Book review of Lawrence Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition

Abstract

Lawrence Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition is one of the first detailed book length attempts to introduce and develop the central themes of embodied cognition, an important trend in cognitive science. Embodied cognition is increasingly influential, but it would be a mistake to characterize it as a rigidly defined and unified theory. It emerged from a variety of fields (e.g., the phenomenological movement in philosophy, ecological, and developmental psychology, robotics, ethology, and dynamical systems theory) and therefore still suffers from internal disagreements over fundamental issues, such as its subject matter, its methodological commitments, the exact nature and definition of “embodiment,” and the extent to which embodiment matters in explaining cognition. Thus, the explanatory capacity and successes of the embodied cognition program depend upon further clarification of these issues. Providing this clarification, it seems, is the primary motivation behind Shapiro’s book. Instead of summarizing the book’s seven chapters individually, I will focus on the themes that Shapiro presents as being central to embodied cognition and to which the main parts of the book are devoted to discussing (the “Introduction” and from “Chapters 3–7”). In doing so, I will additionally be looking at what Shapiro calls the “meta-theme” of the book, namely, the need to understand both (1) what embodied cognition aims to explain, exactly, and (2) how it relates to, and important ways departs from, standard cognitive science (the focus of the “Introduction” and the “Concluding Thoughts”).