The new computationalism - A lesson from embodied agents

Abstract

Computationalism is traditionally considered in the context of cognitive science as perhaps the dominant contemporary approach to understand cognition and cognitive phenomena. It consists in application of concepts and methods of theoretical computer science for understanding and (re)constructing phenomena appearing in much broader fields of science, including the natural sciences and also economics, and some other branches of social sciences. The contribution sketches this new situation, and provides an example of a theoretical model rooted in the traditional computationalism which reflects some new requirements. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.