A Radical Reassessment of the Body in Social Cognition.

Jessica Lindblom

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00987

Abstract

The main issue addressed in this paper is to provide a reassessment of the role and relevance of the body in social cognition from a radical embodied cognitive science perspective. Initially, I provide a historical introduction of the traditional account of the body in cognitive science, which I here call the cognitivist view. I then present several lines of criticism raised against the cognitivist view advanced by more embodied, enacted and situated approaches in cognitive science, and related disciplines. Next, I analyze several approaches under the umbrella of embodied social cognition. My line of argument is that some of these approaches, although pointing toward the right direction of conceiving that the social mind is not merely contained inside the head, still fail to fully acknowledge the radically embodied social mind. I argue that the failure of these accounts of embodied social cognition could be associated with so-called ‘simple embodiment.’ The third part of this paper focuses on elaborating an alternative characterization of the radically embodied social mind that also tries to reduce the remaining problems with ‘simple embodiment.’ I draw upon two turns in radically embodied cognitive science, the enactive turn, and the intersubjective turn. On the one hand, there is the risk of focusing too much on the individual level in social cognition that may result in new kinds of methodological individualism that partly neglect the social dimension. On the other hand, socially distributed and socially extended approaches that pay more attention to the dynamics within social interaction may encounter the risk of ignoring the individual during social interaction dynamics and simultaneously not emphasizing the role of embodiment. The approach taken is to consider several ways of describing and incorporating the (individual) social mind at the social level that includes language. I outline some ideas and motivations for how to study and expand the field of radical embodied social cognition in the future, as well as pose the ubiquitous hazard of falling back into a cognitivism view in several ways.

Highlights

Social cognition is an established research field that encompasses several theoretical approaches to describe and study how the social mind works
Cognition is viewed as information-processing of these more or less explicit internal symbolic representations, being the “internal content” of the external world, and almost nothing outside “the skull” is taken into account. This is the still common and dominant view in the study of social cognition, suggesting that humans relate to each other in much the same way as they relate to other parts of the external world, i.e., by having more or less explicit internal representations of each other, which are manipulated internally (e.g., Kunda, 1999; Quinn et al, 2003; Frith and Wolpert, 2004; Singer et al, 2004; Fiske and Taylor, 2013; Augoustinos et al, 2014)
The mainstream version of embodied cognitive science, i.e., simple embodiment, could be regarded as a “watering down” version of the more radical scientific tradition that dates back to scholars of pragmatism. This means that the influence goes the other way around than often presented or imagined in mainstream cognitive science, and clarifies why there has been a turn to pragmatism and enactivism within more radical embodied approaches of cognition

Summary

A Radical Reassessment of the Body in Social Cognition

Reviewed by: Jifan Zhou, Zhejiang University, China Marek McGann, Mary Immaculate College, Ireland. Reassessment of the Body in Social Cognition. The main issue addressed in this paper is to provide a reassessment of the role and relevance of the body in social cognition from a radical embodied cognitive science perspective. I provide a historical introduction of the traditional account of the body in cognitive science, which I here call the cognitivist view. I present several lines of criticism raised against the cognitivist view advanced by more embodied, enacted and situated approaches in cognitive science, and related disciplines. I outline some ideas and motivations for how to study and expand the field of radical embodied social cognition in the future, as well as pose the ubiquitous hazard of falling back into a cognitivism view in several ways

INTRODUCTION

Aim and Objectives

Findings

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION