There is a widespread misconception among critics of the dynamical systems approach to cognition: the emphasis on embodiment and situatedness has given the wrong impression that the only cognitive activities that can be explained under this paradigm are those concerned with ongoing coping with the current situation. To say that the body is actively situated in a world is only to highlight the most fundamental aspect of all cognitive activity. There is no doubt that the dynamical systems approach has already proven immensely more successful in such cases than traditional computational approaches. Even so, as soon as we move to other, more human, cognitive performances, such as planning or imagining, we must, critics predict, return to the tenets of cognitivism/ computationalism in some updated form, or worse still, to some kind of hybrid stance. Here I briefly examine the foundations of this claim (and find there aren't really any).
On the positive side, I raise the issue of what is the best route for connecting sensorimotor and situated intelligence with (some) human styles of cognitive activity (misleadingly characterized as "decoupled"). A dynamical systems approach is already useful because it forces us to formulate the questions that traditional representational approaches felt unnecessary to ask since they answered them almost axiomatically. What is to represent? How is it possible to alter the meaning of a situation? What sort of system is a cognizer such that the world is meaningful for her? How can a cognizer act autonomously in accordance with meanings not yet established by the situation but by her own actions?
I will very briefly discuss the life/cognition continuity thesis and show how it reveals fundamental issues about agency and sense-making that allow us to begin to answer some of these questions. A powerful methodological guidance is found in Hans Jonas's work on value-generating activities and the evolutionary/historical thread of increased mediacy in cognition. Following a developmental version of this thread, a large part of this presentation will be devoted to examining pretend play (in authors such as Lev Vygotsky, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and Margaret Donaldson) as a particularly relevant activity for understanding how transitions to freer forms of meaning manipulation are inherently embodied and dynamical in nature. This will suggest new vistas and new challenges to synthetical approaches like evolutionary robotics.