The Symbolic Worldview: Reply to Vera and Simon

Vera and Simon (1993) wish to choose up sides between two schools of research in cognitive science, their own symbolic approach versus a loosely associated group of authors concerned with "situated action" or "SA". I can understand Vera and Simon's need to treat these authors collectively, and I am sure they can understand any discomfort the authors might feel in being treated this way. I have often found it hard to tell whether Vera and Simon are disputing my own ideas or someone else's. Moreover, the term "SA" appears at various points to name different things: an intellectual movement, a category of computational models, an empirical phenomenon, and a particular functionality of symbolic systems. Differences in vocabu- lary and worldview have led Vera and Simon into formulations of my own views and others' that I do not recognize and occasionally cannot under- stand. Nonetheless, I do credit their effort to initiate dialogue and will at- tempt to reply in kind. First, some areas of broad agreement are clear. These include the value of much past research within the physical symbol system framework, the ex- istence of various empirical phenomena, the difficulty of relating phenome- nology to computational research, the relevance of both philosophy and cognitive modeling to cognitive science, and the social nature of human