Searching for General Principles in Cognitive Performance: Reply to Commentators

Reply to Commentators 2 The commentators expressed concerns regarding the relevance and value of non-computational non-symbolic explanations of cognitive performance. But what counts as an " explanation " depends on the pre-theoretical assumptions behind the scenes of empirical science regarding the kinds of variables and relationships that are sought out in the first place, and some of the present disagreements stem from incommensurate assumptions. Traditional cognitive science presumes cognition to be a decomposable system of components interacting according to computational rules to generate cognitive performances (i.e., component-dominant dynamics). We assign primacy to interaction-dominant dynamics among components. Though either choice can be a good guess before the fact, the primacy of interactions is now supported by much recent empirical work in cognitive science. Consequently, in the main, the commentators have failed so far to address the growing evidence corroborating the theory-driven predictions of complexity science. We thank the commentators and the authors of the target articles who contributed to this new debate format of TopiCS. We are indebted to the commentators in particular for spelling out the ways in which they see complexity science as problematic, and illustrating the ways in which complexity science is sometimes misunderstood. From the comments it is clear that basic assumptions and technical jargon of complexity theory do not circulate widely across the cognitive science community, and so they understandably become easy targets of complaint and parody. In that light Wagenmakers, van der Maas, and Farrell (this volume) may find interesting an actual explicit multistep outline for how to do empirical work in complexity science. One such outline in Kelso (2003) came out of work on motor coordination and perception, culminating in the 1995 publication of Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior. Scott Kelso's 1995 volume holds up still as a touchstone for ideas about complexity and detailed corroboration of the empirical flags of complexity and qualitative change in brain and behavior. Kelso also explains why the initial empirical focus must be the global dynamics of a system, only turning afterward to a system's components. " It is difficult to isolate the components and study their dynamics. The reason is that the individual components seldom exist outside the context of the functioning whole, and have to be studied as such. " (Kelso, 2003, p. 50). The commentators made clear as well that we should have been more up front about our motivation in departing …