Tim van Gelder

Tim van Gelder was a founder of Austhink Software, an Australian software development company, and is the Managing Director of Austhink Consulting. He was born in Australia, educated at the University of Melbourne (BA, 1984), the University of Pittsburgh (PhD, 1989), and held academic positions at Indiana University and the Australian National University before returning to Melbourne as an Australian Research Council QEII Research Fellow. In 1998, he transitioned to part-time academic work allowing him to pursue private training and consulting, and in 2005 began working full-time at Austhink Software. In 2009 he transitioned to Managing Director of Austhink Consulting.

Van Gelder's research has had three main phases, corresponding to his PhD research on distributed representation, his subsequent research on dynamics & cognition, and his current phase, research into reasoning skills.

In his PhD thesis, completed under the supervision of John Haugeland and entitled "Distributed Representation" (1989) van Gelder gave the first sustained exploration of the general concept of distributed representation, and argued that it was a third fundamental kind of representation alongside language and imagery.

Van Gelder is a proponent of dynamicism or dynamic cognition in cognitive science. This is a theory of cognition that proposes that dynamical systems theory provides a better model (or metaphor) for human cognition than the 'computational' model. For example, that a Watt governor is a better metaphorical description of the way humans think than a Turing machine style computer.

In his first regular academic position at Indiana University, van Gelder was heavily influenced by researchers such as Robert Port, James Townsend, Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith who were exploring cognition from a dynamical perspective, i.e., applying the tools of dynamical systems to studying cognitive processes. Van Gelder published a series of articles providing a philosophical commentary on the dynamical approach, culminating in his 1998 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where he articulated the dynamical approach to cognition and argued that it should be taken seriously as a broad empirical hypothesis comparable to the dominant hypothesis that cognition is digital computation. In his most well-known paper, 'What Might Cognition Be If Not Computation,' van Gelder used the Watt Governor as a model to contrast with the Turing Machine. Van Gelder came to be known as one of the foremost proponents of the dynamical approach, and even as an advocate of anti-representationalism, though he explicitly disavowed that extreme position.

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