Abstract
Material Engagement Theory (MET), which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In How Things Shape the Mind (2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of thinging and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.
Highlights
Material Engagement Theory (MET), which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences have long reached an agreement that mental events do not occur in a vacuum or some a priori metaphysical space
They are better described as components of our lived experience, the skills and capacities of our bodies
Summary
What kind of mental processes and forms of representation can account for the origins and endings of the simple line we have drawn? The first way is to think of it as an action: the drawing of a line. The third way is to think of the line as a sign: the index of our moving hand or perhaps the trace of a creative gesture.. The third way is to think of the line as a sign: the index of our moving hand or perhaps the trace of a creative gesture.2 Speaking, those three ways of seeing the line are inseparable. Each one of those ways supports, informs, constraints, causes and complements the other To grasp their unity is to attend the cognitive life of the line. Most of our troubles with the nature and evolution of human cognition depend and stem from this representational logic of inversion that sets up the artificial opposition between mind and matter
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