The Varieties of Dynamicism

The dynamical approach to cognition is often considered to be ‘revolutionary’. In contrast to the well-established approaches of computationalism and connectionism, dynamicism is typically thought to be anti-representational, holistic, phenomenological and law-based. In this paper, I will argue that this way of thinking about dynamicism is too restrictive: it fails to capture the heterogeneous nature of dynamicist research. Although all dynamicist research projects share a commitment to the mathematical methods, tools, and concepts of dynamical systems theory, they frequently disagree with respect to the truth or falsity of representationalism, the role of holistic phenomenological modeling, and in general, the nature of dynamical explanation.