impossible to
do exactly the same thing more than once; moreover, we cannot
combine or associate thoughts because we do not even have
more than one thought at once, no matter how rapidly we try
to shift from one thought (i.e., one thinking activity) to another.
Every time we think about some object or topic, then, we are
having a new thought because we are engaging in a new act of
thinking, and this is so even if it is the same object or topic as
before, and even if we are thinking about it in what seems to
be the same way we had previously done. Understood from this
functionalist perspective, then, “having an idea” in the ordinary
sense amounts to an instance where this thought (which is new, as
all thoughts always are) involves a significantly changed relation
to old objects or topics: through this new thought we now relate
to those objects in a different, novel way that is appealing and
strikes us as promising.
This motivates reevaluating what we usually call “creativity.”
In a way, every thought is creative, because every instance of
thinking is a new active adaptation to a new situation and
experience. On the other hand, we can still speak of activity
that is “creative” in the sense of being distinctly or differently
innovative—just what the distinction or difference is, however,
must be considered more carefully.
since its early days, of pursuing explanations of cognitive phenomena by building
mechanisms that implement certain principles (as seen in Newell, Shaw and
Simon’s work). In this direction, one reviewer asks how we could build something
that has ‘direct acquaintance with selected aspects of the unfolding situation’.
The simplest and most concrete answer is to point in the direction of applied
work that already does that, such as work in evolutionary or biologically-inspired
robotics (e.g., Brooks, 1990, 1991; Webb, 1995; Reeve et al., 2005) and in artificial
life (e.g., Beer, 1997, 2004, 2020; Froese et al., 2014; Campos and Froese, 2019).
In more traditional approaches, it is common to model cognitive agency in
terms of an input-output system with internal procedures that are responsible for
actively controlling movement or activity (e.g., selecting, initiating, evaluating and
correcting the execution of motor programs) and for interpreting incoming signals
to build and update internal models of the environment and the likely sources of
stimulation. In contrast, a common theme in projects in evolutionary robotics and
artificial life such as the ones just cited is the emphasis on modeling cognitive
agency in terms of intrinsic activity and selective sensitivity to the environment,
where activity and sensitivity constrain and guide each other, both limiting and
enabling a range of specific ways of direct participation in, and adaptation to, the
unfolding situation.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 11 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
In popular media and in academic circles alike, discussions
about creativity, and especially about creativity in science, tend
to revolve around examples of extraordinary, even revolutionary
innovators like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and a few
others. Although understandable and justified in some contexts,
this focus on seemingly unique individuals can be misleading.
Figures like the ones just mentioned have over time gained a
special cultural status because of their influential and innovative
ideas. But this personal status sometimes seems to motivate the
conclusion that their ideas were special because they were theirs,
that the ideas were creative because they were had by creative
people, rather than the other way around. The mythical standing
of creative geniuses is entangled with the psychologization of
“creativity” as an individual mental attribute, whether as a special
mental faculty that acts as the source of creative ideas or as
a cognitive process that yields creative outputs: either way, as
something that people own and possess, creativity also becomes
something that people possess differentially, that some have more
of, others less, and others conceivably lack entirely.
As already seen, researchers studying creativity often point out
that what makes some idea or product creative is the fact that it is
novel, surprising, and useful, or somehow valuable (e.g., Boden,
2004; Simonton, 2012). This reasonable perspective should raise
a red flag for internalist views that hope to find “a single cognitive
or neural mechanism” responsible for “the extraordinary creative
capacities of an Einstein or a Shakespeare” as Dietrich and Haider
(2017, p. 1) put it. These popular criteria suggest that there
is nothing intrinsic to a given idea or product that makes it
inherently creative: rather, an idea’s or product’s “creativeness” is
a relational characteristic, one that depends in part on how the
idea or product in question relates to other ideas or products (e.g.,
which other ideas or products exist and what they are like) and in
part, it depends on how the idea or product in question relates
to other people (for whom the new idea or product is more or
less useful in some way, for some purpose). From this, it follows
that we cannot reasonably expect there to be internal mechanisms
that fully explain the origin of creative ideas or products. If the
sociomaterial context (at least partly, if not entirely) determines
which ideas or products count as creative in that context and
which do not, then that means that one and the same idea
or product could, in different circumstances, count as creative
and as not creative. Accordingly, even if there were “cognitive
or neural mechanisms” that properly and uniquely explain the
origin of certain ideas or products we consider creative in a
given context, the same mechanisms might not be explanatory
of creativity in other contexts because the ideas or products
they supposedly originate would themselves not count as creative
in those other contexts. Given the sociomaterially-extended
nature of what makes ideas and products count as creative,
we reify “creativity” when we see it (only) as an individual
mental endowment, a context-independent ability or capacity,
and something that the geniuses—the Einsteins, Newtons, and
Darwins—possess to an unusual degree, more than the rest of us.
If, in a sense, all thoughts and behaviors are creative, and if
what makes some thoughts and behaviors distinctly creative is, at
least in part, the sociomaterial context, then the challenge we are
faced with is that of making sense of the specifically psychological
or cognitive conditions for these distinctly creative thoughts
and behaviors, and to do so without falling prey to tendencies
toward internalist reification and individualistic exceptionalism.
My proposal is that a promising direction for tackling this
question from the perspective of embodied cognitive science lies
precisely in expanding upon the radical functionalist conceptions
of mind, thought, and experience.
In discussing the functionalist understanding of experience,
or of mind’s relation to the world, I suggested that attention
and intention play a role in the way an individual engages in
experience. The point is that an individual may be more or less
attuned to experience, more or less sensitive to the relations
and unfolding events, and may participate more or less fully
in the situation. To elaborate on this point, let us consider a
concrete situation such as a lab meeting in which colleagues
meet to discuss updates in their scientific research. An extreme
case of a shift in your participation in that shared experience
would be if you fell asleep for a brief moment: even as your
nodding off is part of the objectively unfolding situation and
others might even notice it, this is an instance in which the
experience temporarily has no subjective qualitative character
for you (it lacks a “how” for you, as Dewey puts it). But even
while fully awake our attention can shift in different directions,
which is another way to frame our participation in experiences. If
you get distracted, you might briefly tune out of the discussion
and notice the threatening clouds out the window, and from
them turn to the parking lot, and then to the plans you had
of stopping by the grocery store on the drive home after the
meeting, until you realize you are thinking about recipes rather
than contributing to the discussion. Alternatively, you may be
fully invested in the conversation and your shifts in attention
are constructive and contribute to the goal of the discussion: so
instead of noticing the clouds and the parking lot out the window,
you notice something in the graph projected on the screen, or
in your colleague’s description of their new experimental design,
and by mentioning these you help open up new directions for
the discussion. Of course, it could even be a combination of
these two scenarios, such as, for instance, if your momentarily
turning away to the clouds and the parking lot out the window
actually leads you to notice something different that is relevant
for the ongoing discussion: maybe a technical difficulty can
be avoided by uploading the experimental data “to the cloud”
or perhaps the bright green car in the parking lot suggests a
different experimental manipulation to try or the car’s sudden
breaking inspires you to think of a potentially useful tweak
in the damping parameter in the mathematical model under
discussion. This example intimates two important aspects of the
distinctly “creative.”
The first has to do with the relation between insight and
sight, or between creativity and perception more generally. In
different ways of participating in a shared experience such as
the ones just described, “having an idea” that is valuable for
others can be the result of an individual attending to different
aspects of the situation and, sometimes quite literally, seeing
different things and/or seeing the same things differently. James
seems to suggest as much when he says, “some people are far
more sensitive to resemblances, and far more ready to point out
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 12 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
wherein they consist, than others are. They are the wits, the poets,
the inventors, the scientific men, the practical geniuses” (James,
1890/1983, p. 500). More recently, building upon functionalist
foundations, ecological psychologists speak of perception as “an
achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater
of his consciousness” and as “a keeping-in-touch with the world,
an experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences”
(Gibson, 1979, p. 239). In this ecological perspective, perceiving
is most prominently an act of detecting affordances, that is,
detecting possibilities for action that the environment offers
the agent given the agent’s skills and sensorimotor makeup in
relation to the characteristics of the object or surface in question
(Gibson, 1979; Reed, 1996; Heft, 2001; Chemero, 2009; Turvey,
2018). Sometimes individuals just casually happen upon some
aspect of the situation that others had not noticed, perceiving
affordance others had so far overlooked. But individuals can
also over time become differentially sensitive to some aspects
of the situation more than others (that is, more than they are
sensitive to other aspects and also more sensitive than other
people are to the same aspects): as an activity, perceiving can
become more skillful through attunement or the “education of
attention” (Gibson, 1966; Jacobs and Michaels, 2007; Araújo
and Davids, 2011). This can be seen as a specific instance of
what James and Dewey both referred to as “habits,” that is,
specialized, context-sensitive patterns of activity—in this case,
the activity of perceiving or exploring the environment (refer to
James, 1890/1983, 1899; Dewey, 1922; Segundo-Ortin and Heras-
Escribano, 2021; for related embodied accounts emphasizing the
ecology of skillful performance refer to, e.g., Christensen et al.,
2016; Christensen and Sutton, 2019; Sutton and Bicknell, 2020).
Importantly, however, what is at play here is direct contact with
reality and the detection (rather than inference or estimation)
of relations between things in the world: “The mind does not
need to associate sequential regularities; such regularities only
need to be detected. Associations are perceived rather than
perceptions associated” (Lombardo, 1987, p. 291). Having an
insight, then, can be a matter of noticing that some object
(physical or conceptual) affords a given manipulation that turns
out to be useful in a novel and surprising way.
To emphasize the education of attention, as above, is to
emphasize the dynamically changing nature of the perception,
or how our engagement with the world and participation in
experience can become more skillful over time. This connects
to the second point, which has to do with the dynamically
changing nature of the creative activity itself. In a recent article
focusing on jewelry making, Baber et al. (2019) criticize the
notion that a designer begins with a complete idea and then
works on some material to impose that form onto it; rather,
they propose, the designer works with materials to discover
what the final product can and will be. The authors criticize the
common “separation of ‘creation-in-the-head’ [from] a physical
behavior that is merely the acting out of this ‘cognition’” (p.
285), a view that they see as inadequate because, as they
observe, “technology mediates human activity through a process
of mutual co-construction” (p. 284). At the beginning of the
process, the material presents the jeweler with a range of
possibilities but it also imposes specific limitations depending on
its particular features, including its unique shape, composition,
deformities, etc. As the jeweler engages with that material,
each new intervention reveals and creates new possibilities and
limitations. Drawing from dynamical systems theory the authors
propose, “‘creativity’ arises from the dynamic interplay between
jewelers and their technology” (p. 284).
What is worth highlighting here is that creative activity
(including creative thinking) is not simply a matter of perceiving
unusual affordances in the here and now, nor of merely having
over time developed skillful perceptual attunement such that we
can perceive affordances others cannot: rather, or in addition,
the activity itself has this dynamic, co-constructive character,
in which each new engagement further constrains and enables
future activity, such that the outcome cannot be fully articulated
in advance, before this iterative, interactive process started.
In the case of creativity in science, this includes, of course,
literal physical manipulations through which we operate in an
innovative way on an object (e.g., a measuring instrument,
or the thing measured) or combine objects in an unusual
way. But it can also include the manipulation of symbolic
structures, such as variables in a mathematical formula or
concepts in a linguistically-articulated theoretical description,
in writing, in conversation, or in soliloquy. In this perspective,
what is distinct about the psychological dimension of creative
breakthroughs in science is the especially attuned or “educated”
attention some individuals develop which allows them not only
to see what others cannot or do not, but also to engage with
materials, objects, and structures (including symbolic ones) in
ways that dynamically co-create further possibilities for action
(i.e., affordances).
These references to the conceptual and symbolic might strike
some readers as a case of smuggling in representational thinking
through the back door. On the contrary, however, I see the
present paper as contributing to the larger project many of
us in embodied cognitive science are already engaged in of
not simply responding to the ‘scaling up challenge’ but in fact
questioning the representation-hunger often ascribed to some
cognitive phenomena (refer to, e.g., Zahnoun, 2021). Along these
lines, it is useful to point out how the perspective on creativity
being sketched here resonates with recent work approaching
concepts and conceptual thought in ways that challenge more
traditional internalist, representational accounts. Gabora et al.
(2008), for instance, offer an ecological theory of concepts and
conceptual change, modeled with the mathematical formalism of
quantum mechanics, based on which they propose, “Concepts
and categories do not represent the world in the mind, as is
generally assumed, but are a participating part of the mind-world
whole,” further adding that “they only occur as part of a web of
meaning provided both by other concepts and by interrelated life
activities” (Gabora et al., 2008, p. 95; see also, e.g., Aerts et al.,
2013). From a very different theoretical starting point, with a
more explicitly cognitive neuroscientific focus, but moving in
a similar direction, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) provocatively
propose that “all concepts are ad hoc,” by which they mean that
concepts are situation-specific, on-the-fly behavioral adaptations
that “differ from one instantiation to the next, within and
between individuals and groups” and that “are shaped by the
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 13 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
contexts in which they are instantiated on every time scale, from
the millisecond to the lifetime” (p. 561). In their view, we should
move away from theorizing about “concepts, categories, and
word meanings as things that we have in our minds” and instead
“build theories of conceptualizing, categorizing, and constructing
word meanings: things that we do with our minds” (Casasanto
and Lupyan, 2015, p. 543, emphasis original).
Other recent contributions emphasize the inherently social
nature of conceptual thought as grounded in language, itself
understood as an embodied social practice in the first place.
Along these lines, Contreras Kallens et al. (2018) describe
categorization as a social, interpersonal phenomenon that is
flexible and can change over time, being even subject to
cultural evolution and, therefore, amenable to modeling at the
population level using similar methods already applied to other
phenomena in cultural evolution. Through more anthropological
and archaeological lens, John Sutton and colleagues have offered
a compelling picture that emphasizes the inextricably material
and social dimensions of skillful, creative, and conceptual
activities, including the distributed cognitive activities at play
in remembering (e.g., Sutton, 2008, 2015, 2020; also Sutton
et al., 2010; Sutton and Keene, 2016). And from an individual
developmental standpoint, Heft (2020) highlights how the
sociocultural specificity of developmental trajectories makes it
so that individual perception-action is never socioculturally
‘neutral’, but is by necessity fundamentally shaped by shared
practices: naturally, this includes linguistic practices, such that
naming and talking about complex abstract processes or systems
(e.g., the postal system) not only enables conceptual thinking,
but makes it possible for conceptual thinking to guide adaptive
perception-action in the here and now.
What these admittedly diverse lines of research reveal is that
reference to the conceptual and symbolic, as in the present paper,
need not amount to capitulation to internalist, representationalist
theorizing. The view of creativity being sketched here focuses
specifically on perception-action to propose that we understand
creative innovation in terms of the enhanced perception of
affordances (i.e., the educated attention) and the co-construction
of possibilities through active engagement, that is, in terms of
what Heft (2020) calls “habits of attention and skilled action”
(p. 823). Still, this focus on perception-action is perfectly
compatible with the recognition that behavior, as shaped by
development within specific sociocultural practices, involves
abilities to perceive-act that are sensitive to conceptual and
symbolic meaning. In fact, this is something that becomes even
clearer when we take into account the functionalist foundations
of contemporary theorizing in embodied cognitive science, and
in particular, the way functionalists made sense of intelligent
behavior and the emergence of novelty, including the especially
creative, in complex human practices such as those we find
in science.
As Dewey puts it, “Command of scientific methods and
systematized subject-matter liberates Individuals; it enables them
to see new problems, devise new procedures, and, in general,
makes for diversification rather than for set uniformity” (Dewey,
1929, p. 12). Just as our current thought is shaped by prior
thoughts, experience informs further engagement with the world
by guiding what and how we see; this, in turn, as Dewey
emphasizes here, further shapes understanding, or our ability to
engage meaningfully with the world. So, Dewey adds, “Because
the range of understanding is deepened and widened [the
scientist] can take into account remote consequences which
were originally hidden from view and hence were ignored
in his action”; as a consequence, “Seeing more relations he
sees more possibilities, more opportunities. He is emancipated
from the need of following tradition and special precedents.
His ability to judge being enriched, he has a wider range of
alternatives to select from in dealing with individual situations”
(Dewey, 1929, p. 20-21). The specificity of experience shapes
personal development, making some individuals sensitive to
different aspects of the situation, and enabling them to detect
and articulate unusual relations to and between objects, facts,
and events; this also enables individuals to, by working with
objects, give rise to new possibilities that they can then perceive
and act on. In this way, creative developments in science can
arise from an individual’s differential sensitivity to existing
possibilities and, through active engagement in the world, the co-
creation of novel possibilities—all of which embody (or in-habit)
sociocultural practices, including practices of naming things and
using language to constrain (limit and enable) perception-action
in particular ways.
Building upon the functionalist foundations of embodied
cognitive science, then, motivates approaching creativity as an
activity rather than an underlying capacity, and understanding it
psychologically but non-representationally in terms of affordance
perception, the education of attention, and co-constructive
embodied engagement in experience. No doubt, an approach
like this constitutes a departure from traditional cognitive
views that favor explanation in terms of internal, individual
computational mental mechanisms. But, in this picture, creativity
is still “cognitive” in the deeper sense that goes beyond
the “psychological” and includes the “epistemic”: creativity is
a matter of knowing reality, being acquainted with aspects
of the world, and (re)cognizing possibilities, including even
dynamically changing ones. In this sense, creativity is clearly
dependent on previous knowledge, yet this does not entail
anything representational: to know something is not to construct
an internal copy of it, but rather to undergo transformation
through experience, to have our modes of activity (including
thinking) changed by transaction with things in the world.
The role of the imagination in some creative activities (e.g.,
involving abstract reasoning) need not be seen as problematic.
As Dewey (1934/1980) suggests, the ideas we come up with
through imagination “are not made out of imaginary stuff. They
are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social
experience” (p. 49). He adds: “The locomotive did not exist before
Stevenson, nor the telegraph before the time of Morse. But the
conditions for their existence were there in physical material
and energies and in human capacity. Imagination seized hold
upon the idea of a rearrangement of existing things that would
evolve new objects” (p. 49). In this embodied framing, then,
creative activity is cognitive in that it is a matter of expanding our
knowledge and appreciation of what is possible and what could be
made possible through interventions and interaction. The special
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 14 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
and distinctly creative insight, then, is not a mental impression
triggered in subjective consciousness but a specialization of
thinking activity that is enriched because of what it knows. And
this, again, is the the result of learning, that is, changing with
experience, or the formation of habits:
The reason a baby can know little and an experienced adult
know much when confronting the same things is not because
the latter has a “mind” which the former has not, but because
one has already formed habits which the other has still to
acquire. The scientific man and the philosopher like the carpenter,
the physician, and politician know with their habits not with
their “consciousness.” The latter is eventual, not a source. Its
occurrence marks a peculiarly delicate connection between highly
organized habits and unorganized impulses. (Dewey, 1922, p.
182–183)
Through experience, over time, we develop specialized ways of
doing things and relating to the world (including both material
and conceptual objects) that are sensitive to the context and task
we are engaged in. Learning scientific methods and facts, then,
like other specializations, is a matter of developing specific ways
of dealing adaptively with particular situations. In this context,
creative insight is a cognitive accomplishment in that it concerns
epistemic contact with reality and the discovery of what the world
presents to us.
To conclude, we are now in a different position to reconsider
the view of creativity as the ability to combine or associate old,
familiar ideas to generate new ones. If interpreted in traditional
computational-representational terms, the combinatorial view
commits a version of the psychologist’s fallacy. No doubt, creative
products—a novel mathematical model or a novel theoretical
formulation that a scientist may come up with—are created by
combining other previously existing physical and conceptual
materials. But it is a fallacy to conclude from this that the idea
of the product must have originated through the combination of
the ideas of those other products and their parts or aspects. In
creative activity, we do combine old, familiar things in new ways,
but that is not detached from embodied engagement with the
world around us: “The new vision does not arise out of nothing,
but emerges through seeing, in terms of possibilities, that is,
of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end
which the new end aids in creating” (Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 49). In
science as in other specialized domains, creative breakthroughs
emerge from skilled, habituated sensorimotor activity in which
we detect and forge, with old and familiar physical or conceptual
objects, possibilities for further adaptation in a dynamically
changing experience. One example is precisely what we are doing
right now: revisiting old theories and methods—here, ideas about
mind, thought, and experience from the functionalist tradition—
as a way to inform and re-orient how we act now, including
how we think about and address the scientific challenges we are
faced with. If science involves standing on the shoulders of giants,
then creative activity can be seen as a matter of sensitivity to
the situation and perceiving whose shoulder to climb and which
direction to look so as to go from the old to the new, casting fresh
light on current problems and, through that, setting up new paths
for advancing in understanding.
5. CONCLUSION
In the context of current debates about the limits of embodied
cognitive science, this article offered an entry point to considering
the embodied approach’s promise for contributing to research
in the cognitive science of scientific creativity. A common
view of creativity describes it in combinatorial terms as
involving associating what is old and familiar in order to
generate something novel. One example of a combinatorial
account of creativity in the cognitive science of science was
examined, highlighting the role it assigns to the processing of
internal knowledge structures for generating creative outputs.
Proponents of the computational-representational paradigm
criticize embodied cognitive science for being unreasonable
and implausible in its anti-representationalism—hence the
challenge to ‘scale up’ embodied explanations to account for
‘representation-hungry’ phenomena. Accordingly, the article was
concerned with providing a richer picture of embodied cognitive
science, moving beyond merely negative characterizations (i.e.,
simply as a rejection of representations). The article did
this by exploring contemporary embodied cognitive science’s
theoretical and conceptual roots in the functionalist tradition
in psychology developed by William James and John Dewey.
As a continuation of this functionalist tradition, contemporary
embodied cognitive science inherits a rich and sophisticated
way of thinking about mind, thought, and experience, or the
relation between mind and the world, one that is radically
different from the computational-representational paradigm, but
that amounts to more than a mere rejection of representations.
For these classical functionalists, “mind” is something we do,
or rather the character of some of our activities (e.g., when we
act thoughtfully or mindfully). Not only that, but “thought” is
similarly reframed as a total (if momentary) state of subjective
life, or a slice of a dynamically unfolding activity (namely,
thinking). A consequence of this view is that we cannot have
more than one thought at once, nor have the same thought
more than once, nor combine thoughts—which casts doubt on
the combinatorial view of creativity interpreted in internalist,
computational-representational terms. After identifying these
key foundational aspects of the functionalist inheritance of
embodied cognitive science, the article offered a sketch of how
these concepts translate into a contemporary understanding of
creative innovation in science. Focusing primarily on perception-
action, the sketch offered here described creative innovation
in terms of enhanced affordance perception (through the
education of attention) and the dynamical co-construction
of possibilities through active engagement with material and
conceptual resources. The relation between this sketch and
recent work on concepts and conceptual thinking, on the
one hand, and between the two and old functionalist ideas,
on the other, was explored in order to reveal how even a
perception-action-focused view of creative innovation such as
this can accommodate engagement with conceptual and symbolic
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 15 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
resources in creative thinking and problem solving. The result
is a view that, while not computational or representational,
is still “cognitive” in that it sees creativity as a matter of
knowing reality, being acquainted with aspects of the world,
and (re)cognizing possibilities. Although it is in tension with
internalist interpretations of the combinatorial view, the sketch
offered here in itself illustrates how we combine old ideas (in
this case, from the classical functionalists) in different contexts
to respond to novel challenges and find creative solutions to new
problems. Creativity involves combination and goes from old to
new, but it is just not something that is done in our heads: rather,
creativity is a feature of the mind’s relation to the world, which
is what the functionalists called “experience” and what we today
describe in terms of brain-body-environment systems.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The original contributions presented in the study are included
in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be
directed to the corresponding author.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and
has approved it for publication.
FUNDING
I acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation and
the Open Access Publication Fund of TU Berlin.
REFERENCES
Aerts, D., Gabora, L., and Sozzo, S. (2013). Concepts and their dynamics: A
quantum-theoretic modeling of human thought. Top. Cogn. Sci. 5, 737–772.
doi: 10.1111/tops.12042
Amabile, T. M., Collins, M. A., Conti, R., Phillips, E., Picariello, M., Ruscio, J.,
et al. (2018). Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity.
London: Routledge.
Anderson, M. L. (2014). After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Araújo, D., and Davids, K. (2011). What exactly is acquired during skill
acquisition? Journal of Consciousness Studies 18, 7–23.
Baber, C., Chemero, T., and Hall, J. (2019). What the jeweller’s
hand tells the jeweller’s brain: tool use, creativity and embodied
cognition. Philos. Technol. 32, 283–302. doi: 10.1007/s13347-017-
0292-0
Barlow, H. (1994). “What is the computational goal of the neocortex,” in Large-
Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, eds C. Koch and J. L. Davis (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press), 1–22.
Barrett, L. (2016). Why brains are not computers, why behaviorism is not
satanism, and why dolphins are not aquatic apes. Behav. Anal. 39, 9–23.
doi: 10.1007/s40614-015-0047-0
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59, 617–645.
doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Batey, M., and Furnham, A. (2006). Creativity, intelligence, and personality: a
critical review of the scattered literature. Genet. Soc. Gen. Psychol. Monogr. 132,
355–429. doi: 10.3200/MONO.132.4.355-430
Bechtel, W., Abrahamsen, A., and Graham, G. (1998/2017). “The life of cognitive
science,” in A Companion to Cognitive Science, eds W. Bechtel and G. Graham
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), 1–104.
Beer, R. D. (1997). The dynamics of adaptive behavior: a research program. Rob.
Auton. Syst. 20, 257–289. doi: 10.1016/S0921-8890(96)00063-2
Beer, R. D. (2004). Autopoiesis and cognition in the game of life. Artif. Life 10,
309–326. doi: 10.1162/1064546041255539
Beer, R. D. (2020). An investigation into the origin of autopoiesis. Artif. Life 26,
5–22. doi: 10.1162/artl_a_00307
Boden, M. (1990). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Boden, M. A. (2004). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd Edn.
London: Routledge.
Boden, M. A. (2008). Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Brette, R. (2019). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? Behav. Brain. Sci.
42:e215. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X19001997
Brooks, R. A. (1990). Elephants don’t play chess. Rob. Auton. Syst. 6, 3–15.
doi: 10.1016/S0921-8890(05)80025-9
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artif. Intell. 47, 139–159.
doi: 10.1016/0004-3702(91)90053-M
Bunge, M., and Ardila, R. (2012). Philosophy of Psychology. New York, NY: Springer
Science & Business Media.
Calvo, P., and Gomila, T. (2008). Handbook of Cognitive Science: An Embodied
Approach. Oxford; Cambridge: Elsevier.
Campbell, D. T. (1960). Blind variation and selective retentions in creative thought
as in other knowledge processes. Psychol. Rev. 67, 380. doi: 10.1037/h0040373
Campos, J. I., and Froese, T. (2019). “From embodied interaction to
compositional referential communication: a minimal agent-based model
without dedicated communication channels,” in Artificial Life Conference
Proceedings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 79–86.
Carruthers, P., Stich, S., and Siegal, M. (2002). The Cognitive Basis of Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Casasanto, D., and Lupyan, G. (2015). “All concepts are ad hoc concepts,” in The
Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, eds E. Margolis and
S. Laurence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 543–566.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chemero, A. (2013). Radical embodied cognitive science. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 17,
145–150. doi: 10.1037/a0032923
Christensen, W., and Sutton, J. (2019). “Mesh: cognition, body, and environment
in skilled action1,” in Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 157–164.
Christensen, W., Sutton, J., and McIlwain, D. J. (2016). Cognition in skilled action:
meshed control and the varieties of skill experience. Mind Lang. 31, 37–66.
doi: 10.1111/mila.12094
Clark, A. (1998). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of
Human Intelligence, 1st Edn. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.,
Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, action, and Cognitive
Extension. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2014). Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science,
2nd Edn. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., and Toribio, J. (1994). Doing without representing? Synthese 101,
401–431. doi: 10.1007/BF01063896
Contreras Kallens, P. A., Dale, R., and Smaldino, P. E. (2018). Cultural evolution of
categorization. Cogn. Syst. Res. 52, 765–774. doi: 10.1016/j.cogsys.2018.08.026
Crippen, M., and Schulkin, J. (2020). Mind Ecologies: Body, Brain, and World.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychol. Rev. 3, 357.
doi: 10.1037/h0070405
Dewey, J. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social
Psychology. Henry Holt and Company.
Dewey, J. (1925/1929). Experience and Nature. Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing
Company.
Dewey, J. (1929). The Sources of a Science of Education. New York, NY: Horace
Liveright.
Dewey, J. (1934/1980). Art as Experience. Perigee Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 16 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
Dewey, J. (1934). A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., and Barandiaran, X. (2017). Sensorimotor life: An
Enactive Proposal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dietrich, A., and Haider, H. (2017). A neurocognitive framework for human
creative thought. Front. Psychol. 7:2078. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02078
Eliasmith, C. (2013). How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological
Cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Feist, G. J., and Gorman, M. E. (2012). Handbook of the Psychology of Science.
New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company.
Feist, G. J. (2008). The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Feist, G. J. (2010). “The function of personality in creativity: The nature
and nurture of the creative personality,” in The Cambridge Handbook of
Creativity, eds J. C. Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg (Cambridge University Press),
113–130.
Feist, G. J. (2019). “The function of personality in creativity: updates on the creative
personality,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 2nd Edn, eds J. C.
Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A., and Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981). How direct is visual perception?
some reflections on Gibson’s" ecological approach. Cognition 9, 139–196.
doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90009-3
Froese, T., Virgo, N., and Ikegami, T. (2014). Motility at the origin of life: its
characterization and a model. Artif. Life 20, 55–76. doi: 10.1162/ARTL_a_00096
Gabora, L., Rosch, E., and Aerts, D. (2008). Toward an ecological theory
of concepts. Ecol. Psychol. 20, 84–116. doi: 10.1080/104074107017
66676
Gallagher, S. (2009). “Philosophical antecendents to situated cognition,” in The
Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, eds P. Robbins and M. Aydede
(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press), 35–51.
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2014). Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience. New York, NY:
Springer.
Gholson, B., Shadish, W. R., Shadish Jr, W. R., Neimeyer, R. A., and Houts,
A. C. (1989). Psychology of Science: Contributions to Metascience. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (1996). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gopnik, A. (1996). The scientist as child. Philos. Sci. 63, 485–514.
doi: 10.1086/289970
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and
the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. New York, NY: Psychology
Press.
Heft, H. (2020). Ecological psychology as social psychology? Theory Psychol. 30,
813–826. doi: 10.1177/0959354320934545
Heidbreder, E. (1933). Seven Psychologies. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, Inc.
Hennessey, B. A. (2003). The social psychology of creativity. Scand. J. Educ. Res.
47, 253–271. doi: 10.1080/00313830308601
Hennessey, B. A. (2010). “The creativity-motivation connection,” in The
Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, eds J. C. Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 342–365.
Heras-Escribano, M. (2021). Pragmatism, enactivism, and ecological psychology:
towards a unified approach to post-cognitivism. Synthese 198, 337–363.
doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02111-1
Jacobs, D. M., and Michaels, C. F. (2007). Direct learning. Ecol. Psychol. 19,
321–349. doi: 10.1080/10407410701432337
James, W. (1890/1983). The Principles of Psychology Cambridge, MA; Harvard
University Press.
James, W. (1899). Talks to Teachers on Psychology-and to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company.
Johnson, M., and Rohrer, T. (2007). We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American
Pragmatism and the Cognitive Organism. Vol. 35. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter.
Levin, J. (2018). “Functionalism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed E.
N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab; Stanford University).
Lobo, L., Heras-Escribano, M., and Travieso, D. (2018). The history
and philosophy of ecological psychology. Front. Psychol. 9:2228.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02228
Lombardo, T. J. (1987). The Reciprocity of Perceiver and environment: The
Evolution of James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Earlbaum Associates.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Investigation Into the Human
Representation and Processing of Visual Information. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Maturana, H. R., and Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis: the organization of the living.
Autopoiesis Cogn. 42, 59–138. doi: 10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4
Menary, R. (2010). The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends
Cogn. Sci. 7, 141–144. doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00029-9
Neisser, U. (1967/2014). Cognitive Psychology. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Nersessian, N. J. (2008). Creating Scientific Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neske, G. (2010). The notion of computation is fundamental to an autonomous
Neuroscience 16, 10–19. doi: 10.1002/cplx.20319
Newell, A., Shaw, J. C., and Simon, H. A. (1958/1962). “The processes of creative
thinking,” in Contemporary Approaches to Creative Thinking: A Symposium
Held at the University of Colorado (New York, NY: Atherton Press), 63–119.
Newen, A., De Bruin, L., and Gallagher, S. (2018). The Oxford Handbook of 4E
Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Piccinini, G., and Bahar, S. (2013). Neural computation and the computational
theory of cognition. Cogn. Sci. 37, 453–488. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12012
Pinker, S. (1997). How the MindWorks. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Polger, T. W. (2012). Functionalism as a philosophical theory of the cognitive
sciences. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Cogn. Sci. 3, 337–348. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1170
Posner, M. I., Petersen, S. E., Fox, P. T., and Raichle, M. E. (1988). Localization
of cognitive operations in the human brain. Science 240, 1627–1631.
doi: 10.1126/science.3289116
Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Reeve, R., Webb, B., Horchler, A., Indiveri, G., and Quinn, R. (2005). New
technologies for testing a model of cricket phonotaxis on an outdoor robot.
Rob. Auton. Syst. 51, 41–54. doi: 10.1016/j.robot.2004.08.010
Sanches de Oliveira, G., Raja, V., and Chemero, A. (2021). Radical
embodied cognitive science and “real cognition”. Synthese 198, 115–136.
doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02475-4
Segundo-Ortin, M., and Heras-Escribano, M. (2021). Neither mindful nor
mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance.
Synthese 1–25. doi: 10.1007/s11229-021-03238-w
Sejnowski, T. J., Koch, C., and Churchland, P. S. (1988). Computational
neuroscience. Science 241, 1299–1306. doi: 10.1126/science.3045969
Shapiro, L. (2010). Embodied Cognition. London: Routledge.
Shapiro, L. (2014). The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. London:
Routledge.
Simonton, D. K. (1999). Creativity as blind variation and selective retention: is the
creative process darwinian? Psychol. Inquiry 10, 309–328.
Simonton, D. K. (2010). Creative thought as blind-variation and selective-
retention: Combinatorial models of exceptional creativity. Phys. Life Rev. 7,
156–179. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2010.02.002
Simonton, D. K. (2011). Creativity and discovery as blind variation: Campbell’s
(1960) bvsr model after the half-century mark. Rev. General Psychol. 15,
158–174. doi: 10.1037/a0022912
Simonton, D. K. (2012). Taking the us patent office criteria seriously: a quantitative
three-criterion creativity definition and its implications. Creat Res. J. 24,
97–106. doi: 10.1080/10400419.2012.676974
Simonton, D. K. (2013). Creative thought as blind variation and selective retention:
why creativity is inversely related to sightedness. J. Theor. Philos. Psychol. 33,
253. doi: 10.1037/a0030705
Simonton, D. K. (2018). Creative genius as causal agent in history: William
james’s 1880 theory revisited and revitalized. Rev. General Psychol. 22, 406–421.
doi: 10.1037/gpr0000165
Sutton, J. (2008). “Material agency, skills and history: distributed cognition and the
archaeology of memory,” in Material Agency (Springer), 37–55.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 17 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Sanches de Oliveira Functionalism, Embodiment, Scientific Creativity
Sutton, J. (2015). “Remembering as public practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and
distributed cognitive ecologies,” in Mind, Language and Action (Boston, MA:
De Gruyter), 409–444.
Sutton, J. (2020). “Personal memory, the scaffolded mind, and cognitive change in
the neolithic,” in Consciousness, Creativity and Self at the Dawn of Settled Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Sutton, J., and Bicknell, K. (2020). “Embodied experience in the cognitive
ecologies of skilled performance,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy
of Skill and Expertise, eds E. Fridland and C. Pavese (London: Routledge),
194–206.
Sutton, J., Harris, C. B., Keil, P. G., and Barnier, A. J. (2010). The
psychology of memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed
remembering. Phenomenol Cogn. Sci 9, 521–560. doi: 10.1007/s11097-010-
9182-y
Sutton, J., and Keene, N. (2016). “Cognitive history and material culture,” in
The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, eds C.
Richardson, T. Hamling, and D. Gaimster (London: Routledge), 66–78.
Thagard, P. (2005). Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Thagard, P. (2012). The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and
Conceptual Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thagard, P. (2019). Brain-mind: From Neurons to Consciousness and Creativity
(Treatise on Mind and Society). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Turvey, M. T. (2018). Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective. London:
Routledge.
Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ward, T. B. (1994). Structured imagination: The role of category structure
in exemplar generation. Cogn. Psychol. 27, 1–40. doi: 10.1006/cogp.19
94.1010
Ward, T. B. (1995). “What’s old about new ideas,” in The Creative Cognition
Approach, eds S. M. Smith, T. B. Ward, and R. A. Finke (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press), 157–178.
Ward, T. B., and Kolomyts, Y. (2010). “Cognition and creativity,” in The Cambridge
Handbook of Creativity, eds J. C. Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg (Cambridge
University Press), 93–112.
Ward, T. B., Smith, S. M., and Finke, R. A. (1999). Creative cognition. Handbook
Creat. 189:212. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511807916.012
Webb, B. (1995). Using robots to model animals: a cricket test. Rob. Auton. Syst.
16, 117–134. doi: 10.1016/0921-8890(95)00044-5
Zahnoun, F. (2021). On representation hungry cognition (and why we should stop
feeding it). Synthese 198, 267–284. doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02277-8
Conflict of Interest: The author declares that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a
potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of
the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in
this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or
endorsed by the publisher.
Copyright © 2022 Sanches de Oliveira. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication
in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 18 January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 750086
Available via license: CC BY
Content may be subject to copyright.
