Calvo and Keijzer on Cognition

What is cognition? Although cognition is one of the core concepts in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, there is no generally accepted answer. For example, in his classic book Cognitive Psychology, Ulrich Neisser defined cognition as: “all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.” (1967, p.4) But this definition seems to include many artifacts, like tape recorders, and organisms, like plants, that were not intended to be labeled as cognitive. The classical cognitive sciences that grew up under the influence of people like Neisser used a much more limited interpretation of cognition: not all forms or information processing did suffice. The implicit extra constraint in this definition was that cognition involves the kind of information processing that also occurs in human intelligence, where it is described in terms like perception, planning, thinking and action. (Calvo & Keijzer, 2008, p. 249)

More cognitivism in plants, it seems.

Calvo on Avoiding Terminological Disputes

The debate on ‘plant intelligence’ is unfortunately plagued with conceptual traps. Intelligence is usually cashed out in animal or anthropocentric terms, in such a way that plants plainly fail to meet the conditions for animal or human‑like intelligence, for obvious but uninteresting reasons. Nevertheless, in the name of scientific progress fight over labels ought to be avoided altogether. Plant neurobiology is not searching for the sort of tissues that implement computations in animals. It goes without saying that plants do not share  “neurons” with animals, or exhibit animal “intelligence”. If the reader wishes to keep those terms for animals exclusively, so be it.  (Garzon, 2007, p. 209)

So, I agree here.  Try to be reasonably clear on your terminology, then get to empirical work.  And, it seems to be common ground here at least that there are differences in the capacities of plants and of animals.  So, what are those?

Calvo on the Goals of Cognitive Science

In fact, it has become somewhat inescapable to accept that a final understanding of human intelligence will be embodied and embedded. ... From this perspective, plants and animals, as open systems coupled with their environments, are on a par. The target is the scientific understanding of the continuous interplay of both animals and plants in relation to the environmental contingencies that impinge upon them.  (Garzon, 2007, p. 209).

First of all, I'm fine with saying that plants and animals are equally open systems coupled with their environments.  Leibniz was wrong to maintain that they are "windowless" monads. 

Second, there is a bit more room for debate, it seems to me, when it comes to "the target of scientific understanding".  Maybe one wants to know about the continuous interplay of organisms and their environment, but, then again, maybe one thinks that animal behavior is the product of certain sorts of mechanisms that one does not find in plants, and that among these mechanisms is a body of linguistic competence, and maybe one wants to know what constitutes this competence.  Maybe one does not really care about the continuous interplay of animals and plants with their environment.  Maybe one thinks that behavior of this sort is a kind of hodge podge of lots of different factors that don't really form all that coherent a whole.  Maybe, that is, one takes a view like Chomsky's articulated in the early pages of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

Here, it seems to me, is one place where the new embodied and embedded stuff seems to have understated the differences it has with cognitivism on this score.

Calvo on Plant Neurobiology

In preparation for the upcoming "Systematicity and the Post-Connectionist Era" workshop, I have been reading some papers by one of the organizers, Paco Calvo.  (Incidentally, I have seen a draft of the program and it looks great.)

Put bluntly, an information‑processing system counts as computational insofar as its state‑transitions can be accounted for in terms of manipulations on representations. The relation of representation refers to the standing in of internal states of a physical system for the content of other states. Cognitive activity is thus marked by the processing of representational states. We need nonetheless a more stringent definition of ‘representation’; a principled way to decide when a system manipulates representational states, beyond the somewhat trivial observation that one internal state ‘stands in’ for the content of another state. For present purposes, I propose to consider the following two principles. First, according to a principle of dissociation, for a physical state to become representational, the state must be able on occasions to stand for things or events that are temporarily unavailable. And second, according to a principle of reification, a system state can only count as representational if it can be detected and a parallel drawn between the state in question and the role it plays in the establishment of a connection between the system’s input and output states. That is, we must be able to identify specific physical states with the computational roles they are supposed to play.
     This framework can serve to assess the cognitive capacities of any information‑processing system whatsoever. Notice that it does not rely upon the existence of any specific brain tissue to perform computations. A physical state is contentful if it can be spatiotemporarily identified as causally efficacious in the connection of the system’s input and output states in such a way that the state in question ‘hangs in there’ while the input state it is tuned to decays or is no longer present.v That’s all that is needed. No restrictions in terms of implementation, neuronal or what may, are imposed. I propose therefore to adopt these two principles, taken together, as a condition on the possession of a cognitive architecture, and consider plants as candidates for its satisfaction. (Garzon, 2007, pp. 209-10).

So, Garzon is an embodied cognitionist of a representationalist stripe.  Nicely muddies the water about what embodied cognition people think.  I take it that there is a fair diversity of opinion among embodied cognitionists.

Now, I've long been keen to get on the table a "mark of the cognitive" for various reasons, but one is simply so we can at least get in the ballpark of what we are talking about.  Now, it seems to me that Paco has informed us what he is talking about.  So, given that, I can see how he can maintains that plants are cognitive systems.

But, I don't see that we are necessarily talking past one another.  It seems to me that we can have common ground in the view that the plant cognition he is talking about differs from the human cognition that I am talking about.