Trying to get it
Cognitive Science is really an affiliation of disciplines: AI, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometiems anthropology and the philosophy of the mind. It also has many streams.
Scientific imagination mutates radicaly from one epoch to another and the history of science is more like a novelistic saga than a linear progression...a story that can be told in more than one way (?) alongside the history of science (described her as human nature), there is also a parallel history of mind and nature (many precursors in other words to cognitive science).
Technology has made an important contribution (almost by contrast) as it has raised questions such as "Can language be undertood by a machine"?
The authors propose the term ENACTIVISM for the version of cognitive science that questions that cognition is fundamentally representation. It argues that the mind is not a mirror. We pick up and recover aspects of the world by internally representing them, and our perception is subjective. They describe it as a third way because their study is neither "objective" nor "subjective" (but I haven't quite got my head around that yet..at the moment I recognise it can't be 100% objective)
To the authors there is a "Fundamental Circularity" which is core. I think the argument is...."It is only because the brain undergoes interactions in an envionrment that we can lable the ensuing behaviour as cognitive" (is this the same as the falling tree in a wood argument?!!), and "changes in the brain reveal themselves in behavioural and experiential alternations). But any such scientific description must itself be a product of the structure of our own cognitive system (maybe this is linked to the idea that a computer can't build itself..can't make itself?)... Oh God this is really pissing me off! I don't get it. These ideas don't interest me. Perhaps I need to start with something more simple.