Abstract
We examine how embodiment in biological activity is different from conceptual embodiment as reflected in classic, modern, and postmodern perspectives on tacit knowledge. The central theme of the essay is how understanding is embodied conceptually and biofunctionally. We focus (a) on how biofunctional understanding (BU) is different from conceptual understanding (CU) and (b) on how the overall differences between these two types of embodied understanding are complementary. We show here from a conceptual perspective that embodiment theories have diverged on the meaning of embodiment; but convergence may be more likely across future perspectives if we first redefine the construct of tacit knowledge as tacit understanding and then define (explicit) CU as being directly grounded in tacit understanding, for the purpose of comparison with BU defined as being grounded in biological activity. We illustrate the complementary differences between conceptual and biofunctional embodiment of understanding first in the absence of language and then using a particular statement format and the implicit analogy of biofunctional embodiment in other bodily systems. We conclude with a suggestion about the directly uncovered but highly related embodiment of language in a section on future research.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
We examine how embodiment in biological activity is different from conceptual embodiment as reflected in classic, modern, and postmodern perspectives on tacit knowledge
We show here from a conceptual perspective that embodiment theories have diverged on the meaning of embodiment; but convergence may be more likely across future perspectives if we first redefine the construct of tacit knowledge as tacit understanding and define conceptual understanding (CU) as being directly grounded in tacit understanding, for the purpose of comparison with biofunctional understanding (BU) defined as being grounded in biological activity
Summary
Some leading investigators were groping like they had experienced a sudden enlightenment or even disillusion that their already popular first generation cognitive science was no longer worthy of their attention and that they were better off with some other popular replacement. Rumelhart introduced a radical shift from his symbolic story grammar or his theory of monolithic schemas (Rumelhart, 1975, 1980; Iran-Nejad et al, 1992; Do and Rahm, 2007) to a new focus (see, especially, Rumelhart, 1984, conference paper) on subsymbolic parallel distributed processing (PDP) connectionism (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986). The fact that these pioneering scholars turned away from their already influential work is evidence for a sudden enlightenment; and the fact that they each headed in a different direction in search of something revolutionary like PDP connectionism may be taken as evidence for the lack of direction about where the field was better off heading
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