Cognitive Confinement, Embodied Sense-Making, and the (De)Colonization of Knowledge

Abstract

This paper posits the concept of cognitive confinement as a useful tool for understanding the idea of decolonization of knowledge and the opposite notion of epistemic colonization. For the sake of the mentioned goal, the paper places the discourse on epistemic (de)colonization within the context of a paradigm emerging in the cognitive sciences, referred to as embodied cognition. Cognitive confinement is understood here as a pathological situation in which the environment in which one’s epistemic pursuits are embedded gradually transforms in such a way as to impede these pursuits and downgrade one’s capacity to address real, especially local, problems. The paper also brings up a case study. Namely, it follows those thinkers, most famously Naomi Klein, who regard the ‘shock-therapeutic’ transition from Soviet-backed communism to free market capitalism undergone by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as a new and peculiar wave of colonization. The paper briefly discusses the epistemic or cognitive, broadly construed, aspect of this process.