Abstract
AbstractA popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cognition. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied phenomenon, to be situated. I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity, which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of setting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.
Highlights
An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to eschew strict braincentric reductionism and instead view cognition as embodied, embedded, situated, extended, enactive, ecological, and so on
It’s good to make it clear from the start that what’s at issue in the present paper is tangential to discussions about representation, computation and information processing: as will become clear, a crucial feature of the strong program is that it is marked by reflexivity, which has more to do with how and what we study than with whether we posit representations in our explanations of cognitive phenomena
The goal of this paper is to propose a way in which these ideas from the strong programme in sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) can inspire a corresponding strong program in embodied cognitive science
Summary
An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to eschew strict braincentric reductionism and instead view cognition as embodied, embedded, situated, extended, enactive, ecological, and so on. In other circles “embodied cognition” designates not a category that applies only to some cognitive phenomena but rather a way of understanding and investigating all of cognition: from this perspective the “whether” question doesn’t arise (its answer in every case would be “yes”), and investigation is instead concerned with the question “how.” This second use of “embodied cognition” is illustrated by work on a variety of topics, from wide computation (e.g., Wilson, 1994, 2004), distributed cognition (e.g., Hutchins, 1995, Hutchins & Klausen, 1996), the extended mind and the “natural-born cyborgs” view (e.g., Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2003; Menary, 2010), up to the radical, antirepresentational views of ecological psychology (e.g., Gibson, 1979; Richardson et al, 2008; Chemero, 2009) and enactivism (e.g., Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela et al 1991; Di Paolo et al, 2017; Gallagher, 2017) In this sense, embodiment is not a hypothesis about particular instances of psychological and behavioral phenomena, but is rather the starting assumption that informs how we conceptualize, investigate and understand any and all psychological and behavioral phenomena.
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