Dynamic Embodiment – A Non-Anthropocentric Approach (original) (raw)
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Embodiment theories and alternative perspectives on the body
«Studi di estetica», XLV, serie IV (8/2)(Sensibilia 10-2016-Embodiment), pp., 2017
Embodiment theories have overcome the doctrine of intellectus archetypus without ever discussing the notion of body on which that particular kind of intellect was based. Indeed, the model of the body underlying embodiment theories remains an a priori: anthropomorphic, independent and " self-contained ". This paper sheds light on the problematic points of this vision and explores the anthropology of the " ontological turn " , looking for alternative modes of body knowledge – seeing it as the result of " affects " , " affections " and habitus – more effective in justifying the corporeal dimension of cognition.
"Epilogue: What Embodiment Is", to appear in Nancy Dess (ed.), Embodiment, Routledge.
This essay highlights some ways in which embodiment has been misunderstood-leading to misguided critiques of embodied cognitive science-and corrects those misunderstandings. I will explain what embodiment, at least as it is understood by embodied cognitive scientists, really is. Going forward, inquiry based on a sound, shared understanding of embodiment can continue to transform the scholarly landscape. I have been arguing for the centrality of embodiment in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind for a long time now. Although there are still persistent, long-term critics of embodiment in these disciplines, its centrality has become more widely accepted over time. As the affiliations of the authors in this essay collection make clear, this is true outside cognitive science and philosophy of mind as well: The authors here are drawn from every corner of the university. Despite the increasing acceptance of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, a few new critiques have shown up, mostly driven by social media, where anyone can opine about anything without worrying about the annoying details (editors, peer review) that make old-fashioned academic discourse so difficult. And so slow. This short essay will be reviewed and edited by people with relevant PhDs and will appear in print about a year after the process began. Given this, it is easy to see the appeal of vomiting one's opinions out into the ether, instantaneously and with no interference from experts. Don't worry, dear reader: The rest of this essay is not a rant about the corrosive effects of social media, a conversation better had over a beer. But I will be responding here to some views of embodied cognition that have gotten attention on social media, among other venues, despite being based on misunderstandings. Unfortunately, even though academics ought to know better, social media fights really do shape academic discourse. So dispelling misunderstandings matters. In this essay, I will point to two objections to embodied
Topics in Cognitive Science, 2012
There is substantial disagreement among philosophers of embodied cognitive science about the meaning of embodiment. In what follows, I describe three different views that can be found in the current literature. I show how this debate centers around the question of whether the science of embodied cognition can retain the computer theory of mind. One view, which I will label body functionalism, takes the body to play the functional role of linking external resources for problem solving with internal biological machinery. Embodiment is thus understood in terms of the role the body plays in supporting the computational circuits that realize cognition. Body enactivism argues by contrast that no computational account of cognition can account for the role of commonsense knowledge in our everyday practical engagement with the world. I will attempt a reconciliation of these seemingly opposed views.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2015
One of the bewildering conceptions within the realm of cognitive science has been the perception of meaning and understanding, which has inadequately been approached by previous theories of cognition. Recently, there have been radical shifts in developments in cognitive science toward the theory of Embodiment. On the word of this newfangled standpoint, it is widely accepted that body plays a central role in meaning making. In this novel approach, making linguistic meanings which is closely related to our actions is precisely the point. Several investigations have endeavored to provide the estimates of embodiment by examining the effect of body movements on cognition. A considerable amount of literature has proved that the cognitive capacities are constructed and dependent on the bodily actions through the interaction with the external world.
Journal of Cognitive Semiotics - How our bodies became us
In recent years, the body and the related notion of embodiment have become pervasive objects of inquiry in numerous disciplines, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, and so on. This article aims to investigate more closely the characteristics of the notion of 'body' presupposed by these different theories, which often naturalize the body by taking it as a non-gendered, pre-discursive phenomenon, and thus hiding the concrete reality of the many different bodies we all as persons possess, with all their specific social, cultural, and discursive determinations. The body is not an isolated entity, but the result of a complex set of interactions with the environment and with others, where intersubjectivity plays a crucial role. Much research over the last few years has focused on the ways in which the body has inscribed in itself a predisposition to intersubjectivity: this article discusses another, complementary, question: the way in which intersubjectivity itself shapes bodies. Here the body is seen as the result of a process that takes place in a socio-cultural environment and in intimate interaction with others, rather than the starting point for a process that, beginning from the single organism, expands and opens up towards a wider relational world. In this approach, intersubjectivity becomes a semiotic dimension of the social coconstruction and sharing of meaning. All forms of intersubjectivity imply, and at the same time produce, a work of continual interpretation and reinterpretation which lies at the very basis of the peircean concept of semiosis. Finally, to exemplify how intersubjectivity, semiosis, and embodiment intimately intertwine with one another, one particular field of investigation is considered: the very the first stages of human development, where it is shown how the body becomes a semiotic entity: something much more than -and very different from -a purely natural organism.
Within contemporary philosophy of mind, to say that mind, self, and cognition are embodied is to claim that mental phenomena are constituted not only by what’s going on inside a person’s brain, but depend intimately on the person’s body beyond the brain and, more inclusively, the world in which the person is situated. The goal of this seminar is to understand the significance of this claim, and to articulate the nature of the suggested dependence relation. Acting as a dis-embodied foil for our discussion will be a narrowly circumscribed mechanistic approach to cognition which forms the core of classical cognitive science. According to this approach, thinking is a form of computation operating on symbolic representations that are physically realized solely inside the brain. Despite its commitment to physicalism, classical cognitive science epitomizes a broadly Cartesian vision of cognition as an inner, solitary, ratiocinative, detached, and general-purpose mechanism that is wedged between action and perception, and can be studied without regard to one’s body and environment. Over the past three decades, the once-dominant cognitivist paradigm has increasingly come under attack by a loosely-knit family of research programs emphasizing the embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive character of cognition (“4E-cognition”). Advocates of 4E-cognition span a large network of research communities (including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, robotics, sociology, anthropology, science studies, gender studies, and informatics), taking their cues from disparate sources such as Continental philosophy (esp. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein), American Pragmatism (esp. James, Dewey, and Mead), pioneers in psychology (from Vygotsky to Gibson) and biology (from Uexküll to Varela). (At this point, one is tempted to cite Fodor’s quip that in intellectual history, everything happens twice: first as philosophy and then as cognitive science). Because of the sheer diversity of sources and evidence on which proponents of 4E-cognition have drawn, it is often difficult to determine whether they belong to one church or many. The main task in our seminar will thus be to compare and contrast the intellectual enterprises which are grouped together under the banner of 4E-cognition. In what ways do they depart from the Cartesian paradigm, and how exactly does each of them conceive of the role which embodiment and situatedness play for mind and cognition? How do they differ in their ontological commitments and methodological practices? Are there any unifying themes that go beyond a shared opposition to traditional “dis-embodied” approaches; and if so, what are they? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific approaches to 4E-cognition more generally? Finally, how does all of this matter for our understanding of what kinds of beings we are?
Towards a Science of Embodiment
ABSTRAcT We propose here a science of human body/embodiment. We discuss -owings, and then offer an overall picture of this nascent science, as -ies. We imagine a science whose core subject is the connection of the body — as it appears in an action-perception paradigm derived 59
On What Embodiment Might Have to do with Cognition
Without widely accepted and acceptable characterisations of what is to be meant by the terms cognition and embodiment , to ask what the role of embodiment in cognition is remains an ill-formed question. The connection between cogni-tion and physical embodiment is however an important issue, and investigating it may well bring some enlightenment to the concepts of cognition and embodiment. In this short paper I offer some observations on what seem to be some important consequences of physical embodiment on the nature of cogni-tion, at least cognition as it might need to be in physically embodied agents. These are all derived from my own work on physically embodied mobile robots and point to the need for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition, at least in physically embodied agents.
In this paper we propose a way in which cognitive neuroscience could provide new insights on three aspects of social cognition: intersubjectivity, the human self, and language. We emphasize the crucial role of the body, conceived as the constitutive source of pre-reflective consciousness of the self and of the other. We provide a critical view of contemporary social cognitive neuroscience, arguing that the brain level of description is a necessary but not sufficient condition for studying intersubjectivity, the human self, and language; which are only properly visible if coupled with a full appreciation of their intertwined relationship with the body. We introduce mirror mechanisms and embodied simulation and discuss their relevance to a new account of intersubjectivity and the human self. In this context, we focus on a specifically human modality of intersubjectivity: language. Aspects of social cognition related to language are discussed in terms of embodiment, while emphasizing the progress and limitations of this approach. We argue that a key aspect of human language consists in its decoupling from its usual denotative role, hence manifesting its power of abstraction. We discuss these features of human language as instantiations of the Greek notion of paradeigma, originally explored by Aristotle to refer to a typical form of rhetorical reasoning and relate it to embodied simulation. Paradigmatic knowledge connects the particular with the particular, moving from the contingent particular situation to an exemplary case. Similarly, embodied simulation is the suspension of the “concrete” application of a process: reuse of motor knowledge in the absence of the movement it realizes is an example of “paradigmatic knowledge.” This new epistemological approach to intersubjectivity generates predictions about the intrinsic functional nature of our social cognitive operations, cutting across, and not subordinated to, a specific ontology of mind.