Ecological realism is a school of thought that views the mind as a product of the environment. The environment provides all the meaningful information and the environment is, ultimately, cognition itself. During our century Math has developed a very sophisticated system of dealing with logical concepts. Mathematicians view the mind as a formal system, i.e. a machine. Turing proposed a famous test to decide whether a machine has become intelligent.
Many critics deny the validity of that test.
Artificial Intelligence has evolved into a formal study of human knowledge, away from the purely logical approach of its beginnings. Connectionism is a school of thought opposed to traditional A.I. that promotes the paradigm of Neural Networks, i.e. simulating the way the brain works. Connectionists view the mind as a mechanical product of the brain's distributed parallel computation. Pragmatics deals with acts of speech, or why people use the language they use it. Metaphor is considered by many thinkers as fundamental not only to our linguistic abilities but to our thinking in general.