 Cognitive science spans the disciplines of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy, and its relatively brief history has been dominated by the idea that human information processing depends on inner representations which are subject to computation (Boden 2006). It now encompasses approaches which challenge this idea, seeking to replace or augment inner representation with dependence on the environment. This concern with human cognitive architecture is exemplified in such developments as Marr’s theory of vision (1982), Brooks’ subsumption architecture for robots (1986), and predictive processing theories of perception and cognition (Friston 2010, see also below,  Section 3).  A survey of this large domain must be very selective and we have tried to identify, for each topic, a small number of key ideas on which to build our discussion. Throughout we have focused on sources that highlight the issues that confront us when we try to decide when some contribution from the empirical sciences of mind provides a rethink of some aesthetic doctrine, when the two disciplines offer complementary perspectives, and when the one is of no particular relevance to the other.