Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A certain indecisiveness and lack of common purpose seems to be a feature of cognitive science at the moment. W e are in this paper that it can be explained in part by cognitive science's lack of success so far in connecting its scientific, computational image (better, images) of cognition to what we experience of people in ordinary life: in society, law, literature, etc. Following Sellars (1963), we call these two ways of representing cognizers the scientific image and the manifest image. The scientific image sees persons, and also artificial cognitive systems, as vast assem?blages of postulated units of some kind. In the manifest image by contrast, persons are seen as unified centre of representation, deliberation and action, able to reach focused, unified decisions and take focused, unified actions. Since the manifest image is the murkier of the two, more of the paper is devoted to it than to the scientific image. The manifest image is richer and more diverse than might at first be thought.